In 1919, the photo album of New York art collector John Quinn’s African art collection1 included two images of the same Lumbu statue depicting a mother with its eyes closed and with her hand on her son’s head (fi gs. 1 and 2). One of these is the opening plate.2 In it, the Lumbu statue is presented as a prestigious work, presiding over a group of Senufo, Baga, and Baule fi gures. It also unequivocally demonstrates that Lumbu art was known at the beginning of the twentieth century. A few years prior to this, the 1914 exhibition Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of Modern Art at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in New York included a Lumbu spoon with the typical helmet coiffure, formerly owned by Parisian dealer Paul Guillaume.3 These objects that the fi rst generation of dealers and the heralds of the avant-garde—Paul Guillaume, Joseph Brummer, Marius de Zayas, and Robert J. Coady, to mention but a few—offered for sale as works of art, had been collected in Africa as mere souvenirs. Brought back from the Congo by merchants, colonial administrators, or missionaries, 114 these manifestations of Lumbu material culture were not the subject of any in situ investigation when they were collected. Some of them had simply been designated as being “Kongo” in the colonial and universal expositions of the twentieth century’s early decades. Research is clearly overdue in this area. Lumbu statuary is primarily made up of fetish fi gures (kisi), reliquaries (mbumba), and amulets (muswinga). Kisi and mbumba were placed in baskets on sanctuary altars, and some were among the ritual objects used by ritual healers, nganga. These objects were seen as having connections to the world of nature spirits and the ancestors. The Lumbu had a “golden age” in Mayumba at the end of the eighteenth Lumbu Statuary A Refi ned Art Style Revealed in the Early Twentieth Century FIGS. 1 and 2: Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), opening plate (above left) and interior photo from the album of the African art collection of John Quinn, 1919. Gelatin silver prints. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, anonymous loan (L-R 2689.2001). © The Lane Collection. Reproduced by permission of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. By Charlotte Grand-Dufay FEATURE
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