The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ancestral Origins of African Masterpieces Explored in Major Metropolitan Museum Exhibition This Fall
Features Earliest African Creations to Capture Imagination of Western Avant-Garde Artists – Exhibition dates: October 2, 2007 – March 2, 2008
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present a special exhibition of acclaimed sculptural masterpieces from the heart of Africa’s equatorial rainforest, beginning October 2, 2007. The exhibition explores not only the significance of the works presented in their countries of origin but also how their reception in the West led them to enter the mainstream of universal art. Organized thematically, Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary explains the sources of cultural and spiritual inspiration that led to their creation in equatorial Africa. Drawn from the most important collections of African art in Europe and the United States, the more than 130 works featured in the exhibition relate to 12 distinct traditions in Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were created to celebrate the lives of an extended family’s most notable ancestors and to give expression to their ongoing role as advocates with the divine.
Many of the works on view won renown as fresh sources of inspiration for early 20th-century Western avant-garde artists, who collected them and kept them in their studios. The excitement generated by those works when they first came to the attention of artists in Paris, Berlin, and New York is reflected in such colloquial names as “The Black Venus” and “Great Bieri,” titles by which they have been known ever since. Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Henri Matisse were among the many artists who not only collected African sculpture but who also carefully studied it in the newly formed ethnographic museums of the day.
The exhibition is made possible in part by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.
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