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PORTFOLIO The Legacy of a Poet and a Dealer The Art Nègre Sculptures of Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Guillaume 146 You are walking toward Auteuil, intending to walk the whole way home To sleep with your fetishes from Oceania and Guinea. from Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire1 This spring, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is presenting an exhibition on Guillaume Apollinaire titled Apollinaire: le regard du poète (Apollinaire: The Vision of the Poet), which allows a rare opportunity to revisit the relationship between this important poet and seminal art dealer Paul Guillaume. On the evening of Apollinaire’s death on November 9, 1918, Guillaume signed a long article in Arts à Paris, a magazine that he had just created. It was a vibrant homage to the man who had been instrumental in building his career. Despite this, he wrote only a few words about the subject that was undoubtedly most central to their relationship: “The author of Alcools was among the fi rst to have been passionately interested in the subtle and profound statuary of Africa, and he jealously kept a number of unusual specimens.”2 By the beginning of the twentieth century, the groundwork had been laid for the blossoming of interest in arts nègres, starting with Orientalism and progressing to Japonism, by way of Egyptomania, archaeological discoveries, and Gauguin’s work in Brittany and in Polynesia. Ethnography museums had begun to develop By Michèle Hornn in the middle of the nineteenth century and were thriving all over Europe. Universal expositions also contributed to increased awareness of “other worlds” beyond Europe. Apollinaire followed the work, experiences, and tastes of his sculptor friends with open eyes. He was keenly aware of the new directions that sculpture was taking, and he took it upon himself to be their spokesman and militant defender. Beginning in the 1900s, he began writing art criticism, commentaries on various exhibitions, and prefaces to catalogs. From this perspective of the privileged observer, he was one of the fi rst to write about the ever-increasing interest artists were developing for African art and to express a favorable opinion about these faraway arts. In 1909, he wrote of Matisse, “This wild beast is a sophisticate. He likes to surround himself with both ancient and modern works, with precious textiles and with sculptures through which the Negroes of Guinea, Senegal, and Gabon express their most panicked passions with a rare purity.”3 In the same year, Apollinaire published his famous article “On Museums,” in which he proclaimed that An effort should be made to produce artistic exhibitions on kinds of art that have hitherto remained completely neglected. These are the artworks of certain distant lands and certain colonies. … Until now, artworks from these places have been seen exclusively as the province of ethnography and are Pages 142–143 and 151–152: Full suite of interior pages from the album Sculptures Nègres, Paul Guillaume (ed.), 1917, presented with their original captions translated from French. The visuals in this article are available online through the Ross Archive of African Images at the Yale University Library and also from the Musée de l’Orangerie, which holds a copy of the album in its Paul Guillaume Archives. Plate I. (See fi g. 1.) Plate II. “GOUROS” IDOL (Côte d’Ivoire). Plate III. Jos. Hessel Collection. “ABE” CEREMONIAL MASK (Côte d’Ivoire). Plate IV. (See fi g. 2.) Plate V. (See fi g. 3.) Plate VI. PAHOUIN ANCESTRAL MASK. Presides over the ceremonies of the cult of the dead.


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