In the Washington Post early last November, there
was a review of an exhibit of a private African-American art collection.
The exhibit was at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art on
the National Mall and the reviewer, Philip Kennicott, noted that the show was
planned “to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what was once called the Museum
of African Art.” That “independent museum on Capitol Hill,” as Kennicott
later described MAA, was started by Warren Robbins, a man who had my father’s
job at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, West Germany, a few incumbents before Dad was
there. (The post had been Cultural
Affairs Officer, often unofficially called the cultural attaché. Robbins had the job from 1958 to 1960; Dad
had held the post from 1965 to 1967.)
When Robbins (1923-2008) and Dad were introduced at a party,
Robbins had already bought the townhouse on A Street SE that had belonged to Frederick
Douglass, a former slave who became an adviser to Pres. Abraham Lincoln. When the property had just come on the market
a few years earlier, he was afraid that the historic house, which had been
Douglass’s residence from 1871 to 1877, his first home in Washington, would be
developed and lost. Robbins had family money, but at the time he bought
the townhouse, he had no idea what he would do with it; he only knew he wanted
to preserve it.
That’s when the former Foreign Service Officer learned that
there weren’t any museums in the U.S. that focused specifically on African art
(as distinguished from African artifacts and cultural/sociological objects), so
that’s what he decided to use the house for.
Robbins had been collecting African art since the 1950s when he bought
one piece on impulse and he wanted to introduce this unexplored but important creative
wealth to American museum-goers who heretofore had only seen African art in
collections at natural history museums or museums of ethnography where the
emphasis wasn’t on its aesthetics. As
Robbins points out, it was largely private collectors who played an “important
role” in “the universal appreciation of Africa’s creative tradition” and “its
preservation as a resource for posterity.”
(Indeed, in addition to Robbins himself, two private collectors played
significant parts in the very success of the Museum of African Art: Eliot
Elisofon and Gaston de Havenon, about which you’ll hear more shortly.)
When my dad came along, sometime around 1967 or ’68, having
just resigned from the U.S. Information Agency, then the cultural propaganda
outlet of our diplomatic service, Robbins asked him if he’d like to join up,
and Dad became the unpaid Director of Development for the new Museum of African
Art. (My father wasn’t entirely inexperienced in the world of art, though
he had no background in African culture.
In the late 1950s, he’d bought a part-ownership in a small modern art
gallery in Washington, the Gres Gallery, which I’ve mentioned once or twice on ROT.)
Fifteen years after starting MAA, Robbins (with some input from Dad)
engineered the take-over by the Smithsonian of the small, but by then
prominent, museum, which had by that time expanded, with the help of a Ford Foundation
grant, into the neighboring townhouses.
So, you see that I have something of a personal connection
to NMAfA. I even went to the reopening gala, after the MAA expansion was
completed, in May 1971 as the escort of Muriel Humphrey (1912-98), the wife of
Senator-Vice President-Senator Hubert Humphrey (1911-78), who was a member of
the museum’s national council. I was in the army, assigned to the
now-decommissioned Fort Holabird in Baltimore at the time, and I wore my dress
blues to the semi-formal event. A few
years later, on my mother’s 50th birthday, my father threw her a big party in
the museum, the guests socializing and dining amidst the art on exhibit. (I was unable to attend this celebration
because I was stationed in West Berlin by then.
I sent Mom 50 red roses at the party in my absence.) Therefore, I decided, on the basis of this link
and the interest in African art engendered by my parents’ association with the
original private Museum of African Art, to compile a brief history of what is
now the National Museum of African Art.
In 1871, the renowned abolitionist, orator, and writer
Frederick Douglass (1818-95), born into slavery from which he escaped in 1838,
bought his first home in Washington, D.C., at 316 A Street, S.E., on Capitol
Hill. Two years later, Douglass
purchased the attached house at 318; he lived and worked in the home until
1878, when he moved to Anacostia (now the Frederick Douglass National Historic
Site, administered by the National Park Service), though the Douglass family
maintained ownership of the property until the 1920s. The combined houses remained in private hands
until 1964, when Warren Robbins bought them and established the private Museum
of African Art and opened the property to the public.
Robbins had started collecting African art while on a trip
to Hamburg, West Germany, when he was Cultural Affairs Officer in Bonn,
sometime in the late 1950s. On an
impulse, he spent $15 for a wooden Yoruba statue (Nigeria) in an antique
shop. A year later, once again in
Hamburg, he paid $1,000 for 32 African masks, textiles, and other objects, and
thus began his association with the art of Africa. His collection attracted attention when he
returned to Washington and decorated his home with the pieces and people,
sometimes complete strangers, began coming by to see them. To accommodate the growing curiosity, Robbins,
who’d as yet never been to Africa, created an informal museum in the basement of
his home as a way “of improving communications between cultural and racial
groups,” as he later stated his goal.
In 1963, he raised $13,000 and took out a $35,000 mortgage
to buy the townhouse at 316 A Street, S.E., half of Douglass’s Capitol Hill
residence. The newly-minted museum
director opened his display to the public in June 1964, establishing the first
museum in the U.S. dedicated to African art.
Almost immediately, nearly 200 works were pledged at gifts or loans to
the nascent museum. For the opening, Robbins’s
own art was supplemented by loans from Eliot Elisofon (1911-73), a photographer
and photojournalist for Life magazine
with an esteemed private collection of African art, and items borrowed from the University
of Pennsylvania Museum. The museum’s
mission, the new director said, was to introduce “the cultural heritage of the
Negro people, known mainly in academic circles, to the attention of the general
public.” In 1966, Robbins launched the
Frederick Douglass Institute of Negro Arts and History, the museum’s
educational arm, and began raising additional funds to purchase the other half
of the structure. The collection was now
officially named the Museum of African Art. In addition to never having visited the
continent, the former Foreign Service Officer had also never before worked in a
museum, never been involved with the arts, and never raised money.
Included in the display of masks, sculptures, carvings,
bronze and iron castings, decorative items, textiles, and ceremonial objects,
MAA had a gallery devoted to musical instruments. Recorded drums, recreating the sounds of
eight different kinds of drumming—from the kind that sends messages to the kind
that accompanies important ceremonies—filled the air of the museum as in a
second-floor gallery could be seen a Nigerian raft zither, an Ethiopian lyre,
and a leg rattle from Malawi. Along with
the weapons, household items, and masks, all the objects on exhibit at MAA were
displayed to emphasize their aesthetic properties—that is, the visual beauty of
their form and decoration—without overlooking their sociological and spiritual
import. As the museum itself phrased it:
“Today the art of Africa takes its rightful place beside the other great art
traditions of the world . . . .” In the
original museum setting (before the million-dollar reconstruction), exhibits
sat on rough wood flooring surrounded by tropical plants and wall hangings were
displayed against clay, ivory, terracotta, or ebony-colored backgrounds. (This tactic was clearly a replication of the
theatrical setting that Warren Robbins used in his home museum before the
formal foundation of MAA, when he adorned his rooms with tropical plants to suggest the African jungle.)
In addition to its principal exhibits, the art of the
peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, MAA maintained two permanent displays that
related to its origins and core mission.
One was a recreation of the study Frederick Douglass used in his home in
the 1870s, furnished with genuine objects, such as his desk (a gift from
Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-96, prominent abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and personal effects
(including his typewriter), or period-appropriate antiques based on the
original furnishings. On the walls of
the study were pages from The
North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper Douglass published (1847-51); photos of Douglass in
his many public activities; and examples of the many letters he wrote to
prominent and important correspondents.
Nearby was a gallery that displayed reproductions of modern
Western art that showed the influence of African motifs with the African art
object that inspired it, such as Paul Klee’s Senecio (1922) shown with an Ashanti fertility doll (Ghana). Other famous European and American artists in
this display included Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Calder, and
several German Expressionist painters. Even
though the Western art in the gallery wasn’t original—real pieces would have
made this exhibit fantastic—the gallery was a source of fascination for me, a
novice in African art like most Americans and Europeans at the time, and it
informed my view of modern European and American art ever after. (I later went to an exhibit at the Phillips
Collection, Man Ray, African Art
and the Modernist Lens—see “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10)” on ROT, 18 January 2010—that showed
the influence of this same culture on the Euro-American photographers of the
1910s and ’20s, the era in which the cognoscenti
“discovered” African art. I’d already
learned where some of the striking images of our artistic heritage had come
from and approached this exhibit already a little in the know, as it were.)
In 1967, the Ford Foundation awarded the museum a $250,000,
three-year grant, to be matched with funds raised form other donors. By this time, MAA’s holdings included 300 art
objects and the grant was intended to support the Douglass Institute’s efforts
to create traveling exhibits, lectures, publications, audio-visual materials,
and expanded educational programs. By
1969, the New York Times reported
“increased attendance and activity” at the five-year-old museum, “with weekly
figures up 33 per cent.” In April
1970, MAA closed for a major expansion and refurbishment project which would
eventually double the museum’s space.
Funded largely by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities
($1 million) and the Ford Foundation ($300,000), with smaller contributions by
other donors (including $40,000 from Washington philanthropist David Lloyd
Kreeger, a significant supporter of the arts in the Capital, for whom the new
extension was named), the remodeling was designed to unify the combined
structures added over the museum’s seven-year lifetime.
The initial plans for the MAA didn’t include exhibits of
African-American artists, though temporary shows were devoted to them. Part of the purpose of the expansion was to
afford space and financing to include black American art as an integral part of
the museum’s permanent collection. (The
Smithsonian’s museum doesn’t incorporate African-American art as part of its
principal mission, probably on the argument that a National Museum of
African American History and Culture, officially established in 2003, is in the planning stages.)
The museum reopened in May 1971 (with the gala that I
attended with Muriel Humphrey), almost exactly seven years after it first
opened its doors, featuring an exhibit of items from the magnificent private
collection of Gaston de Havenon, shown in public for the first time. (You can take my word for that apparent
hyperbole: I saw it—I still have the catalogue—and was thoroughly knocked
out. If anyone still believes that
African art has little aesthetic appeal and is only useful as sociological or
anthropological artifacts, then you need to find a copy of this catalogue
somewhere—The deHavenon Collection [Museum
of African Art, 1971]—and look through it.)
Some of the most beautiful and stunning pieces of art, drawn from the
cultures of West Africa, were on display; de Havenon (1904-93), an art dealer
and collector, acquired some of the most sublime examples of sub-Saharan
creativity I’ve seen anywhere even since that introduction.
The art of Africa, like that of Native Americans, Australia,
and other non-Western cultures, used to be called “primitive”; there even used
to be a Museum
of Primitive Art in New York City. That
term implied a lack of sophistication and aesthetic values, the tinkerings of
childlike peoples. The implicit insult
aside, the term was just inaccurate. One
look at the objects on display at the Museum of African Art (and its successor
beneath the Mall), not to mention the art museums that today have all
established sections devoted to African art, will disabuse anyone of the
thought that this creative work is anything less than aesthetically sophisticated
and artistically refined. The term of
art today is “naïve” art, an attempt to describe its origins as untaught and
traditional—which is not the same as unrefined or artless. (This is also inaccurate, since the artists
are only “untaught” in the sense that they weren’t trained in Western-style art
academies or conservatories. Traditional
artists are, indeed, taught their art, but at the knees of their
predecessors. Each generation of artists
is trained in the techniques and styles of its culture by those who practiced
the art before.) One glance at a Bambara
antelope headdress from Mali, a BaKota reliquary figure from Gabon, or an
Ashanti fertility doll from Ghana will prove that conclusively.
This is not the place for a disquisition on African art, but a few things
should be noted, as they affect the notion of an art museum devoted to its
display. First, unlike modern Western
art, African art isn’t primarily decorative.
While many African cultures have extensive decorative traditions
(unlike, say, the Inuit, who traveled light and had little time for or interest
in decoration), almost everything Africans created was for use—if not
ceremonial and religious, then practical and domestic. The beauty of the objects, though inarguably
important, is secondary to the main purpose for the object’s creation. When we see such an art object in a museum,
we’re seeing it out of context since its original intended setting is a great
part of its meaning to it creators. That,
of course, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t appreciate the aesthetic appeal of the
art; but we should acknowledge its greater import. Furthermore, because African artworks are
made for use, they’re never pristine and seldom very old—because most African
works of art get used up over time.
(This phenomenon is furthered by the fact that African traditional art
objects are created from organic materials, such as wood, grass, skins, and
natural fabrics, that deteriorate in time (with the uncommon exceptions of
bronze and iron sculpture). An advantage
of this artistic tradition is that work done today is very similar to that done
decades and even centuries ago—but as outsiders to the cultures in which these
pieces are created, we have to be very careful about the ways we look at them,
understand them, and appreciate them in a museum display—not to mention how we
acquire them.
By 1973, the year Robbins made his first visit to Africa,
MAA included 12 exhibition galleries, an auditorium, and a library; held 5,000
objects; and had a staff of 20 (one of whom, by then, was my father). Eventually, the museum grew to comprise adjoining
buildings, ultimately including nine townhouses, 16 garages, and two carriage
houses.
(Robbins had raised money, reportedly $25,000, to buy a
beaded icon called Afo-A-Kom back from a Manhattan art gallery. The West
African Kom people considered the century-old figure sacred; it had
been stolen from a hill-top village in Cameroon in 1966 and the New
York Times located it at
the New York gallery, where it was for sale (for a reported $60-65,000).
Robbins led a delegation to bring the
statue back to its home, where he was greeted by Nsom Nggue, then fon, or king, of the Kom people, and
welcomed enthusiastically by a pageant of men and women in tribal dress.)
As early as 1966, the New York Times had pronounced MAA, “a tiny but excellent” museum. In the ensuing years, Robbins’s museum gained
considerable prominence, as attested to by visits from celebrities like
Elizabeth Taylor and Muhammad Ali. Washington
Mayor Marion Barry (1979-91; 1995-99)—who died at 78 last 23 November—even
married his third wife in the museum in 1978.)
In 1976, Robbins began a campaign to get the Smithsonian Institution to
absorb the Museum of African Art. He
lobbied friends in Congress and in October 1978, the legislature voted to
authorize the acquisition. S. Dillon
Ripley, Secretary of the Smithsonian, announced the take-over in August 1979;
MAA was officially renamed the National Museum of African Art in 1981. By that time, MAA owned 8,500 African sculptures,
costumes, textiles, musical instruments, and jewelry; numerous books on African
culture and history; early maps of Africa; educational materials; and
photographs, slides, and film segments on African art, society, and environment
bequeathed to the museum by world-renowned photographer Eliot Elisofon; and had
an annual budget of $900,000. Robbins
became the National Museum of African Art’s first director, remaining in that
position until 1983, when he became Director Emeritus and a Senior Scholar at the
Smithsonian.
(When Robbins deeded the museum, its property, and its
holdings to the Smithsonian Institution in 1979, the Institution ran it for seven
years. Then, to support the construction
of the new building on the Mall, the Capitol Hill property was sold in
1986. The Capitol Hill site was
purchased by the National Association for Home Care (NAHC), which operates the Caring
Institute. NAHC restored the property to
the condition it was in in 1871-77 in 1990 and 1993 and opened the current Frederick
Douglass Museum and Hall of Fame for Caring Americans on the property. The museum is open to the public.)
NMAfA opened Ethiopia: The Christian Art of an
African Nation in 1984, its last exhibit at the Frederick Douglass House,
and in 1987, NMAfA was relocated to a new, subterranean building on the
Mall behind James Renwick’s red sandstone Castle, the Smithsonian’s historic
original building on Independence Avenue.
(The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery for Asian art, NMAfA’s next-door
neighbor, is likewise mostly below ground.
The Sackler contains art of North Africa, as well as the Middle East and
Asia.) Congress appropriated $960,000
for the two new museums and ground was broken, with Vice Pres. George H. W.
Bush officiating, on 21 June 1983.
Designed by architect Jean Paul Carlhian of the Boston firm
Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, the four-story structure is 96% below
ground, with the four-acre Enid A. Haupt Garden as its roof; only the
single-story, domed entrance pavilion, 35 feet high by 90 feet long, with the admissions counter, info
desk, and elevators to the exhibit floors, is at ground level. (The Sackler’s entry is topped with pyramids.) Based on an overall concept by Japanese architect Junzo
Yoshimura, Carlhian’s $75 million, 370,000 square-foot design for the
twin museums, Ripley’s last big project before his retirement in September 1984,
incorporates geometric forms which are meant to provide a unity of the project to
existing Smithsonian buildings: the Smithsonian Institution Building (the
Castle), the Arts and Industries Building, and the Freer Gallery of
Art. According to a Smithsonian website,
The National Museum of African Art
was placed adjacent to the Arts and Industries Building with circular forms
derived from the semicircular arches of the Freer Gallery of Art across the
way. The pink granite reflects the colors of the Smithsonian Institution
Building and the Arts and Industries Building, while the gray color reflects
the Freer Gallery of Art.
The NMAfA is constructed principally of red granite with a
motif of circles reflected in its domed roof, round windows, curved stairways, and
arched doorways. (The Sackler,
continuing the variation of a classical theme, is of grayish-tan granite and
uses a diamond shape as its architectural motif. The two museums are connected underground by
a corridor or concourse that also contains offices and classrooms for various
Smithsonian programs.)
The new museum, with five times the space of MAA’s Capitol
Hill home, was opened in September and that same month an anonymous donor gave
NMAfA a gift of $200,000, in recognition of which the museum renamed its
library the Warren M. Robbins Library, the world’s principal resource center
for the research and study of the visual arts of Africa. The
new museum has 68,800 square feet of space, of which 22,000 square feet are
exhibition galleries. The main
exhibition spaces are on the first and second floors below ground, with six
galleries, a lecture hall, the Warren Library, the Eliot Elisofon Photographic
Archives (containing over 350,000 items), the museum workshop, the museum
store, and NMAfA admin offices. On
Sublevel 3 is another exhibition space for displays of special selections from
the collection and the other Smithsonian offices and classrooms, plus the
entrance to the concourse to the other buildings. Some of the galleries are devoted to
permanent displays, including the 525-object Disney-Tishman African Art Collection,
a 2005 gift of unique and rare pieces from the Walt Disney World Company to NMAfA.
Continuing
installations, which rotate works from the museum’s permanent collection,
span the cultures and forms of the continent below the Sahara. Some exhibits explore a particular region, such as the lesser-known works from Sierra
Leone and Liberia, the art of Benin,
the pottery of Central Africa, and the archaeology of the ancient Nubian city
of Kerma, as well as ceramics, small stone figures from the 15th to the
18th centuries, and the artistry of
everyday objects. NMAfA’s focus also
covers contemporary art from the continent, such as Senegalese artist
Ousmane Sow’s Toussaint Louverture et La
Vieille Esclave (1989), a mixed-media sculpture of Haiti’s18th-century liberator. The
museum’s educational projects for both children and adults include films with
contemporary perspectives on African life and storytelling programs, as well as
lectures, public discussions, and musical performances. The practical
workshops, such as traditional basket-weaving, bring Africa’s oral and cultural
traditions to life along with demonstrations by African and African-American
artists.
By the time Warren Robbins died at 85 (of complications from
a fall at his home), NMAfA held over 9,000 art objects from the continent of
Africa and 30,000 books on African art, culture, and history. As of 2009, the National Museum of African
Art’s yearly budget was $6 million and its current collection, the largest
public holding of contemporary African art in the United States, comprises
12,000 items. In June, NMAfA marked its
50th anniversary, commemorating the day in 1964 that Warren Robbins opened the
doors to the Frederick Douglass townhouse that had become the Museum of African
Art.
[The National Museum of African Art, the United States’
only museum dedicated to the collection, conservation, study, and exhibition of
traditional and contemporary African art, is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30
p.m. (closed 25 December). Admission is
free. NMAfA is located at 950 Independence Avenue, S.W., near the Smithsonian
Metrorail station on the Blue and Orange lines. For more information about the exhibitions and
the museum, call (202) 633-4600 or visit the museum’s website, http://africa.si.edu; for general Smithsonian information,
call (202) 633-1000.
[I said above that I had a personal connection, through
my father, to the original Museum of African Art. Between gifts from my folks, early
inheritances, and my own acquisitions, my own small art collection includes a
few pieces of works from Africa, mostly purchased from MAA. Among these are a carved wooden Bamun figure
of a boy from Cameroon, a Bambara “Chiwara” (female antelope headdress figure)
from Mali, a stylized iron bird from the Bobo people of Burkina Faso, a carved
wooden Yoruba twin figure, a Bronze Senufo equestrian figure from the Ivory
Coast, and three carved wooden masks from the Senufo, Baule (Ivory Coast), and
Ibibio (Nigeria) peoples.]
