25
The Awakening
of a
Sleeping Beauty
Memories of the Genesis
of an Exhibition
The Hidden Treasures of the Ter vuren
Museu m ( 1995)
It all began on a cold winter day at
the end of 1992 or the beginning of 1993.1 I
had been working for the RMCA for only two
and a half years. On that morning, the painter
Louis De Vries came to see me to talk about an
exhibition project that was dear to his heart.
No one had any inkling at the time that this
project would profoundly affect the course of
the museum’s history.
The project he outlined to me was essentially
a proposal to organize a major exhibition of
the masterpieces of African art that we held in
our reserves. The idea appealed to me immediately.
I made an appointment with our director,
Dirk Thys van den Audenaerde, so De Vries
could present it to him.2
Despite my enthusiasm, I was somewhat
apprehensive about what kind of reaction
the project might elicit. To understand my
reservations, it is necessary to remember
events that had transpired eight years earlier.
In 1984, Thys, along with several other
researchers at the museum, had presented
part of the museum’s artistic patrimony to
the readers of a periodical called Openbaar
Kunstbezit Vlaanderen.3 He stated at the outset,
“It is a unique and difficult challenge for
me to present the Royal Museum for Central
Africa to the readers of Openbaar kunstbezit
Vlaanderen because the museum isn’t really
an art museum. It was not created to collect
masterpieces, nor was it intended to house or
exhibit them to the public.”4
He added that “in some ways, the ethnographic
objects displayed at the museum are not artworks
but ordinary utilitarian objects that are
examples of the material culture of the peoples
who are being studied there.”5 He further stated
that this applied not only to the objects used
in everyday life, such as combs and knives, but
to ritual objects such as masks or ancestor fi gures
as well. He did concede that some sculptors
conferred “harmonious forms and very refi ned
fi nish to their works, to a suffi cient extent that
one might rightly speak of them as art objects
rather than as utilitarian ones.”6
In other words, reluctantly ... .
Unfortunately, Thys, a brilliant zoologist by
training, was not the only one in the 1980s
who still viewed things this way.
Par / By Viviane Baeke