Abstract
This article is the last of a three-part study that identifies Belgian art nouveau as “imperial modernism” and its interlocking history with the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Part III opens by discovering the sixth and final element of a distinctively Congo lexicon of modern design in the “steamer style” of Henry van de Velde, who began and ended his career in Tervuren. The body of the article provides a critical account of the Royal Museum’s history, the tepid revisionism of its 2005 Memory of the Congo exhibition, and the challenges of the museum’s on-going renovation. This analysis is framed by new research that brings back to the interpretive field a surprisingly unexamined history of the foundational role of violence in Belgian national identity and collective self-definition after 1830, suggesting how the creation of a cultural system as a nation of victims and avengers may have interacted with patterns of violence in the Congo.
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