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African Art: A Century at the Brooklyn Museum by William C. Siegmann with Joseph Adande and Kevin D. Dumouchelle New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2009; 296 pages, approx 200 color illustrations, map, list of exhibitions, bibliography, index. $49.95 (paper) $75.00 (cloth)
This impressive, lushly illustrated catalogue is a welcome addition to the corpus of permanent collection publications focused on African art. Few American museums can lay claim to the history that the Brooklyn Museum does in the book's title: a century of African art. More than a century, in fact, because as William C. Siegmann describes in his essay on the collections history, the museum began its African collection in 1900. The longevity of this institution's display of African objects as works of art, not artifacts, is equally noteworthy. Since 1923, with the exhibition "Primitive Negro Art," the museum has recognized the aesthetic significance of African objects - not as sources of inspiration for Western art but as art in their own right. Over the course of a century, the museum has continued to build on the fine objects collected in the early twentieth century, leading to the collection featured here.
Authors of permanent collection catalogues face a particular challenge. They must devise new ways to present a survey of classic genres of African sculpture (usually the heart of a museum's African collection), and they must elucidate that collection for a wide range of readers. The collection catalogue should both introduce the vast subject of African art and offer a new contribution to an academic discipline. In addition, the publication's significance depends upon the collection it documents; without historically important, aesthetically powerful works of art, a permanent collection catalogue lacks a raison d'etre. Siegmann and his contributors to this publication achieve a...