The Market as “Artist”: The French Origins of the Obsession with Provenance in Historical African Art

Abstract

ABSTRACTProvenance has become crucially important in the Western market for historical African sculpture, and as a consequence individual African artists have been erased in favor of an emphasis on the dealer's or collector's discriminating “eye.” This article proposes an explanation for why this erasure has occurred by looking at the development of the market for historical African art in early twentieth century Paris. Though commonly portrayed as an invention of artists of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, the aesthetic category of “primitive art” was in fact just as much a creation of the newly emergent commercial structure that ensured the livelihood of those artists: the dealers, critics, curators and collectors who created an “art world” independent of the old state-sponsored academic framework. This article analyzes the influential role this distinctive market formation has played in shaping Western perceptions of historical African sculpture by investigating the interwoven careers of four key figures: the collector André Level, the curator Henri Clouzot, and the dealers Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton.