Frans M. Olbrechts: 1899-1958: In Search of Art in Africa.

Frans M. Olbrechts: 1899-1958 In Search of Art in Africa Edited by Constantine Petridis Antwerp: Antwerp Ethnographic Museum. 2001. 327 pp., plus 153 pages of plates and photos, 129 color plates, 121 black and white photographs, 5 maps. 37.00 Euros hardcover.

This collection of essays by eleven authors, also published in a Dutch edition, surveys, evaluates, and honors the career of Frans M. Olbrechts in developing African anthropology and art history in Belgium, particularly focusing on these disciplines' growth at Ghent University and the city of Antwerp. Since Olbrechts's writings were mostly in Dutch, his contributions have not received the attention that they might otherwise have gained, particularly in the United States. The contributors vary in age from the very senior to recent PhDs. The book is a most valuable addition to the study of the history of African anthropology and art history.

The occasion for this publication was an exhibition of African objects at the Antwerp Ethnographic Museum in 2001, curated by the editor of this volume, Constantine Petridis, who took his PhD in art history at Ghent. The exhibition reevaluated two earlier exhibitions that Olbrechts was involved in, the exhibition "Congolese Art" held at the City Festival Hall in Antwerp in 1937-38, which displayed 1525 objects, and the "Ivory Coast Expedition of Ghent University and the Antwerp Vleeshuis Museum," held briefly 1939. A few objects that were in those exhibitions are included in this one. Reflecting Olbrechts's interests, the recent exhibition and this catalogue focus heavily on figures, rather than on masks, despite the latter's importance in the regions of Africa that held Olbrechts's interest.

Petridis's prologue, in memory of Adriaan Claerhout (1926-2000), one of Olbrechts's first students, briefly surveys Olbrechts's contributions and suggests that, while he was director of the Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo, Tervuren, for the last ten years of his life, his most seminal contributions were made in Antwerp and at Ghent University. Olbrechts was interested in studying African art as art, but he also had a deep interest in its sociocultural setting, although his own work rarely fulfilled that aim.

Petridis argues in the next chapter, "Olbrechts and African Art," that Olbrechts was one of the first to question the anonymity of African artists and to press for an examination of their personalities. Based on his own experience with the cultural anthropology being developed in the United States, Olbrechts argued for intensive periods of field research in Africa. The chapter contains a brief history of the study of African art into Olbrechts's time and indicates how strong a role he played in the growth of ethnography in Belgian museums. He was not trained in anthropology or art history; these disciplines did not exist as such in Belgium when he was a student. He wrote his dissertation on the analysis of a 1702 manuscript on conjuring and healing, supplemented by field research with conjurers in the Flemish region, as part of his training at the Catholic University at Leuven. He was at that time interested in folklore, language, and ethnology, and he held strong Flemish sentiments throughout his life.

The subsequent chapter, by Aldona Jonaitis, a preeminent scholar of Northwest Coast Native American art, has little to say about Olbrechts, but surveys the ideas and interests of Franz Boas, the American anthropologist who was to influence Olbrechts to a considerable extent. She discusses Boas's interest in intensive field research, in tracing the history of objects and people, in linguistics and native texts, in the creativity of native artists, and his critique of social evolutionism. The ideas contained in Boas's famous book Primitive Art (1927) were quite influential to Olbrechts.

This chapter serves as a useful background to the next, by Mireille Holsbeke, on Olbrechts's American experience. Receiving some financial support to increase his knowledge and experience, Olbrechts decided to go to Columbia University, where Boas taught, becoming immersed in Boasian ideas and meeting many of Boas's first generation of students, some of whom later became very well known. Boas put Olbrechts in touch with the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, D.C., which arranged for fieldwork among the Eastern Cherokee. He used this experience to complete the translation into English of a manuscript on healing, originally in the Sequoya syllabary, which had been begun by another scholar. This allowed Olbrechts to carry out intensive field research for some eight-and-a-half months in 1926-27, and to put his linguistic interests to work. It also marked the second time that he had dealt in detail with a manuscript, and one that had to do with healing. Then Olbrechts spent three months in 1928 among the Tuscarora, and in 1929 he was for a brief time with the Onondaga. Holsbeke makes it clear, as do other writers in this volume, that Olbrechts's American experience turned him into an anthropologist. Throughout his life he stressed to his students the importance of long-term field research. It is obvious from accounts in this book that, while Olbrechts did not always act as an anthropologist in his later interests in African art, he guided his students to do so, and that he saw this as a goal in his own work. While holding a position as an attache at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Belgium, he reorganized the ethnographic section and its exhibition, writing a popular catalogue. His attention then turned to the study of art, and particularly African art, of which the museum had a substantial collection.

The chapter by Herman Burssens, a graduate of the University of Ghent in art history and archaeology, follows the career of Olbrechts at Ghent University and in Antwerp. At the university he began teaching a course in "primitive" art in 1932 and in 1936 published (in Dutch) Ethnology: An Introduction to the Study of Primitive Civilization. His museum duties ended in 1935 as teaching became predominant. In 1937-38 he mounted an exhibition of Congolese art at the Antwerp's City Festival Hall. Burssens writes that the "intention of the exhibition was to classify the sculpture of Congo--as a preamble to the study of the art of all sub-Saharan Africa--by style and stylistic area and to place it in its cultural context, as far as the available data would permit" (p. 90). The exhibition was to some extent a critique of the manner of display at the Tervuren museum, which Olbrechts considered old-fashioned. This was a prelude to his completion of the manuscript of his most famous work, Plastiek van Kongo, in 1939 (not published until 1946), which did not have the impact it might have had if it were published in English. A French version appeared in 1959, but by then African art studies had largely moved beyond Olbrechts's system of stylistic analysis. The American anthropologist Daniel J. Crowley attempted to publish an edition in English, but could not get access to the photographic plates. However, although not mentioned in Petridis's account, Crowley was finally able to develop an American edition titled Congolese Sculpture. This was Crowley's translation of the French edition, which in turn had been translated by Dom Alexandre Gilles de Pelichy from the Dutch. The American edition, edited by Crowley and his wife, Pearl Ramcharan-Crowley, was published by the Human Relations Area Files, New Haven, in 1982 (HRAFlex Books, Ethnography Series, F01-001), with the plates in microfiche; it is still available on demand.

Olbrechts never carried out research in the Belgian Congo; the book was largely based on private collections in Belgium. However, some of his students attempted to employ his system of stylistic analysis, among them Albert Maesen in the Congo in 1952-55. Maesen had assisted Olbrechts in developing his ideas for the book. Olbrechts stressed the importance of history in the study of African art and the study of the artist, and he believed that modern African art forms would evolve, though decrying the efforts of missionaries and colonial officials to influence native art.

In the next chapter, Daniel P. Biebuyck, a former student of Olbrechts, notes that in his Plastiek van Kongo, Olbrechts failed to make use of background cultural data that was available at the Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo; thus he did not effectively follow his own stated aims, partly derived from his experiences in America concerning the cultural setting of the art. Plastiek van Kongo rather focuses on sculptural form and style. Biebuyck, and also Burssens, note that Olbrechts was director of the Royal Museum for ten years, beginning in 1947. Biebuyck indicates that, while there, Olbrechts had its large collection inventoried, was involved in the creation of the journal Congo-Tervuren (later Africa-Tervuren), and sponsored research studies in Africa. He was also the driving force behind the creation of the human sciences section of the Belgian organization the Institute for Scientific Research in Central Africa, which allowed Olbrechts's students entree to research funds, otherwise largely lacking in Belgium. Through this fund Olbrechts was able to send Daniel Biebuyck and Jacques Maquet to London to study with Daryll Forde, and later on, Jan Vansina as well. Luc de Heusch was sent to to Paris to study with Marcel Griaule, as de Heusch indicates in his epilogue to the book, for there was no proper PhD program in anthropology or ethnology in Belgium at the time.

Constantine Petridis covers in some detail Olbrechts's morphological approach to the study of art, as developed in his Congo art book. Petridis writes:

   The most important results of Olbrechts's
   research can be summarized
   thus: firstly the classification of Congolese
   figurative sculpture into four
   stylistic areas, secondly, the ethnic
   attribution of a number of previously
   unidentified objects, third the identification
   of an individual hand within the
   corpus of Luba works of art known at
   that time; and fourthly, albeit in secondary
   order, the awareness that the
   stylistic diversity of African art is also
   historically determined, the result of a
   chronology (p. 119).

Petridis goes on to discuss the problems of the definition of style and provides a useful, brief history of stylistic research in African art. Olbrechts drew from the cultural complexes school of Bernhard Ankermann, and also from the cultural area concept of Melville J. Herskovits, for theories of cultural centers, developing four art areas for the Congo, based on figural sculpture. They were Lower Congo, Kuba, Luba, and a combined Northern style, composed of the Northeastern and Northwestern Congo. Each style was broken down into substyles. Petridis discusses how Olbrechts also drew from Giovanni Morelli's analysis of formal elements in Renaissance art and provides a thoughtful account of Olbrechts's method of stylistic analysis based on posture, proportion, and detail. The shapes of eyes, ears, mouths, and noses were important, as well as small details which were very useful in identifying particular carvers. Olbrechts decried the view that African artists lacked individuality in their work. Two of his students also employed his stylistic scheme in Africa: Pieter Jan L. Vandenoute, in the Cote d'Ivoire, and Albert Maesen, in the Congo. Another scholar, Louis Perrois, did so in Gabon.

A further discussion of Olbrechts's morphological approach occurs in Wilfried van Damme's chapter. Although this writer calls it morphosemantic, the semantic aspect is not clear to me from his discussion, which is otherwise very thoughtful. He explores at some length Olbrechts's lengthy, but obscure, 1943 article, "The Integration of Art into the Culture of Primitive Peoples," published in the journal Gentsche Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeshiednes (Ghent Contributions to the History of Art), a programmatic argument for greater knowledge of society and culture in the study of "primitive" art. This is Olbrechts's reaction to the purely aesthetic approach of critics and collectors, in which he advocates the use of objective, scientific, and detailed analyses, sometimes of measurable features. His orientation is thus also useful for comparison. We learn from this chapter that Olbrechts did not see cultures as homogenous, a view which allowed him to move to questions of the individuality of the artists, and that he decried popular views of the time on the uniformity of "primitive" culture. Van Damme goes into an interesting discussion of Olbrechts's approach to form and style, contrasting it with Adriaan Gerbrands's work, Art as an Element of Culture, Especially in Negro-Africa (1957). Van Damme also shows how Boas's ideas related to Olbrechts's, and how the latter claimed that ethnologists and anthropologists were not interested in the aesthetic and social functions of the works they studied, nor their history--they were technique-oriented--a critique which seems surprising to me in the light of my knowledge of anthropology at the time that Olbrechts was writing. Olbrechts was obviously in the process of forging a useful scholarly position in African art studies. In the final analysis, van Damme considers that Olbrechts's approach derives from art history, rather than ethnology or anthropology; the latter two fields supply the documentary material for analysis.

Constantine Petridis provides another chapter, this one on the 1937-38 Congolese art exhibition at the Antwerp City Festival Hall. This was a huge exhibition, with 97 items in the historical section, 130 in the modern Belgian art section (that is, Belgian artists whose works were, in one or more ways, influenced by the existence of the Congo) and, in the Congo art section, a mere 1525 pieces! Both Olbrechts and Albert Maesen, who assisted him in this exhibition and apparently influenced Olbrechts's development of his idea of style area, wrote sections of the catalogue, both exhibition and catalogue being forerunners of Olbrechts's Plastiek van Kongo. Curiously, the exhibition pieces were not drawn from Tervuren, with which the Antwerp-Ghent group seemed to be in some tension, but largely from private collectors. (These individuals proved to be very helpful in funding the 1938-39 expedition to Cote d'Ivoire of two of Olbrechts's students, Albert Maesen and Pieter Jan L. Vandenoute.)

In the light of more recent research, of course, Olbrechts's Congo art styles and substyles, largely employed in the same manner in Plastiek van Kongo, have been revised as greater knowledge has accumulated, but Olbrechts set a frame, a target, against which others scholars could view their own research and writing.

This chapter is followed by two specialized Congo studies by Belgian scholars, both based on field research, each concerned with ethnic identity and differences in the arts, and both to some extent expanding and clarifying aspects of Olbrechts's Congo art classification. Annemieke Van Damme-Linseele, who took her PhD in art history at Ghent University in 1998, discusses the artistic identity of the Nkanu and other Eastern Kongo groups between the Nkisi and the Kwango Rivers in both southern Congo and northern Angola who have generally been labeled as Yaka, Teke, or Kwango. She found that some sculptural details confirm these associations, though others show associations with the Western Kongo peoples. She concludes that the similarities seen between Nkanu nkanda initiation objects and masks and those of neighboring peoples are the result of a common historical basis found in the Nsamba, rather than the influence of the Yaka or other peoples over the Nkanu. Her detailed discussion of object forms is thoughtful, but the chapter fails to tell us much about the nature of this supposed common cultural base.

Rik Ceyssens, who took her doctoral degree in cultural anthropology at the Catholic University of Njimegen, Netherlands, writes about the art of the royal Kanyok newcomers and the indigenous commoner Kete in the region between the Bushimaay and the Lubilash Rivers and elsewhere in the Congo. The court artists, nominally of Kete background, were hired to produce objects for royalty, but they and other Kete artists also created other pieces for Kete and neighboring peoples on demand. At the royal court, the carvers produced as required by royalty; elsewhere they were freer to innovate. The author warns against employing simplified ethnic labels in discussing art.

With a chapter by Anja Veirman we turn to West Africa, Olbrechts's second African area of interest, and in particular the Cote d'Ivoire. In 1933, with the botanist Jean Houzeau de Lehaie, who was collecting specimens for Belgian institutions, Olbrechts took a three-month's trip of more than 8000 km (4970 miles) from Dakar, through what are now Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Cote d'Ivoire, ending at Abidjan. Olbrechts, searching for fruitful sites in the Francophone region for his students' research, also collected, with the help of the botanist, 1729 objects from seventy-two different locations, a small number of which were later exhibited at the Royal Museum of Art and History. Over 600 photographs were taken, and efforts were made to obtain information about the provenience and use of the objects acquired, but obviously only very limited ethnography was possible. This was surely not intensive anthropological or art historical field research. It was in the expedition style of Marcel Griaule's Dakar to Djibouti expedition (though on a smaller scale in terms of time and distance) as well as other collecting and exploratory expeditions of that time and earlier. Veirman nicely places this form of acquisitive behavior in the context of the colonialism of the time.

On the basis of this trip, Olbrechts decided that the Cote d'Ivoire was the best place to work. Two art historians who were training with him at Ghent University were initiated into fieldwork by Olbrechts, Pieter Jan L. Vandenoute among the Dan and the We and Albert Maesen among the Senufo. Dan art was much admired in Europe, but little was known about its function and meaning. Olbrechts also believed that the physical environment influenced the development of art forms, an idea that he wished to test. Leaving in November 1938, Olbrechts spent some two months in Cote d'Ivoire, assisting his two students in selecting their research sites and in beginning their researches. World War II brought the research to a close in September 1939. A large number of objects were collected by the two students, mainly from the Dan and the We, as well as over 2000 field photographs. From these activities, some 1500 ethnographic objects were displayed between May 4 and 9, 1940, in the Antwerp City Hall, but the capture of Antwerp by the Germans put an end to the exhibition. Veirman concludes the chapter with a thoughtful discussion on colonialism and the ethnographer.

Two chapters follow on the researches of Vandenoute and Maesen in the Cote d'Ivoire. Elze Brayninx, who received her PhD in art history at Ghent University, discusses Vandenoute's discovery of marked differences between the masking style of the Dan, which he considered to be classically "ideological," and that of the We, which was "expressionist," differences not found in brass casting. He apprenticed himself to a Dan sculptor and studied brass casting, ceramics, dance, music, and poetry, as well as figural sculpture and masking, in what appears to have been a successful, if foreshortened research trip.

Anja Veirman lauds the quality and range of Maesen's collection of Senufo art. Maesen was working under difficult conditions, with no single major publication on Senufo art at the time of his research, only bits and pieces here and there. Also, Senufo society encompasses many other ethnic groups who had moved into the Senufo region, with their own craft and art specializations; it was, and is, really a multiethnic society with great variety in object forms. Veirman believes that the expedition lacked depth, since it was carried out for only a year over a wide area. She views Maesen's major contribution as the demarcation of regional styles, for he suggested five Senufo sculptural-style areas on the basis of form. Robert J. Goldwater modified these to three in his well-known catalogue for his 1964 exhibition of Senufo art at the Museum of Primitive Art in New York City.

In an epilogue in memory of Marie-Louise Bastin (1918-2000), the well-known scholar Luc de Heusch writes about his relationship to Olbrechts and his own early career as a student and researcher in the Congo. He then briefly describes the very fruitful career of Bastin, who worked out the styles of the Chokwe workshops, with their very skilled artists, and who also delineated the historical decline in monumentality and refinement in Chokwe art. De Heusch ends his thoughtful paper by questioning the habit in the West of favoring certain art forms on the basis of aesthetic evaluation, warning that the people who make and use these objects do not necessarily view them in the same light, and that Western aesthetic evaluations are "the indication of a new form of ethnocentrism" (p. 293). Further, de Heusch ties Western art appreciation to the art market which, in supposedly saving African art objects, has also led to much looting. Again, he writes that the mask in an exhibition, without its setting and accompanying dance, "sunders that mask from reality" (p. 294). These are all issues which African art scholars have discussed before, but these closing words by a senior scholar of African art, myth, and culture are still quite relevant today.

Reading this book is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle in which certain pieces exist multiple times and other pieces are missing. By its nature, as a collection of papers, there is bound to be repetition across chapters, as in discussing Olbrechts's famous book Plastiek van Kongo, and the two West African expeditions. Missing matters include the lack of discussion of why Olbrechts decided to focus on West Africa in his later years (instead of the Congo, where he had had such a strong interest previously), and the failure to clearly detail Maesen's exact contributions to Olbrechts's famous analysis of Congo art. I would have liked to learn more from Petridis of Olbrechts's attitudes toward the way colonialism operated in the Congo (and elsewhere in Africa), given its unusually destructive forms, a topic Olbrechts does discuss in chapter 14 of Plastiek van Kongo. Crowley, in his introduction to the American edition of that work, refers to the author's "long illness" (p.v) which delayed the publication of the French edition. I wonder how much this condition set back Olbrechts in developing his scholarly program, or related to the fact that he never carried out long-range extensive field research in Africa. An overall scenario of Olbrechts's accomplishments seems to come in fits and starts, despite the brief chronology of his life and accomplishments at the end of the book. But Olbrechts was clearly a man for all seasons. He developed a scholarly training program and stimulated the growth of museum collections and the fields of anthropology, art history, and museology in Belgium. In his own work he attempted, albeit not always successfully, to analyze art as objects, to view them in their cultural setting, and to focus on the artist as a creative individual whose works should be identified if already collected, or who should be intensively interviewed and observed if still alive, and whose own ideas about their work should be taken seriously.

Having trained under Melville J. Herskovits in the late 1940s and early 1950s in another developing African program (at Northwestern University), and having noted, even as a student, the struggles that Herskovits, also a Boas disciple, went through to develop a scholarly program out of virtually nothing, often with considerable opposition, I fully appreciate the persistence, hard work, and strong belief in scholarly goals that Olbrechts possessed in order to develop his various scholarship programs in Belgium. The contributors to this volume, some trained through Olbrechts's efforts at an early time and others more recently trained in Belgium, have themselves become established scholars, certainly a tribute to Olbrechts's efforts. This book will allow Anglophone readers and scholars to obtain a better understanding of the African work carried out by Olbrechts at Ghent and Antwerp, many of whose publications have only appeared in Dutch, a language not particularly well known in the monolingual United States.