2 Editorial In conjunction with Pope Francis’ 2015 Apostolic Journey to the United States, the Vatican launched a retread of its traveling exhibition Vatican Splendors: A Journey through Faith and Art, which had toured a number of venues in North America and Brazil in 2010–11. Organized by the Congregazione per l’Evangelizzazione dei Popoli of the Vatican City State, this event is less an art exhibition than an examination of the history of Catholicism, the papacy, and St. Peter’s Basilica through a selection of relevant art and artifacts. I happened to be in Southern California for a family wedding and saw it at its West Coast venue in the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. The jumble of material it presented contrasted starkly with Christina Hellmich’s spare and elegant curation of African, Oceanic, and Native American art from the Vatican collection in her 2013 Objects of Belief from the Vatican, which was profi led in our summer 2013 edition. I visited the Reagan with my mother, Marcia, who has an unquenchable sense of curiosity but, due to a visually impairment needs assistance to read the didactic information at museum exhibitions. Given that this sprawling exhibition takes up nearly 12,000 square feet of exhibition space and features about 200 objects, this was quite a job, but it also forced me to take an especially close look at the structure of the installation. Extensive chat panels about virtually every aspect of the material formed a major component. Moreover, there was a pervasive sense that the objects themselves could not carry the narrative, so every detail had to be explained and expounded upon in detail. I think this was especially the case since the history being expressed was very much from the church’s perspective—for example, there was a lot of information about Eusebius of Caesarea’s account of the Emperor Constantine at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in AD 312 (in hoc signo vinces) but little about the political and societal contexts of his eventual conversion to Christianity at the end of his life in 337. It also featured an entire section addressing the relatively Our cover shows a horned dance mask, culture uncertain, lower Ogooué region, Gabon, which a C14 test has dated to the 16th or 17th century. Ex Gertrud Koch, assistant to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, brought to Europe in 1952. Wood, pigment, iron. H: 40 cm. Private collection. Photo: Vincent Girier Dufournier. Behind is a view of the village of Lambaréné on the Ogooué River, c. 1950. Louis Perrois archives. non-confrontational and service-oriented aspects of Catholic missionary efforts when compared to those of other organizations—the non-denominational London Missionary Society, to name just one. This situation was stated as being the result of conscious reform but there was absolutely no acknowledgement of the egregious events that triggered said reform. The lengthy didactic detail presented in Vatican Splendors is all too familiar to those of us interested in non-Western art, especially in the fi elds of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Having earned the right to be called art only after Western artists appropriated the aesthetics of artworks from these areas for their own ends, the approach of nineteenth-century ethnology museums still all too often echoes in contemporary museum displays. This is gradually changing as museums reinstall and update their display concepts, and a particularly fi ne example recently opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art under the title Look Again: Contemporary Perspectives on African Art, a component the larger Creative Africa suite of exhibitions. The vast majority of the objects in this temporary exhibition are select loans from the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania, which is one of the oldest and most comprehensive institutional collections in the United States. In their usual home, a fl ashlight and a treasure map would be helpful to locate these many remarkable artworks; however, the resolutely aesthetic selection by guest curator Kristina Van Dyke quite literally casts light on its subject matter and gives the objects much-needed space to breathe. In addition to being physically spacious the installation is not cluttered with anthropological information. An interesting display of the dozens of small sculptures and other objects that form the contents of a Tshokwe divination basket is laid out fl at on top of a pedestal and is identifi ed only through the most basic label information. Van Dyke prefers that visitors actually look at the objects and try to learn from what they see rather than be limited by “sound bite” didactic text that provides little in the way of real information while simultaneously narrowing perceptions. We rarely see long discussions of the symbolic elements of a da Vinci painting displayed directly next to it, so why do we need it for a Kongo sculpture? This information can be accessed in detail elsewhere. Look Again can best be seen as taking a mainstreaming approach. This material is not so exotic that it needs to be marginalized in order to be appreciated. A related contrast was visible at the May sales held by Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York, which provided other interesting opportunities for comparison as well. Sotheby’s usual various owner sale (led by a major uli fi gure that sold within estimate for $4,730,000) featured the fi rst part of offerings from the renowned African art collection of Drs. Daniel and Marian Malcolm: twelve remarkable artworks with their own catalog that were displayed amid the rest of the African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian objects in a dedicated preview gallery. Taking a different approach—a mainstreaming one, if you will—Christie’s offered eleven objects selected with an eye to modern and contemporary art collectors and previewed them with material from its fl agship Impressionist & Modern Art and Post-War and Contemporary Art sales, taking advantage of visual affi nities between, for example, an archaic Baule fi gure and paintings by Léger and Modigliani. Sotheby’s brought in a little over $6.5 million for eleven objects that sold from the Malcolm group, and Christie’s made in excess of $5 million for seven objects from its offering. These fi gures are solid though not stunning in today’s art market, but a fact of particular interest was that Christie’s lots went to seven separate buyers, all of them crossover collectors from twentieth-century and contemporary art. To me this is not entirely surprising, given that the installation beautifully demonstrated the clear degree to which the modernest paintings resembled the African masterpieces next to which they were placed, rather than the affi nity being vague or running the other direction. Jonathan Fogel
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