INSCRIPTIONS
129
gender. Though not confi rmed through fi rsthand,
fi eld-based documentation, it has been suggested
that such female fi gures would be owned and
used by women and would specifi cally serve female
needs and concerns.
LIMITATIONS OF PROVENANCE
This essay’s focus on inscriptions and sketches
as aids to reconstruct collection histories—in
this case, a specifi c exhibition inventory—refl ects
the increasing attention that collectors, dealers,
curators, and even academics of African art devote
to provenance. For quite some time, such
documentation has also been gaining economic
signifi cance, often considerably augmenting the
market value of a particular work. For museums,
provenance often also offers an important
legal or, in the context of the UNESCO convention
as adopted by the American Association of
Art Museum Directors, ethical reference in that
it provides a terminus ante quem and thus helps
situate an object on a timeline. However, despite
the merits of provenance research, it should be
clear that a collection history in and of itself does
not confi rm the quality of a work nor does it warrant
its authenticity. These comments apply to
Olbrechts’ Kongo-kunst. Even though his selection
for the show includes a signifi cant number
of objects that can readily be labeled as masterworks
today, the vast majority of the 1,525 ob-
FIG. 19 (below):
Bowl-bearing fi gure.
Songye, DR Congo.
Wood, pigment. L: 44 cm.
Ex Gaston Heenen, Brussels (by
1937); Ralph Luetters, Stuttgart;
Alfred Weissenegger, Amstetten,
Austria; Sotheby’s, Paris (June 24,
2015; lot 65).
Private collection.
Photo: © Sotheby’s.
Because of a lack of fi eld research,
we know nothing about the meaning
and function of bowl-bearing
fi gures among the Songye. Among
the neighboring Kanyok, the bowl
bearer is simply a serving dish, the
decoration of which signals the class
of its owner, especially when used to
feed visitors whom the owner hopes
to impress (Ceyssens 2001: cat. 82).
jects he assembled for the exhibition were not of
that quality. The exhibition primarily served an
encyclopedic purpose in that it aimed to present
the largest possible collection of mostly privately
owned works with the intent to demonstrate
the incredible formal and typological diversity
of Congolese art forms, as well as their rich and
varied contextual references.
While I personally recognize how provenance
can add to the historical interest of an object
and how it can help evaluate a work in the contextual
environment in which it was created (or
at least used), I also believe that the growing
emphasis on collection histories has had a number
of negative side effects. First, a provenance
that relates back to a pioneering collector or
early scholar of African art who is identifi ed as a
“discoverer” or tastemaker often has erroneously
led to the assumption that any object which
has passed through that individual’s hands must
possess some degree of quality.8 This reasoning
falsely implies that these early African art lovers
automatically had the knowledge needed
to distinguish between “good” and “bad” art.
The truth is that such discrimination is built
upon systematic comparison between a
large number of related works. In the
fi rst decades of the “emancipation” of
African art as art, in many cases the
corpus of comparanda either was