Some African objects had been collected by Europeans for centuries, and there had been industries producing some types, especially carvings in ivory, for European markets in some coastal regions. Between 1890 and 1918 the volume of objects greatly increased as Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed. These objects entered the collections of natural history museums, art museums (both encyclopedic and specialist) and private collections in Europe and the United States. About 90% of Africa's cultural heritage is believed to be located in Europe, according to French art historians.
Initially mostly seen as illustrating the ethnology of different African cultures, appreciation of pieces as artworks grew during the 20th century. Only towards the end of the century was "modern" African art in fine art genres accepted as significant.
19th century Before the Berlin Conference of 1885, traders and explorers to Africa purchased or stole art as souvenirs and curios, spreading beyond the coast; ivory objects made along African coasts had been collected for centuries, and many were made by Africans for purchase by Europeans, mainly in areas reached by the Portuguese, such as the Afro-Portuguese ivories. The period dominated by curio collecting, in which objects served as souvenirs, was followed by a period of trophy collecting in which large collections of artifacts (mostly weapons), and animal skins, horns, and tusks from hunting expeditions were formed.
Starting in the 1870s, thousands of African sculptures arrived in Europe in the aftermath of colonial conquest, exploratory expeditions and Christian missionary activity. Many reached museums such as the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878 in Paris, and its counterparts in other European cities. At the time, these objects were treated as artifacts of colonized cultures rather than as artworks and were very cheap, often sold in flea markets and pawnshops.
For the discussion about the restitution of African art following the announcement by French president Emmanuel Macron in 2017, see the report on the restitution of African cultural heritage.
European collections
The different histories of museums in Europe and the United States affected the collecting and display of African art in both places. European museums typically were founded as state institutions and thus their collections and displays were shaped by national interests. African art and artifacts were mostly displayed in an ethnological context. The appreciation of African objects purely as fine art in Europe was largely limited to private galleries in the early twentieth century. In Paris, dealers such Paul Guillaume, Charles Ratton and Louis Carré played a role in the formation of major private collections of African art. The latter half of the twentieth century saw the opening of the first European art museums devoted to collecting and displaying African art, including the Musee Barbier-Mueller in Geneva (1977), the Musee Dapper in Paris (1986). Also, many general art museums by then had collections of non-Western art, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium In 1897, King Leopold II took advantage of the Brussels International Exhibition in Tervuren to promote his holdings of the Congo Free State. The 1897 International Exhibition piqued scientific interest in the natural resources, people and animals of Central Africa, thus King Leopold II decided to build on his promotion of Congo. The Royal Museum of Central Africa was established in 1898 as a permanent museum and scientific institution, responsible for mounting exhibitions for the Belgian public and encouraging the study of Central Africa.
British Museum
The Sainsbury African Galleries in the British Museum in London display 600 objects from the largest permanent collection of African arts and culture in the world. The three permanent galleries provide a substantial exhibition space for the museum's African collection, comprising over 200,000 objects. This curatorial scope encompasses both archaeological and contemporary objects, including both unique masterpieces of artistry and objects of everyday life. A great addition was material amassed by Sir Henry Wellcome, which was donated by the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in 1954.
Highlights of the African collection include the Benin and Igbo-Ukwu bronze sculptures, the beautiful Bronze Head of Queen Idia, a magnificent brass head of a Yoruba ruler from Ife, the Apapa Hoard from Lagos, southern Nigeria, a dozen exquisite Afro-Portuguese ivories, Asante goldwork from Ghana, including the Bowdich collection, the rare Akan Drum from the same region in West Africa, a series of soapstone figures from the Kissi people in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Torday collection of Central African sculpture, textiles and weaponry, important material from Ethiopia following the British Expedition to Abyssinia, the unique Luzira Head from Uganda, excavated objects from Great Zimbabwe and satellite towns such as Mutare including a large hoard of Iron Age soapstone figures, a rare divining bowl from the Venda peoples and cave paintings and petroglyphs from South Africa.
The Benin Bronzes were seized by a British force in the Benin Expedition of 1897 and given to the British Foreign Office. As Paula Girshick Ben-Amos, a professor of anthropology and African Studies at Indiana University, states in "The Art of Benin", “art of the Benin Kingdom came to public and scholarly attention in the West in 1897, when members of a British Punitive Expedition brought out thousands of objects as war booty.”
Around 200 of the bronzes were passed on to the British Museum, while the remainder were divided among a variety of collections, with the majority being purchased by Felix von Luschan on behalf of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin (the present-day Ethnological Museum). In 1936, Oba Akenzua II began the movement to return the corpus of objects now known in modern discourse as the 'Benin Bronzes'.
Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro The Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro was the first anthropological museum in Paris, founded in 1878. It closed in 1935 when the building that housed it, the Trocadéro Palace, was demolished; its descendant is the Musée de l'Homme, housed in the Palais de Chaillot on the same site, and its French collections formed the nucleus of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, also in the Palais de Chaillot. Numerous Fauvist and Cubist artists discovered African art at the Trocadéro Museum.Jean Paul Crespelle, The Fauves, tr. Anita Brookner, Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1962, p. 114. Picasso said that this art taught him "what painting was all about", seeing it in the museum's African masks, which had been created "as a kind of mediation between [humanity] and the unknown hostile forces that [surround us]",Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso, 1964, repr. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1989, , p. 266. and to have been influenced by the masks in the forms of the figures in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which eventually led to Cubism.According to Christopher Green, Picasso: Architecture and Vertigo, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University, 2005, , p. 51 this is "generally accepted" although denied by Picasso himself.Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc, New York: Basic, 2001, , p. 92: [A]lthough the sharp change in the right-hand demoiselles occurred after Picasso's visit to Trocadéro, . . . . [i]t turns out that African art supported his conceptual approach and convinced him of the deep meaning of geometry as the language of the new art." Most of the African collection has since been transferred to the Musee du Quai Branly, also in Paris.
The Glendonwyn Collection
The Glendonwyn Collection comprises over 3,000 objects. Initiated in the XX century by Manuel González Scott-Glendonwyn, its scope encompasses from archaeological to XIX century objects. Most of the pieces were added to the collection in the 1960’s. A trilogy of three books titled “Art of Black Africa: The Glendonwyn Collection” was published in the 1990’s. Features of the Glendonwyn Collection include multiple Benin and Igbo-Ukwu bronze sculptures, The Benin Massacre bronze sculpture (a magnificent representation of the massacre of the Phillips expedition), Oba the Warrior (a representation of an Oba, which appears in the front page of the first book of the collection), multiple 6th century BC Nok terracottas, Benin Bronzes, several dozen perfectly maintained Afro-Portuguese ivories, and a good representation of 11 of the 17 African historical cultural civilizations including Yoruba/Ife, Ashanti, Senufo, and Dogon. The collection also includes some contemporary art from artists such as Twins Seven Seven or late 80’s additions.
In the year 1999 the Spanish Government initiated negotiations to convince The Glendonwyn Collection owners to establish a museum in Madrid. Negotiations failed in 2002 with the death of the head of the family, although in the 1999-2002 period, several expositions were presented in Spain’s public museums. The Glendonwyn Collection is currently divided between Madrid, Tenerife and Dubai.
Museum of African Art (Belgrade)
The Museum of African Art in Belgrade is the only one of this kind in the Balkan region. It was opened in 1977 because of Yugoslavia's relations with many African countries thanks to its central role in the Non-Aligned Movement. The museum was opened out of the desire to acquaint the people of Yugoslavia with the art and culture of Africa since there was a deeply rooted notion about Yugoslavia sharing a friendship with African countries thanks to their similar struggles. It was created thanks to Zdravko Pečar and Veda Zagorac who donated to the city of Belgrade their private collection of African art which they collected over several decades which they spent on the continent - Pečar was a foreign correspondent and an ambassador to several African countries. Over the years, the collection was expanded thanks to the museum buying pieces, receiving them as gifts from Yugoslavs who lived in Africa and as diplomatic gifts which were given the museum by the ambassadors of African countries. As a result, the museum today has a significant collection of art and ethnographic items from the Bambara, Dogon, Mossi, Kisi, Dan, Senufo, Ashanti and other people.
National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands Jointly administered by the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, public ethnographic museums in the Netherlands hold important collections of African heritage. In January 2021, the Dutch government approved a central mechanism for the repatriation of colonial heritage, and a research group is working on practical guidance for colonial collections in Dutch museums.
African art in ethnological collections
Initially, all African art objects were viewed as ethnological specimens. Notably, during the period of 1890 through 1913, all large museums redefined their public image in terms of an educational prerogative. In response to the debate around the use of the terms curio and curiosity, the League of the Empire in 1904 recommended the "orderly arrangement and the transformation of mere curios into objects of scientific interest by appropriate classification." Likewise, as a means of validating the expansion of ethnological collections, the rhetoric often employed was one of the necessity of conservation and preservation in the face of the inevitable extinction of the producers of the materials culture in their custody (121).