African Art in the Barnes Foundation: The Triumph of L’Art nègre and the Harlem Renaissance by Christa Clarke (review)

African Art in the Barnes Foundation is an important scholarly publication masquerading as a coffee table art book. A comprehensive catalogue of its subject, the sixty-seven works in the collection are each provided with full-page color reproductions. (And by isolating each sculpture on a grey ground, Rick Echelmeyer implicitly acknowledges and continues the photographic legacies of Man Ray, Charles Sheeler, and Walker Evans.) Christa Clarke’s comprehensive introductory essay, “Albert Barnes, the Barnes Foundation, and African Art,” provides the history of Barnes’s approach to and philosophy of collecting, while the short scholarly essays accompanying each object offer a précis of current research in the field of African art history. The tome thus provides a rich compendium for both the eyes and the mind.¹

Clarke’s introductory essay argues that the Foundation holds an important place in the reception of African art in the West because, “[i]t was one of the first permanent installations in the United States to display objects from Africa as fine art, in an era when such works were typically presented as cultural artifacts in ethnographic museums” (p. 21). Clarke argues further that in addition to his deep appreciation of African art, Barnes “believed that the study of African art, as an important form of black cultural expression, could serve as a tool for racial advancement and equality” (p. 22). For those familiar with the life of this cantankerous and competitive collector, the latter premise may seem far-fetched initially, but the author carefully unpacks these arguments in the following pages, convincingly demonstrating that “African art deserves to be seen as central to the aesthetic mission and progressive vision that was at the very heart of the Barnes Foundation” (p. 23).

If Albert Barnes was not the earliest American collector of African art, he certainly was the most ambitious and confident of them. In the section titled “Albert Barnes, Paul Guillaume, and the Emerging Market for African Art,” Clarke traces Barnes’s association with the Paris-based dealer Paul Guillaume, who opened a gallery for “tableaux modernes” and sculptures nègres in 1914. Shortly thereafter, during WWI, the center for the display of African art shifted to New York, as exemplified by the pioneering exhibitions of African art at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 (1914) and Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery (1918), both of whom collaborated with Guillaume. Key to the reception of the African material as art, however, was the publication in Paris of Sculptures Nègres, by Guillaume Apollinaire, with a brief introduction by Paul Guillaume (1917).

With Guillaume’s authority (and self-promotion) firmly established, Barnes entered the field in the summer of 1922, collecting forty-seven works, and continuing with major purchases for the next two years. As he wrote to Guillaume that November, “Please remember, I intend to try to have the best private collection of Negro sculpture in the world” (p. 28). Clearly in competition with important patrons of modern and African art who began collecting before WWI—such as John Quinn and Walter and Louise Arensberg—Barnes attempted to upstage them not only in size but quality. From the first he was concerned with training his eye by studying objects and texts in order to purchase works that were the finest aesthetically. As he assembled his collection he took pains to criticize works in public collections, including those of the Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Museum, even as he learned from them. Such self-education may have included trips to Robert Coady’s two galleries in New York City. Clarke speculates that Barnes may have also been familiar with Coady’s writings for The Soil, which “promoted the idea of an aesthetic relationship between the arts of Africa and African American artistic expression and, by...