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Michel Leveau and the Musée Dapper 125 culture and that issues such as education and public health should be addressed fi rst. Paris then became his choice. The project was beginning to develop when we met, and he was looking for someone to help him turn it into a reality. The Dapper Foundation was created in 1983, and three years later the museum opened. The name comes from the seventeenthcentury Dutch humanist, who wrote an important work, Description of Africa, which was published in 1689, without ever having been there. T. A. M.: References to Olfert Dapper are often made by the museum, especially in its publications. Did he infl uence Michel Leveau’s method of collecting? C. F.-L.: Perhaps not consciously. Like Dapper, Michel Leveau was never in Africa for the purpose of accomplishing his “work.” He never acquired anything in situ but bought exclusively in the West, at auction houses (especially Sotheby’s), from Parisian galleries, and from private collectors. He was a connoisseur with a trained and sure eye and an appreciation for provenance, as demonstrated by the fact that many of the pieces in the collection were formerly the property of fi gures like Charles Ratton, Helena Rubinstein, Jacob Epstein, and Georges de Miré. Although he was by no means a socialite, he was part of a small group of active collectors in Paris, which included individuals like André Fourquet and Hubert Goldet. T. A. M.: Might another similarity with Olfert Dapper be seen in the encyclopedic quality of the museum’s collection? C. F.-L.: Most defi nitely! Beauty was an important criterion for Michel Leveau, but not all of his acquisitions spoke to a purely aesthetic imperative. If that had been the case, the museum’s collection, with its nearly four thousand objects, could never have attained the breadth that it has today. Some pieces caught his attention because they made sense to him as being characteristic of regional styles or peoples. The roughly fi fty exhibitions the museum has organized over the years also were an important infl uence on the nature of acquisitions, inasmuch as exploring their subject matter thoroughly sometimes dictated the purchase of certain kinds of objects. He understood the importance of a didactic approach that would satisfy visitors’ desire for knowledge and understanding. T. A. M.: The Chefs-d’oeuvre exhibition that the museum is now presenting largely focuses on the statuary of


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