79 the assistance of Lorenz Homberger, Gigi Pezzoli, and Claudia Zevi. Like his other exhibitions, this one is broadly conceived and exhaustively addresses the art of sub-Saharan populations, particularly those of Western and Equatorial Africa. However, one important thing distinguishes this exhibition from the others: the context in which it occurs. In 2015, researchers, collectors, and art afi cionados are far more conscious of the importance of attributions and the qualitative differences between works, a phenomenon related in no small way to the development of the art market that has been ongoing since 2000. Better resources for formal analysis and knowledge of the historical contexts of works, including those by master hands and workshops, now exist, thanks to a signifi cant increase in the amount of available data and information. The short time frame for the production of the exhibition made it impossible to secure loans from most major European and American museums, but the organizers made the best of the situation by giving more space to works from private collections. This made it possible to show hitherto unpublished or little-known works of remarkably high quality, such as a seated Baule fi gure, possibly a representation of a bush spirit; a Fang head, collected in situ by an envoy of the Governor of Gabon before 1904; and a particularly fi ne Sakalava maternity fi gure. Like most broadly conceived survey exhibitions, The Land of the Spirits does not dwell on particular types of objects or cultures but rather offers an overview of the kinds of works through which the creativity of African artists fi nds expression: reliquaries, fi gures, masks, oliphants, ivory objects, headrests, pipes, spoons, throwing knives, spears, house posts, heddle pulleys, etc. It opens with a large gallery devoted to an examination of the relationships between African art and the twentiethcentury European avant-garde, in which the show’s most important pieces are shown alongside images of the ateliers of Picasso, Giacometti, and Matisse, along with a long excerpt from Paul Guillaume’s book L’art nègre et les avant-gardes du XXe siècle (Art Nègre and the Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes). The play of forms and volumes, of signs and symbols of the displayed pieces, evokes the jungle described in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or, perhaps even more, the fi rst lines of Baudelaire’s sonnet Correspondances: Nature is a temple in which living pillars Sometimes give voice to confused words; Man passes there through forests of symbols Which look at him with understanding eyes. FIG. 4: Figure of a chief. Tshokwe, Angola. 19th century. Wood. H: 35.5 cm. Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisbon, inv. AA964. © Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisbon. Photo: José Pessoa. DGPC/ADF. The Land of the Spirits
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