Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2006

By Elena Martínez, graduate of the Ecole du Louvre and specialist in African art.

Introduction:
The Catalan town of Lleida, Spain, is opening itself to the world of tribal art for the first time by hosting Cultures of the World: The Collection of the National Museum of Denmark from September 16, 2006–January 7, 2007. This itinerant exhibition, sponsored by the Fundacio la Caixa, examines the origins of ethnographic collections in Western institutions by looking at the history of the tribal art collections in the National Museum of Copenhagen. One hundred twenty-two pieces from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas were selected by curators Albert Costa and Espen Waehle. Together they illustrate the fascination that Europeans have had for little-known "others" inhabiting faraway lands ever since their existence became known through the voyages of the great navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as Christopher Columbus, Bartolomeo Dias, and Vasco De Gama. Some of the objects were collected in the course of those voyages. Witnesses to the existence of strange cultures, they became part of the curio cabinets of the nobility, where they were categorized by material or provenance in an early attempt to comprehend a new and exotic world. In the eighteenth century, the collection of such material became more systematic. This was the era of pivotal European sea expeditions to the South Pacific and North America, the crews of which included scientists who obsessively catalogued everything they encountered––natural history specimens and man-made objects alike––for further study. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonial presence that the major Western powers established in Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas further stimulated European interest in the indigenous populations of other parts of the world. During this time, ethnology became an autonomous scientific discipline with attendant specialized museums in which objects were inventoried, studied, and presented to an increasingly interested public. Newly established enthusiasm for the material led to the formation of private collections, which in turn benefited these new institutions with gifts and bequests. Cultures of the World traces these developments with considerable clarity. The first galleries transport the visitor to the Royal Kunstkammer of King Frederic III (1609–1670), in which the embryo of the Danish National Museum's collection is clearly visible.