maceutical enterprise, A. C. Barnes Company. His fi rst foray as a collector was guided by a high school friend, the American realist painter William J. Glackens (1870– 1938), who traveled to Paris for two weeks in February 1912 and returned with thirty-three modern works for Barnes. At fi rst skeptical of Glackens’ selections—which included paintings by Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, and Renoir—Barnes soon became a convert and began to educate himself in art.3 Inspired by his initial acquisitions, 92 he made several trips to Paris between 1912 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, building his collection of European modernist works through purchases from well-established dealers such as Ambroise Vollard, Paul Durand-Ruel, and the brothers Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune. Barnes also kept abreast of the market closer to home, visiting auction houses and New York galleries and acquiring American modernist works. During these early years of Barnes’ collecting, the market for African art in the Western world was only just emerging, centered in Paris, and in large part generated by the growing interest in modernist art. Until the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, objects from Africa had generally been acquired by individuals as curiosities, travel souvenirs, or colonial trophies and by museums of ethnography as examples of material culture. But avant-garde artists, mostly based in Europe, became the driving force behind a growing appreciation for the aesthetics of African artifacts as they began experimenting with new forms of artistic expression. As early as 1905, such artists as Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck began looking at and collecting African sculpture. They were especially drawn to more stylized and abstract works. In Paris, interest in African art on the part of modernist artists inspired a few intrepid dealers. Among them was the young Paul Guillaume (1891–1934), who became one of the most infl uential art dealers of the twentieth century and played a signifi cant role as Barnes’ confi - dant and foreign secretary at the Barnes Foundation.4 When he fi rst met Barnes, probably in Paris around 1922, Guillaume was known on both sides of the Atlantic as a dealer of both modern Western art and l’art nègre. The latter, ostensibly defi ned by race, encompassed not only works from Africa but also from Oceania in the fi rst half of the twentieth century.5 It is clear that France’s colonial relationship with Africa—particularly its colonies in sub-Saharan Africa including Côte d’Ivoire, French Sudan (present-day Mali), Gabon, and the Congo—provided vital channels for sourcing the African art he offered. Once in Guillaume’s hands, objects from Africa were carefully staged for his clientele as works of fi ne art. One of his display strategies was to mount the sculpture on specially made bases created by the Japanese craftsman Kichizô Inagaki (1876–1951).6 Guillaume was aided—if not guided—by his friend and mentor, Guillaume Apollinaire. He loaned African sculpture to signifi cant exhibitions in New York during WWI and in Paris after the war, including the one organized in 1916 by the Lyre et Palette, an association created by modernist writers Blaise Cendrars and Jean Cocteau and the artist Manuel Ortiz de Zárate. For this, their inaugural exhibition, which attracted bohemians and artists as well as high society, Guillaume’s African sculptures were presented alongside modern paintings by Matisse, Modigliani, and Picasso.7 The accompanying catalog included a preface by Apollinaire on the subject of l’art nègre, which stressed that the works were being displayed for the fi rst time in Paris for their artistry and not simply out of ethnological interest.8 By 1920, Guillaume was widely recognized as a preeminent connoisseur and booster of African art, interest in which was spreading among, and indeed beyond, the cultural vanguard. In Paris, the craze for things African was such that some could even claim ennui—the writer Jean Cocteau complained that “le crise nègre,” as he fl ippantly called it, had grown tiresome—though most, including artist Juan Gris, continued to enthuse about its impact on the development of modern art.9 The growing appreciation for the artistic merits of African art eventually led to debate about whether it should be included, along with arts of Oceania and Native America, in the hallowed galleries of the Louvre. This was the question posed by the distinguished art critic Félix Fénéon to twenty notables—including artists, collectors, ethnographers, critics, and dealers—in the pages of the periodical Bulletin de la vie artistique. Amid a range of opinions on the subject and the relative merits of non-Western arts, Guillaume affi rmed the superiority of African art over Oceanic art and emphasized its signifi cant impact on modern artists. Building the Collection Given Guillaume’s importance in avant-garde circles, it was inevitable that he and Barnes would meet after the end of the war when the latter resumed his regular purchasing trips to Paris in 1921.10 Exactly when and through whom they fi rst met is undocumented, but their relationship soon blossomed and Barnes’ interest in Af- FIG. 5 (above): Paul Guillaume at his desk, c. 1914. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. FIG. 6 (below): Seated female fi gure of the Sãdo’o Society. Senufo, western central Senufoland, Côte d’Ivoire. Late 19th– early 20th century. Wood. H: 87.6 cm. The Barnes Foundation, A209. Photo: Rick Echelmeyer, © 2015 The Barnes Foundation. FEATURE
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