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Penn Museum FIG. 18 (above): Alfred Stieglitz, 1914. View of the exhibition Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of Modern Art at gallery 291, New York. Courtesy Archives de Zayas, Seville. FIG. 19 (above center): Charles Sheeler, c. 1917. Untitled Philippines, Rapa Nui, Indonesian, and Congolese sculptures in front of an unidentified painting by Morton Schamberg (?). Gelatin silver print. The Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (L-R 1480.2001). © The Lane Collection. Photograph courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Featured here is the small non-Western art collection of Sheeler’s longtime friend, the American artist Morton Schamberg (1881–1918). It is displayed in front of what is certainly one of Schamberg’s own lost works. The artist probably acquired these four figures around the spring of 1917, when de Zayas organized a show of Schamberg’s photographs juxtaposed with those by Sheeler and Paul Strand. After Schamberg’s unexpected death from the influenza pandemic in October 1918, Sheeler fulfilled Schamberg’s wish to donate the four carvings to the Penn Museum. As a result, the diminutive Teke reliquary from the Congo featured at right was the first work circulating on the New York art market to enter the museum, blurring the limits between ethnographic and fine art collections. FIG. 20 (above right): Joseph Van den Boogaerde Collection, Enghien-les- Bains, 1916. Bernard de Grunne Archives. In this arresting photograph featuring Van den Boogaerde’s collection in 1916, the two masterpieces of Luba art now in the holdings of the Penn Museum (see figs. 29 and 30) almost disappear in an accumulation of Congo art and artifacts. Indiscriminately juxtaposing hunting trophies (animal skins, skulls, ivory tusks, etc.) and prestige items constitutive of Luba leadership, the officer’s display underscores the equal status he attributed to these artifacts as colonial trophies gathered during his stay in Eastern Congo. FIG. 21 (below): “Ethnological Humor from Central Africa. Exhibition of Congo Art at the Archaeological Museum of the University of Pennsylvania Contains Amusing Objects” in The Philadelphia Record, Sunday, March 3, 1918. Press clippings for the exhibition of African art organized by Charles Sheeler at the University Museum in February 1918. Photograph courtesy UMPA.


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