10/13/2026
Insightful write-up from 2007 on African Art by NYT chief critic Holland Cotter....vintage Cotter
Franko Khoury/National Museum of African Art
ART
Out of Africa, Eclectic Visions
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: June 1, 2007
African art has it all: beauty, brio, inventiveness, moral gravity, emotional depth, practicality, sensuality and humor. It’s hot and cool, high and low, chastening and consoling, endlessly varied, surprising always.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
A cow mask at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. More Photos >
So why do our big museums still give us so few African shows? And why, when they do, are those shows so often packaged the same way? Third-tier Western artists get solo retrospectives; entire African cultures are squeezed into art-of-a-continent surveys.
Many such surveys are collection samplers, the only thematic thread being the taste or money of a single owner or institution. They are at least as much about the Western market as about African art. And given the present sluggish cultural climate, this model probably won’t change soon. So it’s important to keep asking why something knowledge-advancing can’t be done with the survey format. Two current collection shows, one in Washington and one in Boston, answer the question in very different ways.
“African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection” at the National Museum of African Art in Washington is made up of 88 traditional sculptures and masks from the several hundred acquired by the New York real estate developer Paul Tishman and his wife, Ruth, from the 1950s to the 1980s.
The Tishman collection was widely exhibited in those decades. A generation of art historians grew up with it. A canon of “classical” African art was in part shaped by it. In 1982 the Tishmans sold the material to the Walt Disney Company, thinking it would find a permanent home in an African pavilion at Epcot in Florida. The pavilion was never built. Two years ago Disney gave the bulk of the collection — certain outstanding objects had already been dispersed — to the National Museum of African Art. With more than 500 works, the gift is exceptionally large. It is also very uneven. But where it’s great, it’s great. “African Vision” is about greatness. It presents itself as a “masterpiece” show: clean installation, scant information, one stand-alone treasure after another. The Tishmans often went for top of the line, and some of their earliest buys are the best. Like many Westerners they loved the quasi-naturalist Benin court art of Nigeria, and bought well in it. And they were lucky with ivories. Amazing things came their way, from a late-15th-century hunting horn from Sierra Leone with Portuguese coats of arms in relief, to a 16th-century saltcellar that has images of two n**e, winged males with mohawk haircuts on either side.
These figures may or may not be angels; they are certainly extraterrestrial. So, by the look of it, is the serene young man with ash-white skin in a wood sculpture from Madagascar. Anyone who savors the subtleties of archaic Greek art will love him. Yet the artist who carved him might be shocked to find him in a museum. Sculptures like this one were made to be placed outdoors near graves, where time and weather would wear them away.
We can only speculate about what this image did, or meant, or who made it, or exactly where on Madagascar it came from. African art in the West has traveled huge distances and through many hands on its way to auction houses or collectors’ living rooms or museums. Evidence of origins and function was often lost en route. Sometimes it was selectively stripped away as objects were cleaned up to assume their gleaming, modernist masterpiece roles. At the same time less familiar, less “beautiful” images were pushed to the backs of shelves or discarded altogether. Collections and canons and values were formed by this kind of editing. The Tishman collection was, and it is a crucial aspect of its history, and the proper subject of a collection show. With the Tishman holdings — a loamy jumble of the good, bad and odd — now in its hands, the National Museum of African Art is in an ideal position to scrutinize this history, to turn a masterpiece show into a think piece, and a timely one at that, with talk of the art market and its manipulations so much in the news.
But only the exhibition catalog written by Christine Mullen Kreamer takes on the critical task, and even then does so discreetly. The show itself toes the old hard line. Collectors are benign heroes; art magically appears in their hands from nowhere, or rather from a vague somewhere called Africa, for our entertainment.
A second exhibition, “Material Journeys: Collecting African and Oceanic Art, 1945-2000: Selections from the Geneviève McMillan Collection” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, takes the opposite tack. It has its textbook sculptures and de rigueur masks, but lots of unclassical, uncategorizable, unglamorous things too: door locks, drums, jewelry, head-bashers, splashboards and hats, side by side, as in a bazaar. The show not only acknowledges the market’s role in collecting, but takes commerce as its theme, in an installation that follows the itinerary of one avid shopper on a half-century buying spree. Geneviève McMillan was born in France and educated in Paris, where she developed an interest in African culture and where she did a little buying. A Kota reliquary figure she picked up there opens the show. She married an American and moved to the United States in 1946. They made their home in Cambridge, Mass. (where she still lives), but she kept traveling.
She made repeated trips to the South Pacific, even more to Africa, where she sought out dealers and artists and sorted through markets in Dakar, Monrovia, Abidjan, Accra and Kinshasa. The show, which is accompanied by a fascinating book by Christraud M. Geary, the museum’s curator of African and Oceanic art, moves along with her through the decades, supplementing art with a display of travel ephemera — posters, airline schedules, stamps — and the diary in which Mrs. McMillan kept track of what she bought, when and where.
The Kota piece, acquired in 1945, was a safe bet. This sculptural type was wildly popular. For many collectors it meant “authentic” Africa. But she grew more adventurous. A wooden game board from Ivory Coast, compartmented like an ice-cube tray, was unlikely to turn the head of classically minded shoppers, but it turned hers. So did an iron throwing knife, all hooks and barbs and lethal grace, from Congo. And although a connoisseur would sneer at a pendant necklace from Papua New Guinea made from two seashells and a shell-shaped scrap of pink plastic, I bet Mrs. McMillan adores it. I do. It’s one of my favorite items in a show rich in the hybrid, the impure, the first-time-seen, the unknown. It doesn’t take a scholar to identify a chi wara headdress (bought in Bamako, Mali, 1960). But what’s the story with that carving, maybe Nigerian, of a man in a pith helmet and leg warmers on horseback (bought in Paris, 1978)? Or that Cameroonian metal head with the chipmunk cheeks and barking dog on top (bought from a Mr. Sillah in Cambridge in 1979)? Uncanonical, to say the least.But eminently collectible in Mrs. McMillan’s view, a view that challenges and redefines all kinds of orthodoxies: purity, beauty, authenticity, value, and art among them. If, as a result, “Material Journeys” is shorter on convention-vetted masterpieces than the Tishman show, it offers a far truer, newer, more various and surprising vision of Africa. A fair exchange, I would say.
“African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection” is at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, 950 Independence Ave., S.W., Washington, through Sept. 7, 2008. “Material Journeys: Collecting African and Oceanic Art, 1945-2000: Selections From the Geneviève McMillan Collection” is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, through Sept. 2.
