A Propos Macron and the Restitution of African Arts: A German Case Study

When French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on November 28, 2017, he announced his plans to temporarily or permanently return French state-owned African cultural possessions to their original source nations (Macron 2017). Museums with African art collections were sent into a tailspin as heated debates ignited across the world following the speech. Macron subsequently engaged the Senegalese economist and philosopher Felwine Sarr and art historian Bénédicte Savoy to write a formal report with restitution recommendations. Released in 2018, their report concluded that all cultural possessions in French museums acquired before 1960 without evidence of full consent from their original owners or guardians should be returned to Africa (Sarr and Savoy 2018),¹ “essentially advocating the unconditional and comprehensive return of all such possessions” (Plankensteiner 2019: 357). Activists, philosophers, scholars, and museum professionals voiced varying, and often more nuanced, positions on restitution, ranging from calls for reparations instead of restitution to critical analyses of the politics, purpose, impact, and rationale of returning Africa’s cultural possessions.²

Macron’s speech and the 2018 report inevitably jolted African art scholars and museum curators into the realistic challenges of delivering evidence of ownership beyond the more commonly available history of an object’s “social life” within Western collections (Appadurai 1988: 3).³ As Forni and Steiner note,

provenance generally does not begin in Africa but rather in Europe or North America … [T]he social biography of an African art object is often silent before its discovery by a Western connoisseur, when it is adopted into the “ego-system” and branded with an identity and value commensurate with its status in the African art canon

(2018: 2).⁴

Expanding this argument, Förster, Edenheiser, and Fründt pointed out that previous forms of provenance research had failed to “systematically clarify questions of access or ownership” (2018: 16).⁵

Museums in Germany responded to the growing calls for the restitution of African arts from colonial and postcolonial contexts⁶ with efforts to sensitize institutions to the complexities of ownership, consent, and claims for restitution; by advocating provenance research that retraces an object’s history of ownership before its removal from Africa; and by proactively disclosing the circumstances under which specific objects were moved within and outside of their original African contexts (Plankensteiner 2019).

1.

Installation views of the exhibition A Different Perspective: African Ceramics from the Collection of Franz, Duke of Bavaria. Note in the lower image, a figurative vessel by Voania of Muba (foreground center) and Mbitim (foreground, left of center).

Photo: Asif Khan Ltd., London, used with permission

A GERMAN RESPONSE TO CALLS FOR RESTITUTION

A newcomer to the world of African art collecting, Die Neue Sammlung–The Design Museum in Munich⁷ presents an interesting case study of how the shifting sands in restitution-based provenance research impacted the real-time development of the 2019 exhibition and publication A Different Perspective: African Ceramics from the Collection of Franz, Duke of Bavaria, which was slated to run from September 27, 2019 to April 19, 2020. In July 2018, Die Neue Sammlung had publicly announced receiving a large donation and permanent loan of African ceramics, dating from the early nineteenth century to the present, from the private collection of His Royal Highness, Franz, Duke of Bavaria.⁸ The duke had begun acquiring African ceramics in the late 1970s with the intention of donating the collection to a Bavarian museum to enable public access to, research into, and education about African ceramic arts.⁹ His recent gifts and permanent loans to Die Neue Sammlung fulfilled his longstanding goal.

Set within the ultramodern architectural structure of the Pinakotek der Moderne, Die Neue Sammlung offered the unique opportunity to highlight these African ceramics from the perspective of design in modern and contemporary artistic sensibilities rather than presenting them as artifacts frozen in an ethnographic past, which the German public had grown to expect of museums with African collections over the past 150 years.¹⁰ Moreover, Die Neue Sammlung is internationally acclaimed for its...