MUSEUM NEWS 52 Above, left to right: Chéri Chérin, Le chemin de l’exil, Kinshasa, 2004. MRAC, HO.2013.57.1747. Reliquary guardian figure. Kota, Gabon. © Leopold Museum, Vienna. Max Ernst, The Feast of the Gods, 1948. Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, acquired in 1968. © Bildrecht, Vienne 2016/Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna. Left: Female and male fi gures. Mangbetu, Upper Uele, DR Congo. Wood (Nauclea vanderguchtii). H: 49 and 43 cm. MRAC collection, Tervuren. inv. EO.1955.128.1 and EO.1955.128.2. Lower right: Amedeo Modigliani, Étude de tête pour une sculpture, 1910/11. © Collection E. W. K., Bern/Davos. Reproduced by permission of Galerie Kornfeld, Bern. Below: Car sculpted in wood. Republic of the Congo. MRAC collection, Tervuren, inv. E.O.1966.48.25. Congo Art Works BRUSSELS—The reopening of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren (MRAC) is fast approaching, and that institution recently announced that the exhibition Congo Art Works: Popular Painting, on view until January 22, 2017, at the BOZAR Center in Brussels, will be the fi nal show it will stage outside its walls. Curated by Bambi Ceuppens and Sammy Baloji, this exhibition explores a painting movement that fl ourished in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the second half of the twentieth century. It includes examples of works by many of the movement’s major proponents, including Chéri Chérin, Chéri Samba, Shula, and Djilatendo, among others. This school of painting is fi rmly rooted in daily life and often incorporates humor, even though its subjects include serious matters such as religion, public health, and politics. The eighty pieces presented in the exhibition— canvases, drawings, and other works mainly from the Bogumil Jewsiewicki Collection that the MRAC acquired in 2013—together form a portrait of an epoch. A few older works from the museum’s ethnographic collection are juxtaposed with these more contemporary creations and are featured as highlights of the show, an inclusion welcomed by afi cionados of the traditional arts of the region. Their presence in the show is not random but rather an eloquent response to the commonly held but incorrect belief that traditional African art and modern pictorial works have no connection with one another. Gods from Other Places VIENNA—The Leopold Museum in Vienna is presenting Fremde Götter: Faszination Afrika und Ozeanien (Gods from Other Places: The Fascination for Africa and Oceania) until January 9, 2017. While the exhibition’s subject matter, the aesthetic discovery of the arts of distant cultures by European avant-garde artists, has been explored many times before in exhibitions and in print, this show is interesting in that it unveils many hitherto unpublished and little-known works of African and Oceanic art from the museum’s collection. While somewhat uneven in the quality of the works it contains, this collection is vast and the show includes some 200 artworks—masks, sculptures, weapons, etc.—brought together by the museum’s founder, Rudolf Leopold. The collection he assembled was later complemented by more than fi fty works from the estate of Erwin Raisp-Caliga, an Austro-Hungarian naval offi cer. The works by Picasso, Klee, Léger, and Pechstein that appear in the show alongside “the gods from other places” mainly come from the collections of other museums, including the Musée National Picasso in Paris, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Brücke-Museum in Berlin, and the Kirchner Museum in Davos. An eponymously titled catalog accompanies the exhibition.
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