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Our cover shows a group of reliquary heads and busts created by Lumbu sculptors from Gabon and preserved today in various French private collections. Photo: Hughes Dubois. 2 Editorial Around 2,500 years ago in the Ionian city of Ephesus, Heraclitus espoused a philosophical system expressed through koan-like statements, notable even at the time for being nearly impossible to comprehend. Despite this minor issue, he was infl uential and, although his writings survive only in fragmentary form and through later references, his work is frequently summarized in the aphorism recorded some 1,000 years after his death, παντα ρει (panta rei, everything fl ows), believed by some to be the root of today’s commonly known phrase, “Change is the only constant.” Whether or not there’s a direct connection, this is a reasonable paraphrase of aspects of Heraclitus’ philosophy, at least to the degree that anyone understands it. Established religion tends to be conservative and change often lags behind social evolution—sometimes considerably—but change must eventually follow or the religion becomes irrelevant. Religious art tends to refl ect these changes. It’s not especially easy today to imagine Catholicism without Michelangelo, but before Gothic, Romanesque, and Byzantine art and architecture, early Christians worshiped in secret with, on the recommendation of Clement of Alexandria, a fi sh, a dove, a ship, a lyre, or an anchor as their emblem rather than the crucifi x, which had shameful implications. One of the best remembered of these early symbols, the fi sh, is itself a pre-Christian Roman religious icon, and though considered a church father, Clement was removed from the martyrology of the Roman Rite by Pope Sixtus V in the sixteenth century because his views were no longer considered to be in line with the theological development of the church. Apparently, change is indeed a constant here. Some of this is a little obscure but, whatever your particular heritage, if you’re from the West, it’s all part of a more or less familiar progression that has contributed to the society that we all intuitively understand today. We know that our religions change and that the art associated with them also changes, yet many fi nd it odd that , to the degree to which they may think about it at all, traditional arts of non-Western peoples have more than two modalities: old, traditional, and real or new, corrupt, and fake. This is usually predicated upon the art-producing society in question existing in a comparably binary situation: the time before and the time after it was impacted by Western infl uence. The cultural arrogance of this is nothing short of jaw dropping. Part of this harks back to decisions made by early art dealers selling African and Oceanic art about what types of artworks they chose to promote. However, they were far from experts and knew little or nothing about the background, use, and evolution of the artworks that traders, missionaries, soldiers, and colonials were bringing to Europe. Indeed, many of these latter individuals who acquired artworks in Africa got them from African intermediaries far from the point of origin, who had them solely because they were salable. The prevailing Western perspective about such arts is also informed by the fact that at that time these cultures were deemed primitive, a term that by its very defi nition does not allow for evolution or change, since it describes something in an undeveloped state. Though it was not a conscious choice on our part, many of the articles between the covers of this issue happen to address this misperception. Alisa LaGamma’s article about her remarkable Kongo show on view at the Met traces some fi ve hundred years of cultural and artistic development within that particular region, of which the notable nkisi n’kondi nail fi gures known by the proper name Mangaaka were a relatively late innovation, created in an unsuccessful attempt to counter European incursion. Charlotte Grand-Dufay’s article on the Lumbu of Gabon provides a panorama of the development of that culture’s art styles over the course of a century or so and includes a discussion of that people’s role in selling other cultures’ artworks. Mike Cowdrey’s analysis of a Wajaje winter count describes a calendrical system that begins around 1758 and was maintained until the keeper ran out of space in 1885/86. It was likely started as glyphs painted on hide but the version that this article addresses, probably created around 1870 to replace a damaged or worn-out earlier version, involved copying the existing glyphs onto Western-produced muslin, in part using colored pencil and watercolor paint. Perhaps the clearest articulation of artistic change and adaptation is in our interview with Alain Weill, who contributed many of his colonial-infl uenced African fi gures to the exhibition Homme Blanc/Homme Noir at the Pierre Arnaud Foundation in Lens, Switzerland. These are sculptures by African artists of fi gures, usually though not always of Africans, outfi tted with European clothing and accoutrements. I’ve long been fascinated by these fi gures, and when I fi rst became involved with African art (longer ago than I now care to recall), I saw a few of them and my twenty-something self thought, “An African statue with a European military uniform, cool!” I found it interesting when I was told that there was no market for these artworks and, as such, they had very little monetary value. In some cases, the type of uniform or other details can provide clues as to when these sculptures might have been made, and they are sometimes quite early. A Baule colonial fi gure with WWI-style attributes might fetch a few hundred dollars. A Baule blolo bian from the same time period, and perhaps even from the same hand, could be in the thousands or even tens of thousands. Odd, when you think about it. However, the art market is not about political correctness or equality in history, it’s about what sellers feel they can promote and what buyers want to acquire. Like the highly sought after Mangaaka nkisi n’kondi mentioned above, the Kunin Senufo deble, the Rubin Kota, and the two Luba Warua Master sculptures that have helped redefi ne the market over the last year do not come from a place of primitive purity, but rather are the sophisticated and masterful results of countless centuries of cultural interaction and artistic evolution, and they are worthy of even greater respect for being so. Jonathan Fogel


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