Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2011

By Constantine Petridis, Associate Curator for African Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Introduction
This past June the Cleveland Museum of Art announced its acquisition of a selection of Congo sculptures from the collection of René and Odette Delenne in Brussels. Comprising thirty-five works of different regional and cultural attributions, the addition of this collection—resulting from a gift/purchase agreement— substantially increases the CMA’s permanent African art holdings. The Delenne Collection elevates the quality of the museum’s Central African collection to the highest echelon and arguably places it on equal footing with some of the best museum collections of this material in North America.
René and Odette Delenne purchased their first African work of art—a small Teke figure from Henri Kamer in Paris—in 1958 after visiting and falling in love with the Congolese pavilion at the Brussels world’s fair in 1958. They were married on December 2 of the same year, and from then on they embarked on an inspiring exploratory journey that would introduce them to peoples and art objects from every corner of the world.