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133
NOTES
1. The Olbrechts sketches were recently transferred from the Letterenhuis
(House of Literature) in Antwerp, formerly known as the Archief en
Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven (Archive and Museum for Flemish
Cultural Life).
2. The remarkable collection of Alexis Bonew, which was partially auctioned
at Sotheby’s in Paris on 10 December 2014, included a number of
important works that had also been part of Kongo–kunst. The Olbrechts
inscriptions are also mentioned for a number of works in the Bonew sale,
but some of the most signifi cant Bonew objects are illustrated in Olbrechts’
1946/1959 volume, if only in the now well-known Songye and “Kongo”
installation views in the 1937–38 exhibition (lots 13 and 22) or in one
of the many engravings by Jean Van Noten that grace the book (lot 19).
Interestingly, several of Bonew’s works are also associated with three
colonial sources cited in this essay: Willy Claes, Jos Walscharts, and François
Wenner.
3. Aside from some better-known examples in the Tervuren museum,
including one that was acquired in the Congo by Governor François (Fritz)
Wenner between 1921 and 1930 (see Ceyssens 1995: cat. 103), the two
other great examples of these rare Kata/Kambulu masks are one formerly
in the Mestach Collection in Brussels (Mestach 2007: 227, cat. 106) and
another formerly in the collection of Gustav and Franyo Schindler in New
York (Baldwin 1987: 69). There are also two examples of the genre in the
Felix Collection (Felix 2016: cat. 33 and 39b).
4. I should add that I was already familiar with the staff sold at the Sotheby’s
auction in June, as I had admired it in the collection of Adriaan Claerhout
in Antwerp when I met with one of his daughters to discuss my homage
to her father in my 2001 Olbrechts publication. However, I admit that,
like the auction house, at that time I had no idea of its earlier provenance.
Notwithstanding, it is surprising that the Claerhout heirs did not know of
its Olbrechts-related history.
5. The celebrated round, striated Luba mask from the Seattle Art Museum
served as the centerpiece in Julien Volper’s recent monograph Autour des
Songye (2012). In 2016 it was presented in Cleveland as part of a selection
of loaned masterworks displayed for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s
centennial, a fi tting tribute to the association between “Kat” White and
the museum’s African art collection (see Petridis 2016).
6. In 1918 colonial agent Willy-Eugène Claes was suspended from his duties
and sent back to Belgium for reasons of general misconduct, negligence,
alcohol abuse, and violent behavior.
7. Curiously, in 1998, while it was apparently still owned by Jack and
Deborah Rosenberg, the ex-Claes Songye power fi gure appeared in an
advertisement for the Merton D. Simpson Gallery in New York in African
Arts (31, 2 (1998): 1).
8. My use of the term “quality” here does not account for the possible
insights into endemic or native aesthetic preferences and evaluation
criteria, which obviously do exist and are not necessarily equal to those
applied in the West by dealers, collectors, curators, and scholars.
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