The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum by Roslyn Adele Walker, and: Accumulating Histories: African Art from the Charles B. Benenson Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery by Frederick John Lamp, Amanda M. Maples, and Laura M. Smalligan (review)

The Dallas Museum of Art currently houses some two thousand African art objects in its collections. One hundred and ten of these are presented in The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum, which was published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the museum’s African collection. The illustrated objects are aesthetically stunning and are comprehensive in presenting the great diversity of sculptural traditions in Africa. The holdings of the museum have been assembled over four decades, primarily through donations from major collectors whose histories are presented in some detail. Thanks to these collectors and their generosity, the museum now possesses a remarkable collection of African art.

Roslyn Adele Walker, the author of The Arts of Africa, is the Senior Curator of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, and the Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art at the museum. She has presented the 110 objects in a thematic four-part matrix, beginning with “Icons and Symbols of Leadership and Status” and ending with “African Art and the Influences of Foreign Trade.” In between are chapters titled “African Art in the Cycle of Life” and “African Decorative Arts.” In all of these chapters, Walker provides excellent essays on the ethnographic contexts for the objects, as well as insightful stylistic and morphologic analyses. Some objects are further contextualized by historical field photographs. The fifty-twoethnic groups represented by the art objects are enumerated on a very helpful map and described individually in brief entries that cross-reference the catalogue or figure number. An eight-page bibliography and an index greatly enrich this volume.

The writing and organizing of this volume were clearly a monumental undertaking. Walker brought to it both superb curatorial skills and meticulous scholarship. The result is a splendid publication that not only presents the best of one museum’s collection, but also makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the arts of Africa.

Accumulating Histories celebrates the collection of one individual, which thus stands in contrast to the multi-collector holdings now in the Dallas Museum of Art. Charles Benenson was a New York City real estate developer who in 2004 bequeathed his African art collection of several hundred objects to the Yale University Art Gallery and also provided an endowment for the establishment of a Department of African Art. A Yale graduate, he was a staunch supporter of the university and one of its most prominent benefactors. This volume is both a catalogue of his collection and a comprehensive account of Benenson himself, for in many ways the collection tells us about what drove him to make what at times were unusual acquisition choices. If much space in this volume is devoted to Benenson, the man and collector, it is because the collection at the Yale Art Gallery is so much a reflection of him as a person. Thus this volume is not merely a portrayal of an exceptional collection, but also a detailed account of the unusual man who created it.

As the authors emphasize in their essay “The Characters and Their Tastes,” Benenson not only had a passion for collecting, but also a preference for architectonic forms that were offbeat and aggressive. Essentially, he acquired what appealed to him, sometimes to the chagrin of his expert advisors who valued the contemporary Western...