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Athough I was never officially his student, Roy Sieber inspired my research on the history of African art collecting in the United States and was an important mentor to me. More than a decade ago, as a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, I read the quote (in Ross 1992) that serves here as an epigraph and was instantly captivated by the subject's potential. With the encouragement of my advisor, Ekpo Eyo, I approached Sieber about writing a dissertation on the history of taste. His response was immediate and enthusiastic. During my 1993-94 fellowship at the National Museum of African Art, he served as my advisor, generously sharing the copious notes and bibliographic material he had accumulated over many years. We soon concluded that a history of taste was perhaps too broad a subject; I subsequently narrowed my topic to a consideration of select collectors and critics of African art in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Sieber, who participated in my doctoral exams, proposed that I write my qualifying paper on John Graham and the Crowninshield collection, which was published in 1996 in Winterthur Portfolio. This essay is drawn from my dissertation, "Defining Taste: Albert Barnes and the Promotion of African Art in the United States During the 1920s," which I am revising for publication.
Primitive Negro Sculpture and the Aesthetic Philosophy of Albert Barnes
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed, in the Western world, a growing appreciation for and attendant aestheticization of objects from sub-Saharan Africa, formerly perceived as either ethnographic curiosities or examples of material culture. Galleries and museums began to display these objects as "art," while institutions and private individuals formed major collections of African sculpture. Contemporaneous publications presented the works as artistic creations and, in some cases, sought to understand and interpret their meaning. Art dealers Paul Guillaume and Marius de Zayas, art critic Carl Einstein, philosopher Alain Locke, and anthropologists Emil Torday, Marcel Griaule, and Frans Olbrechts, among others, produced studies on African art that varied in both scope and depth. Published at a critical juncture in the nascent study of African art, their writings provided conceptual and aesthetic frameworks that influenced subsequent scholarship. Today, in this time of reevaluation and reflexivity in...