African Arts at the Princeton University Art Museum

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2019-01-01
Journal	African Arts
Authors	Kristen Windmuller-Luna
Institutions	Brooklyn Museum

Abstract

Established in 1882 as an encyclopedic teaching museum, the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, is home to a group of nearly 750 works of African art, covering almost 2500 years of artistic production on the continent and in its diasporas (Fig. 1). Founded as the Museum of Historic Art at what was then called the College of New Jersey, it was created in tandem with the Department of Art and Archaeology, whose interests profoundly shaped its collecting and exhibition practices.1 The Museum’s global holdings of over 100,000 objects span human creativity across time and space, with specializations in ancient Greece and Rome, Asia, western Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Africa.The Museum’s African collection, started in 1937, focuses on historic African arts from the sub-Sahara, with particular strengths in central and western African sculpture and masks. These have been complemented in recent decades by contemporary works by artists from the continent and its diasporas. Closely linked to the university’s teaching program, the presentation of African works at Princeton—as both objects of ethnographic and aesthetic interest—has mirrored changing attitudes toward non-Western art both in the field and on campus.The collecting, research, and presentation of African arts at Princeton have always reflected the academic interests of its faculty and have varied across eras as well as by department or campus institution. In the mid-1800s, organizing the world—whether by sorting rocks, assembling fossils, or classifying people—had captured the campus’s attention. Given this focus, African arts were first collected and displayed at Princeton through the lens of ethnology and natural history.Following a slightly earlier trajectory than the Art Museum, and a separate collecting and exhibiting ethos as well, the E.M. Museum of Geology and Archaeology (also known as the “Guyot Museum” and the “Museum and Art Gallery”) housed non-Western objects in the present-day Faculty Room of Nassau Hall from 1874 to 1909, and later in Guyot Hall as the Museum of Natural History from 1909 to 2000.2 Curated by Swiss-American geographer Arnold Guyot, Princeton’s first professor of geology and geography, the Nassau Hall installation’s seemingly disparate “antiquities” (anthropological, ethnological, and archaeological objects) gained logic through their spatial organization, which reflected Guyot’s linear view of societal progress (Turner 2004: 256). Starting with the dinosaurs at the rear of the room, progressing to so-called primitive cultures at the center (including both Native North Americans such as Inuits and “Pueblos,” as well as Neolithic Swiss lake-dwellers), the wunderkammer-like display approached its zenith with the plaster-cast Greek sculptures. The curatorial climax came with an oil portrait of George Washington, a reflection of Guyot’s endorsement of the theory of American Manifest Destiny (Blackman 2017b). Present in both the museum and in his widely disseminated textbooks, Guyot’s taxonomy was undeniably racist: It privileged a “normal” white Greco-Roman ideal (illustrated by a tousle-headed Apollo Belvedere) over other supposedly derivative races, including Africans.3 The separation of the races and their arts was underscored in 1889, when paintings and “fine arts”—such as the aforementioned Greek marbles—were moved from the E.M. Museum to the new Museum of Historic Arts (Turner 2004: 261).The historical record is vague as to where African works fit into the physical layout of the Faculty Room exhibition, or if they were ever on view in this early space. Nonetheless, the hierarchical values of its collections and exhibitions—namely the separation of non-Western from Western arts because of their perceived evolutionary inferiority—are important for understanding later presentations of African objects in Princeton’s Museum of Natural History. By 1905, the museum in Nassau Hall was organized into geology, paleontology, and archaeology sections, an apparent change from the now-deceased Guyot’s original scheme, along with several “ethnological” subsections. Four years later, the present-day Geosciences Building (Guyot Hall) was built to accept the growing dinosaur fossil collection; like the last installation of Nassau Hall, it was arranged by scientific disciplines, foregoing Guyot’s original “history of creation” scheme.The contents of the former Museum of Natural History’s African collection can be partially reconstituted from historic checklists, labels, and remaining objects. Among its earliest benefactors was Reverend Robert Hamill Nassau, a Princeton Theological Seminary alumnus. As described in 1911, Nassau’s collection—called the “West Africa Exhibit”—was located in Guyot Hall’s Gallery of Archaeology and Ethnology. A “war canoe prow” (discussed later in this article) was suspended from the gallery’s central pillars (The Princeton Alumni Weekly 1911: 317). After being stationed for four decades in what was then German West Africa, Nassau had donated his collection to Princeton in 1902 and 1903.4 The group of objects ranged widely, encompassing jewelry, musical instruments, games, weapons, currency blades, raffia-fiber dresses from the Fang, and a red-feathered prestige headdress from the Cameroon Grassfields. A scholar of religion, Hamill was particularly interested in collecting, documenting, and writing about what he called “fetishes.” Typical among those “fetishes” Nassau gave to the Museum of Natural History is a linked pair of crochet-capped duiker antelope horns filled with empowered materials, described by an accompanying label as “Fetich—If put over a door, will reveal coming evil.”Despite its new organizational system, non-Western art—particularly from Africa—remained an afterthought in the Museum of Natural History at Guyot Hall when compared to its “scientific” holdings of fossils and minerals, areas of intense rivalry and competitive acquisitions among museums that sought to distinguish themselves through large and varied collections. The collection of African material was again augmented on a large scale in 1925, when Dutch geologist Willem A.J.M. van Waterschoot van der Gracht gave a collection of works from eastern and southern Africa (present-day Tanzania, Somalia, Mozambique, Senegal, and Gambia). Gathered in the early twentieth century during one of his many trips as a consulting mining engineer, it ranged from weapons to headrests to beaded jewelry to Zulu hide shields and knobkerries. African material was on view in this new Museum of Natural History on Guyot Hall’s first floor until the late 1950s or early 1960s, after which time it remained in storage.When and if works from Africa ever returned to exhibition in Guyot Hall is unclear. Certainly by the mid-1970s, the Museum of Natural History’s curators were eager to deaccession or sell African works donated by Nassau and van der Gracht—a mixture of “objets d’art” and “ethnological” objects, as curator Donald Baird described—or to transfer them to the art museum at Princeton or elsewhere (Baird 1974: 2). The entire Museum of Natural History was deinstalled in 2000, its spaces slowly overtaken by offices, classrooms, and new research units. Its collections were dispersed to other institutions, to storage, or elsewhere on campus (The Smilodon 2009: 1-2; Dalton 2000). The slow decline of the Museum of Natural History, and of its ethnology displays in particular, represented a gradual shift in academic interests on campus. No longer would the products of African cultures be viewed as simple artifacts of material culture, but—over the process of several decades—as art, deserving of a place in the Art Museum.Just a short walk across campus from Nassau and Guyot Halls, Princeton’s historic homes of natural history, works by African makers were viewed through a dramatically different lens at the Art Museum. Although being in the museum lent African objects a kind of de facto “artistic merit” that they lacked in the natural history collections, that didn’t mean that their importance or their makers were immediately recognized or emphasized. It took many decades of slow growth and increasing visibility for the African works to both be fully appreciated as “art” and take the pride of place that they hold in the Art Museum today.From its nineteenth-century genesis, the purpose of the Museum of Historic Art (now the Princeton University Art Museum) was to collect and exhibit works of art to support the teaching goals of the university both in and beyond the Department of Art and Archaeology.5 Although both were founded in 1882, the Art Museum and the Department were born into a relationship which—while symbiotic—was not totally equal when it came to influence over Museum-related activities. Given the emphasis on direct teaching through objects, the interests of Art and Archaeology faculty drove acquisitions and exhibitions well into the late twentieth century, resulting in a collection whose strengths reflected curricular focus areas, such as photography or the arts of China (Bunnell 1976: 2). Lacking specialist curatorial or faculty stewardship until the 2000s, the African arts collection at Princeton grew without a definitive path for much of its history, like that of many American museums that belatedly prioritized Africa. While works from Pharaonic Egypt have been part of the Art Museum since its 1890 opening, the collection of African arts as we now know it began in 1937 with a single work, a carved wooden amulet said to be from Ethiopia.6 As was the case in other Museum departments, its holdings were shaped by the intertwined influences of scholarship, the art market, and the tastes of alumni donors, whose gifts make up the majority of the collection. Like most Western museums, the collection leans heavily towards works from western and central Africa, essentially excluding north Africa and Egypt because of an artificial division between the supposed Arab north and the black sub-Sahara. Shaped largely by the geographies of colonialism and the tastes of European modernists like Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, so-called discoverers of African art at the turn of the twentieth century who lauded its pure formal abstraction, these collections focused on a distinct canon of nineteenth and twentieth century sculptures and masks in wood. Highly influential, it set a circumscribed precedent for what was classified as museum-quality African art, despite the fact that African creative forms are far more diverse in terms of time, region, and material.It was under the directorship of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (1922-1946), a scholar of the European Renaissance, that sub-Saharan art entered the collection for the first time. Beyond the aforementioned Ethiopian pendant, Mather—a collector of European medieval and Renaissance art—gifted two outstanding Ethiopian Christian works from his personal collection to the museum after his retirement. Recently identified by this author as a rare late fifteenth or early sixteenth century icon, a small tempera on wood diptych depicting the Virgin Mary with Christ Child and an equestrian St. George demonstrates the bold geometry favored by northern priest-artists in Tₔgray (Fig. 2). One of only two known works by this painterly hand, it is a remarkable survival of pre-jihad (1529-1543) Ethiopian Orthodox art from the early modern era. Equally impressive is the eighteenth-century manuscript, which includes Gₔ’ₔz canticles, psalms, and praises to Mary among its sumptuously illuminated parchment folios. Potentially linked to the Empress Taitu Beitul (r. 1889-1918) by a drawing accompanying the volume, the manuscript’s naturalistic shading and lushly painted textiles epitomize the style used at the courtly workshops in the capital of Gondär. There, courtly priest-artists transposed the stories of the Bible into eighteenth-century Ethiopia, setting many scenes in front of Gondär’s iconic domed stone castles. In one evocative scene, Moses divides the Red Sea with the T-headed mäqwqwamiya staff of the Ethiopian Orthodox clergy, as Pharaoh (wearing a tiered Ethiopian crown) and his musket-bearing soldiers slide beneath the waves on the opposite page (Fig. 3).7 While decidedly a part of the continent, Ethiopia was kept academically apart from it until relatively recent years because of its majority Christian faith and painting-based artistic practices. Thus, the Museum did not acknowledge these works as “African” at the time of their acquisition.With just three pieces from Ethiopia, the Art Museum’s African holdings remained small until the mid-twentieth century, when the collection was transformed by a major gift. In 1947, a tenacious woman named Joyce K. Doyle made a gift of five trunks containing some 150 works from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then known as the Belgian Congo (Doyle 1947: 1). Joyce’s husband, Donald B. Doyle (Class of 1905), had worked as a mine manager for Forminière, a Belgian lumber and diamond mining company based in the Kasaï region of that infamous colony between 1919 and 1923. From their homestead in Tshikapa, Doyle collected what she described as “bintus,” relying upon prospectors “to bring [me] the things that Africans made and had used” (Doyle 1976: 1). George Young, a Forminière diamond prospector, was her primary resource. Despite his professing to have “hated everything African,” it was through his hand that Doyle acquired Pende masks, dozens of Kuba cut-pile embroidered prestige cloths, and utilitarian objects ranging from arrows to sleeping mats. Photographs suggest that Doyle, who was fluent in Ciluba, also traveled herself to obtain some works (Brett-Smith 1983: 10). Among the pieces she collected from Kuba, Pende, and Chokwe artists—some of which may have been commissions or early tourist pieces—we count two frequently exhibited works, a Chokwe headrest and a Kuba cometic box.8 The visual balance of twinned caryatids on the headrest evokes the balance of order and leadership associated with Chokwe sovereigns (Fig. 4). With deep-set eyes and long beards, the figures recall both the elders and the deceased ancestors. Their pose—elbows on knees and hands cradling cheeks—further suggests a representation of the departed or of those dreaming to seek wisdom. Carved from a lustrous deep brown wood, the figures are further decorated with imported metal furniture tacks, alluding to the wealth Chokwe leaders amassed through both local and long-distance trade. A wooden cosmetic box carved by a Kuba artist to hold bright red tukula powder draws its form and elaborate interlaced patterns from a heritage of courtly prestige objects dating back to at least the sixteenth century (Fig. 5). Square on top and bottom and round in the center, its shape echoes that of baskets owned by those of humbler status.Although collected around Tshikapa, the works of the Doyle collection provide insight into regional diversity and the ways in which trade allowed different artistic styles to come into mutually influential contact with one another, while still staying distinct. Many of the Kuba embroidered cloths, for example, came from far north of Tshikapa or were produced in styles meant to appeal to trading clients.9 Equally, Doyle’s letters underscore how her appreciation for central African cultures—and her desire for them to be showcased in an art museum—was unusual, given the harsh and condescending opinions of other foreigners (such as Young) living in Congo in the 1920s. Accessioned in 1953, the Doyle gift remains one of the Museum’s largest collections of African arts, and its sole fully field-collected grouping. Director and former Monuments Man Ernest DeWald (1946-1960) welcomed these “Central African curios”—as Doyle also described them—to the Museum, noting the lack of comparable works in the collection (DeWald 1947: 1; Doyle 1947: 1.)10Despite this warm welcome, the archive suggests that works from the Doyle collection were not permanently exhibited in the 1950s or 1960s (Doyle 1976: 2). How often and where in the museum they were displayed during temporary exhibitions is unclear (DeWald 1953: 1). When African works appeared in the Museum’s exhibition ledgers during this decade, it was invariably the Ethiopian manuscript, a perennial favorite in a of and Nonetheless, at least a had been for the display of the African collection, as well as for its after took up the in the for a Gallery of Native Arts would works from in a new is to exhibit in this a of objects of primitive cultures around the toward artistic than 1). this a of gifts during the 1960s from (Class of new and aesthetic to the collection with several works from the of including a from a an by the of and a from an among the works in this gift was a with four figures (Fig. The and figures around the both and to the of their and the varied patterns of their the growth of the collection, was specialist curator of African arts in the mid-twentieth century at Princeton, as remains the case the of the in of the Museum’s collecting areas, was also for African works from Asia, Europe, and the African objects were in exhibitions that moved around their frequently by the of their While the Museum’s are vague on the curator of and Native American art, was a least for the of some African objects and the of exhibitions from the 1960s until his from the curators in the 1960s and the of African arts and history took on new across the United as the last of the African by colonialism gained their and African Americans across the to for their and In the academic not at of African art history as the first of the late 1950s began to the of Princeton’s the of (now the Department of African American faculty and in history, and African American years later, to a of nearly at the of 1). Despite the first of black during Princeton remained largely decades provide a and that reflected the and of of the university the (now the for and in With a new focus on black and a culture, the was set for a appreciation of African arts at to be a for African arts at the Museum African an exhibition that of Art described as the Museum’s exhibition for Princeton by the Museum of African Art in Washington, (now the Museum of African the exhibition African was arranged at Princeton by curator of and of the museum and 10). works from the collection, as well as from collections, the exhibition both and (Fig. into on the and Congo as well as the western it was by of African in as well as a with by and 10). a by George then of and a of and The further to the As described by the Princeton Alumni of augmented the objects, historic and musical Despite to the of African arts from ancient to the the of “African” culture, African African an ethnographic in the local and campus displayed as works of art, the objects are in relatively the as they have appeared in or and their to their African was a at Princeton for both its scale and its over The it was by several It would be Princeton’s largest exhibition of African arts until the only an in the between and the collection to through gifts during the 1960s and 1). It a particular when (Class of a collection of and most of which have now entered the collection. A for the from to traveled the Democratic Republic of the Congo, works from other also from and the Among other works, the exhibition African Art from the Museum’s showcased from the collection, including a a large of masks, and a Chokwe with scenes of and (Fig. Doyle’s collection of from the Democratic Republic of Congo had been to as when it at the museum in the late gift was to by then as a gradual shift in about African production at the Museum that had started in the 1950s While the of the “art” was the of the was that not only historical African also and used at Princeton’s Art Museum during the and reflected both the lack of in African arts at the and the of the during this shift towards was reflected not only in the exhibition and in museum also in local which in about the in African and the of in the of which European modernists like and Picasso the of at Princeton was not to that during this reflected a in the museum field in which both and were still used to African arts, as a growing with the and of the was in both and African objects gained at the Art Museum during the where they were exhibited and described as it be that at the time, African works were also part of the collections at the Museum of Natural History just across campus. than art from these collections. While not a of the Department of Art and the Art Museum’s African works from teaching in the known for her in and Kuba Pende masks, and other into her and the between so-called aesthetic and utilitarian objects (Bunnell 1976: 2). With these of exhibition and African objects at Princeton were art and during the to of the African collections were displayed in the present-day or works from other collection areas in New The also African works, such as History with the a home for the collection was still By the during the of it had among of to with a that they to exhibit their gifts in a for the African the at long last the of African art a as the museum its and the of the first time in its history, the African arts collection a home in the to the on the African large along with for Weekly 4). the focus of from the Museum, the collection also from the of several over the three It gained a and a aesthetic focus with the of scholar who since as both a and consulting curator for the collection and several As part of a from the art came to Princeton as a in African arts during the academic two and a of in the on the in earlier the the African collection transformed again by alumni The of museum B. of some works from central and western Africa, to the largest gift in this collecting gift the Museum’s first works from southern Africa, a of objects meant for including a of wooden headrests made by and A of a with by a wooden is among the (Fig. and over other objects from what was then the at Princeton, had the of of a Museum of African Art the gift was an impressive of and including a nineteenth-century with carved and (Fig. earlier acquisitions of the late twentieth century, including a (Fig. A case of was created with these and other works, now a perennial favorite among and as well as of the of two decades of to African arts in both the museum and in the Department of Art and Archaeology, whose teaching influence on the collecting and exhibiting practices. the first time in its history, African and arts were in the Department on a the of with the museum started after with his of of in African a of works from the Art Museum, the Museum of African and collections. to the in his and in direct to art objects, it was the first exhibition of African arts at Princeton in nearly three The exhibition how a

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00448

References

1974 - Africana and Mr. Clark Stillmen (Letter from Donald Baird to Sheldon Judson)
2017 - Princeton’s Lost Museum: Arnold Guyot’s E.M. Museum and the Great Juncture of American Natural History Museums in the Late 19th Century
2017 - Princeton’s Lost Museum: Arnold Guyot’s E.M. Museum and the History of American Natural Science
1983 - The Doyle Collection of African Art [Crossref]
1976 - Letter from Peter C. Bunnell to David W. Doyle
2000 - Anger as Princeton Closes ‘Inspirational’ Museum
1947 - Letter from Ernest T. DeWald to Joyce K. Doyle
1953 - Letter from Ernest T. DeWald to David Doyle
1947 - Letter from Joyce K. Doyle to Harold W. Dodds
1976 - Congo Artifacts