Les forêts natales: Arts d’Afrique équatoriale atlantique (review)

The title of the exhibition Les forêt natales [Native forests] was borrowed from the great French poet Guillaume Apollinaire as an allusion to the environment from which the pieces on display derived. The exhibition layout was worthy of this illustrious reference. And there is indeed no doubt that this show will constitute a landmark in French museography of African arts, as the presentation of such a vast and fine corpus of works from Atlantic Equatorial Africa had no precedent.

Nearly one-quarter of the 325 works exhibited came from the collections of the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac (MQBJC). There were also contributions from other public institutions, either in France or abroad, but not a single one from an African public collection, such as the Musée National des Arts et Traditions du Gabon in Libreville, which was known, years ago, for housing “masterpieces” (Perrois 1986).

A loan of seventy-five pieces had been granted by two leading institutions, the now-closed Musée Dapper (Paris), and the Musée Barbier-Mueller (Geneva). Those from the former were familiar to the French public, as many of them had been already shown in 2015–2016 in Chefs-d’oeuvre d’Afrique dans les collections du Musée Dapper, the last exhibition organized by the Dapper Foundation in its Parisian space.

The MQBJC also relied upon other private collectors and art dealers in order to increase this corpus. Its composition reflected this sector’s intense activity for many years through the presence of many pieces that had been recently sold for high prices or that established auction records during the last decade. This was the case of, among others, the Ngumba figure from the Myron Kunin collection (cat. n° 9), the Mabea that belonged to Félix Fénéon (cat. n° 18), the two Betsi from the Georges de Miré (cat. n° 65) and the Oliver and Pamela Cobb collections (cat. n° 72), the Kwele pipibudzè masks from the J.-M. P. collection (cat. n° 116), or the Shamaye-Shake reliquary figure from the André et Lucienne Mary collection (cat. n° 146). These works had been previously sold at auctions, where they had all benefited from catalogue notes by Louis Perrois, the scientific advisor of Les forêts natales.

Indeed, the exhibition layout mirrored the main domains of interest of the French ethnologist, whose expertise on Gabonese art has acquired an almost uncontested aura in the field, especially among collectors, art dealers, and auctioneers. It included two main clusters of objects that have also been the focus of the private sector until now: the figures known as Fang (Figs. 1–2), with which Les forêts natales opened, and the so-called Kota reliquary figures, in the central part of the exhibition. Central and south-central Gabonese art was also represented, albeit with less emphasis (Fig. 3). Artworks attributed to peoples from southwestern Gabon and the neighboring Republic of Congo were relegated to the end of the exhibition, where the focus was on masks, which constitute one of the most prized segments of the Atlantic Equatorial African art region.

The presentation of the objects on display was underpinned by the “ethnomorphological approach” implemented by Perrois since the 1960s (1966; 1972), and criticized by various authors (see Fernandez and Fernandez 1975; Siroto 1995: 9–11). This method essentially consisted of identifying styles and substyles within various corpora of figure sculptures or masks from Atlantic Equatorial Africa and attributing the resulting clusters to distinct ethnic groups or subgroups, regardless of the scarcity of reliable field data. This approach also characterized the minimalist scenography of the exhibition with a deliberate emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of the works on display at the expense of an explanation of their contexts of production and use. Like in an art gallery, panels and labels were reduced to a minimum. They were often accompanied by maps of migrations but never by supporting...