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107 hundreds of weapons and currencies featured in this group are sculptures that remain some of the highlights of today’s Penn Museum Congolese collection (figs. 11, 12, 13, and 14). Following this acquisition, in September 1912 Gordon contacted Hungarian-born ethnographer Emil Torday, 11 who had spent extensive periods of time in the Kasai region in south-central Congo in the years prior, and invited him to Philadelphia for a period of three months.12 Gordon’s hope was that Torday would give several lectures during his stay and, more importantly, that he would catalog the Congolese collections acquired by the museum from Oldman and Umlauff (fig. 15). After some negotiation regarding his stipend,13 Torday gladly accepted the invitation and followed the program set by Gordon, working at the museum from January 1 through the end of March 1913. In addition to giving two public lectures and publishing articles pertaining to his sojourns in the Congo in The Museum Journal,14 he participated in the building of the museum’s collection by selling a group of forty-five objects and textiles he had personally collected during his 1908–1909 expedition in the Kasai. Purchased for $280 in June 1913, the collection was largely composed of cups, arrows, wooden boxes, and textiles (figs. 16 and 17). In 1914, the American market for African objects experienced important changes. As a combined consequence of New York’s 1913 “Armory Show”15 and the beginning of World War I, an intense transatlantic art market developed between Paris and New York, which encompassed both modernist and African art in a single movement.16 The adventurous galleries that began importing works by the European avant-garde simultaneously initiated displaying African objects for their aesthetic qualities as well as for their role as a source of inspiration to many modern artists. The galleries instrumental in that movement were Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Gallery of the Photo Secession, better known as “291” (fig. 18), Robert Coady’s Washington Square Gallery, and Marius de Zayas’ Modern Gallery. By categorically changing methods of display for African objects—that is, by moving away from the crowded galleries of anthropology museums and toward spare installations emphasizing the aesthetics of the individual works—these galleries were influential in shifting the Western appreciation of African objects and allowing them to be seen as legitimate works of art. Because of this, new collectors emerged who acquired African objects as art and were willing to pay prices equivalent to those of modern artworks. As a consequence, African objects began circulating simultaneously in two distinct realms: Anthropology museums continued acquiring from ethnographica vendors, while private collectors and galleries were “singularizing” the objects and integrating them into the market dedicated to works of art. These two markets rarely collided but the Penn Museum was an exception. Gordon, assisted by curator Henry Hall, increasingly favored a selective form of collecting in keeping with the museum’s mission to promote the artistic qualities of African statuary. He had connections within New York’s modern art circles, primarily through the young American artist Charles Sheeler, who had been working for the museum as a photographer since 1913, taking views of FIG. 10: Handwritten list of the 1,827 artifacts from the Congo sold to the Penn Museum by the firm Umlauff, 1912. UMPA, Office of the Director, Correspondence Gordon-Umlauff 1912. Photograph courtesy UMPA. Penn Museum


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