Photography and the rise of African art

“Object, Image, Collector,’’ organized by the MFA’s curator of African and Oceanic art, Christraud M. Geary, and photography curator Karen E. Haas, examines how photography helped shape what we see as the canon of African art, even as it developed into an art form itself, and traces the evolution of that canon through the 20th century. It’s a fascinating foray into the machinations of Western taste-making, featuring 50 works drawn from 20 Boston-area collections. Boston turns out to be a treasure-trove of African and Oceanic art.

African artifacts appeared in Europe in the first decades of the 20th century as France and other countries exerted power over colonies in Africa and the Pacific. The impact on artists and collectors was explosive, setting off a mania for things African that lasted into the 1920s, especially in Paris.

In 1914, African art showed up in a legendary exhibition at photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York. The exhibit drew on the collection of Frenchman Paul Guillaume, an early owner of the Fang reliquary guardian on view here. Stieglitz documented the show in his magazine Camera Work. That magazine is here, in the same display case as the reliquary guardian (the label notes that the magazine was a gift to the MFA by Georgia O’Keeffe, who married Stieglitz).

Painter and photographer Charles Sheeler shot a Fang figure (1916-1918) that closely resembles the one here: dark, with strong, expressive lines and a smooth, almost oily surface. The legendary Modernist’s African photos celebrate the lines and planes of his subject matter, but many of Sheeler’s photos are moody, shot in warm tones with shadows that caress and complement their subjects, revealing a trace of 19th-century Romanticism.