ART on view ECLECTIC A 21st-Century Collection By Hélène Joubert It is rare for a museum to open its doors to private collections, and even more so to that of a single collector, although temporary exhibitions do sometimes draw upon private resources in the interest of strengthening the pertinence of a show’s discourse or of improving its quality when museums lack comprehensive holdings. Nonetheless, the partially ethics-based timidity of museums vis-à-vis private collections can be attributed to the lack of documentation or provenance for objects in them. This is a point often raised with regard to ethnographic collections documented in situ or as a measure of prudence with regard to the valuation of pieces that are temporarily taken into the confi nes of these ultimate pantheons. Despite this, it should be recognized that the resources offered by private collections are important and precious, particularly where African art is concerned. For more than a century they have represented an informed selection that has enriched museums and will undoubtedly continue to do so more and more in the future. In the course of the twentieth century, the often-absent information regarding an African object’s original context was replaced by the validation it achieved through dealer provenance, its inclusion in exhibitions, illustration in publications, and/or its passage through the hands of famous collectors, all of which confer another kind of historical dimension upon a piece. Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière used these criteria, among others, as he built his collection, and in doing so, he has become the most recent link in a chain of references that spans generations.1 Since the Passions Privées exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1995, FIG. 1: Poster for Ecléctique. Une collection du XXIe siècle (Eclectic: A 21st-Century Collection), on display at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in the East Mezzanine gallery until April 2, 2017. © Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. FIG. 2 (left): Figure of a woman pounding millet. Dogon, N’duléri substyle, Touré/Douentza region, northern central Dandiagara, Mali. 16th–17th century. Wood, pigment, iron ornaments and repairs. Ex Gouro Sow, Bamako; Hélène and Henri Kamer, Cannes/ Paris/New York, before 1966; Hélène and Philippe Leloup, Paris. © Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Photo by Claude Germain.
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