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INSCRIPTIONS
Establishing a Pre-1937
Acquisition Date for 1,525
Central African Sculptures
FIG. 1 (left):
Poster for the exhibition
Kongo-kunst in the City
Festival Hall in Antwerp (24
December 1937–16 January
1938), after a design by
Jean Van Noten.
Lithograph. 84 x 57 cm.
MAS | Museum aan de Stroom,
Antwerp, inv. AE.2001.0026.D.
Photo: Michel Wuyts. ©
Collectiebeleid Musea en Erfgoed,
Antwerp.
FIG. 2 (above):
Jean Van Noten, Belgian
(1903–1982), Portrait of
Frans M. Olbrechts, 1937.
Charcoal on paper. 80 x 130 cm.
MAS | Museum aan de Stroom,
Antwerp, inv. AE.1977.0037.0274,
Gift of Margriet Olbrechts-
Maurissens. © Collectiebeleid Musea
en Erfgoed, Antwerp.
Inscribed inventory numbers and other
post-artist marks on artworks are regularly used
both by auction houses and dealers to establish a
connection between particular objects and collections,
whether public or private, current or past.
This article deals with inscriptions that specifi -
cally refer to the inclusion of a number of Central
African objects in the 1937–38 landmark exhibition
of Congolese sculpture, Kongo-kunst (fi g. 1).
Although I have written about this topic in the
past, certain important recent discoveries warrant
revisiting it in some detail.
In 2001, while a postdoctoral fellow of the
Fund for Scientifi c Research —Flanders, I curated
an exhibition on Frans M. Olbrechts and the early
study of African art (fi gs. 2 and 4) for the then
Ethnographic Museum in Antwerp, Belgium (see
Petridis 2001), an institution that has since been
absorbed into that city’s newly created Museum
aan de Stroom (MAS). One section of the exhibition
was devoted to the above-mentioned Kongokunst
show, which was held at the Stadsfeestzaal
in Antwerp and organized by a team of scholars
working under Olbrechts’ leadership. This historic
event served as the cornerstone for what
is arguably Olbrechts’ most infl uential scholarly
accomplishment, his book Plastiek van Kongo,
which was published in Dutch in 1946 and in a
By Constantine Petridis
French translation in 1959. As part of the discussion
of the exhibition’s singular contribution
to the developing fi eld of African art history, I
reunited seventy-two objects from the original
exhibition’s selection of 1,525 African artworks.
All of the pieces that were included in the show
are listed in the original exhibition catalog (Olbrechts
1937). While only a small portion of the
exhibited objects were illustrated in that publication,
photographs of many more appear in Olbrechts’
subsequent Plastiek van Kongo.
Two invaluable aids to the identifi cation of
the bulk of the other works that were part of
Kongo-kunst but were not illustrated in either
the exhibition catalog or Plastiek van Kongo
are a collection of sketches and succinct annotations
in Olbrechts’ own hand, which are held in
the archives of the MAS.1 Some of these are enhanced
by rubbings of striking relief decoration,
and together they serve as a visual record roughly
equivalent to the digital fi les and checklist that a
museum registrar today would compile in preparation
for an exhibition. These single, handwritten
sheets are especially precious for identifi cation
purposes because they also contain the inventory
numbers that Olbrechts temporarily assigned to
the works he selected for his exhibition. Not only
do these match the numbers included in the cata-
FEATURE