African art in Western collections

Between 1890 and 1918, Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed. These objects entered the collections of natural history museums, art museums (both encyclopedic and specialist) and private collections in Europe and the United States.

Before the Berlin Conference of 1885, traders and explorers to Africa bought or stole art as souvenirs and , speading beyond the coast; ivory objects made along African coasts had been collected for centuries, and many were made by Africans for European markets in a style matching European taste, mainly in areas reached by the Portuguese, the Afro-Portuguese ivories. The period dominated by curio collecting, in which objects served as souvenirs, was followed by a period of trophy collecting in which large collections of artifacts (mostly weapons), and animal skins, horns, and tusks from hunting expeditions, were a tangible means of showing penetration, conquest and domination.

Starting in the 1870s, thousands of African sculptures arrived in Europe in the aftermath of colonial conquest and exploratory expeditions. They were placed on view in museums such as the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878 in Paris, and its counterparts in other European cities. At the time, these objects were treated as artifacts of colonized cultures rather than as artworks and were very cheap, often sold in flea markets and pawnshops.

The different histories of museums in Europe and the United States affected the collecting and display of African art in both places. European museums typically were founded as state institutions and thus their collections and displays were shaped by national interests. The appreciation of African objects purely as fine art in Europe was largely limited to private galleries in the early twentieth century. In Paris, dealers such Paul Guillaume, Charles Ratton and Louis Carre played a role in the formation of major private collections of African art. The latter half of the twentieth century saw the opening of the first European art museums devoted to collecting and displaying African art, including the Musee Barbier-Mueller in Geneva (1977), the Musee Dapper in Paris (1986), but many if not most general national art museums by then had collections.

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