GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE'S AFRICAN COLLECTION

Author(s): J B Donne
Source: Newsletter (Museum Ethnographers Group), No. 14 (AUGUST 1983), pp. 4-9
Published by: Museum Ethnographers Group
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40838688
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GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE1 5 AFRICAN COLLECTION

•Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet of Alcools and Calligrammes, a prolific writer

in many fields, inventor of the term 'surrealism', and friend of all the great
painters and literary figures of his day, died on 9 November 1918, two days before
the Armistice, at the age of 38. He had been wounded in the head early in 1917,
had undergone an operation for trepanation, and had finally succumbed after a
brief attack of Spanish 'flu, then raging in Paris, He left behind a wife,
Jacqueline, to whom he had been married six months but whom he had known off and
on for some time, and a top-floor flat in the Boulevard St-Germain crammed with
books, paintings by his famous contemporaries, knick-knacks such as Pueblo pottery .
and examples of European folk art, together with a couple of dozen African pieces.
From what one can gather from contemporary photographs of artists' studios of the
day and from contemporary accounts, Apollinaire 's collection was quite typical of
what artists in Paris were themselves collecting in the years 1905-18. What is
unique about it is that this collection has been maintained to this day almost
exactly as it was at the time of Apollinaire' s death. Other collections of the
period were subsequently dispersed, weeded out or enlarged, but Jacqueline
Apollinaire, with a justifiably jealous sense of possessiveness, succeeded in
keeping the entire contents of the flat virtually intact until her death in the
late 1960's.

What is surprising is that, despite the obvious importance of this collection,

in almost pristine condition, to ethnographers and art historians alike, and the fact
that photographs of the flat and of many of the African pieces were published, notably
in Michel Leiris and Jacqueline Delange 's massive African Art (1968, p. 15), Jean
Laude's La Peinture française (1905-14) et 'l'Art nègre1 (1968, Documents, fig. 19),
and the catalogue of the Apollinaire exhibition held at the Bibliothèque Nationale
in 1969 (no. 323), according to Jacqueline's nephew, M. Gilbert Boudar, who had
been broughtup in the flat, nobody had shown any interest in the African collection
until my visit in 1974 (2).
At first the collection might appear to be of little interest to the ethnographer
because Apollinaire never visited Africa - apart from 10 days in Oran on leave in
1915 - and showed no interest whatsoever in Africa or Africans except insofar as
they might stimulate his imagination. As a collector of ethnographica, his field-
work seems to have been restricted to an antique shop in the Rue de Rennes owned
by a M. Heman, otherwise aptly known as M. Sauvage. He did, however, publish two
articles, 'Melanophilie ou melanomanie1 in 1917 (Apollinaire, 1955, pp. 234-7) and
'Sculptures d Afrique et d Oceanie' in 1918 (Apollinaire. 1960, pp. 441-2), on the
subject of 'art negre', in which term he clearly includes both African and Oceanic
art. These do not appear to have been properly appreciated with regard to the time
at which they were written, and though they are padded out with inventive flourishes,
they do display ignorance at least tempered with intelligence. The earlier of the two
was shortly to be turned into the introduction to the dealer Paul Guillaume' s album

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entitled Sculptures Nègres , published to accompany what seems to have been the first
formal exhibition of primitive art to be held in Paris (3). In it Apollinaire states
the reasons for which 'Negro art1 was being collected at the time:
For some years now, artists and art-lovers have been of the opinion that one can
appreciate the idols of Africa and Oceania from a purely artistic point of view,
without regard to the supernatural character attributed to them by the sculptors
who carved them or the faithful who paid service to them. Whether one approves of
it or not, this movement exists, but as yet there are no means of critical appraisal
available to this novelty, which one might call melanophilia or melanomania

In the present state of anthropology and the scientific study of art, it would be
imprudent to try to hold forth with any assurance, either from the archaeological
or the aesthetic point of view, on these negro idols, which excite even more
curiosity in their admirers the less information there is concerning their origin,
and to which it has so far not proved possible to attach any artist's name
(Apollinaire, 1965, p. 234).

Provenance was therefore of no interest and a distinction between African and

Oceanic pieces of no importance. (I in fact never saw any Oceanic pieces, despite
a suggestion by Michel Leiris that Apollinaire kept some in his bedroom, but either
Leiris had never visited the flat or else the pieces had been put away at the time
of my visit (4)). Nor was any concern shown for the actual function of the objects,
partly due to a misplaced idea that the anthropologists of the day had no reliable
information on the subject. Pieces were admired for undefined artistic - and not
necessarily aesthetic - reasons, in rather the same way as the Surrealists in the
1930's admired what they called 'objets trouves'.
Now we come to the collection itself. In 1975 I recorded 21 pieces seen in the
flat plus a male Bembe figure (one of a male and female pair, the female still in
the collection), which Jacqueline had given away to a friend, making 22 pieces in
all. The place of origin of 4 of these I was unable to ascertain with any certainty
(they included a sanza, an engraved calabash and a staff), leaving 18 attributable
pieces in all (Donne, 1978, table 1). Since then I have come to include 4 more
pieces, 3 recognised from photographs and a group on copper (?) from Dahomey mentioned
in the catalogue of the Apollinaire exhibition held in the Bibliothèque Nationale
in 1969, but not illustrated (Bibliothèque Nationale, 1969, no. 323). There are now
therefore 22 out of a known 26 pieces which can be attributed with a certain amount
of «assurance to particular areas of Africa.
I am going to discuss this material from two points of view: firstly, the politics
of ethnography: and secondly, the history of ethnography. In both cases the terminus
ad quern of 1918 is of vital importance. There is no reason whatsoever to think that
the collection was in any way enlarged by purchase or gift after that date, or
reduced by sale, loss or gift except in the one case of the male Bembe figure, which
is included in my analysis. Those pieces which I did not myself see in 1975, but
which appear in photographs or in the Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue, may well
in fact been tidied away in one of the cupboards or drawers. After all, the flat
had been in continuous habitation for half a century after Apollinaire ' s death and,
as the photographs show, a certain amount of rearrangement did occur over the years.

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The geographical origins of the 22 attributable pieces can be broken down as
follows (I deliberately use the colonial names as they were at the outbreak of the
First World War);
Ivory Coast 4
Dahomey 6
German Cameroon 1
Gaboon 2
French Equatorial 5
Africa
Belgian Congo 4
(I have made some slight adjustments in the boundary areas of Gaboon, French
Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo since my list of 1978).
Objects collected in the colonial territories tended to converge almost exclusively
on the colonial ruling power when they found their way to Europe, With the exception
of German Cameroon and the Belgian Congo, all the territories listed above were
French Colonies. There is nothing from the British Colonies, notably Nigeria. The
reason that the Belgian Congo is represented is because the administration employed
personnel of various nationalities and so collections made in the Congo - though
concentrated in Belgium itself - were also dispersed throughout Europe. This
restrictive distribution based on political spheres of influence, which of course
was as apparent in public museums as in private collections, slowly began to be
relaxed with the appearance of dealers specialising in African art and the development
of the international art market after the First World War.

The one piece from German Cameroon is an anomaly. It may be an early Grasslands
piece made for trade (Gebauer, 1979, p. 187). It is, I suppose, possible that it
came out through Duala or even Nigeria (5).
But the geographical origins of these pieces deserve further definition. The
sources of the objects collected before 1918 - and even later to a lessening extent -
were not dictated only by the colonial spheres of influence agreed among themselves
by the European powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. There was also the problem
of actual penetration and colonisation itself, often achieved only through military
campaigns, as in the case of Benin, the Sierra Leone Protectorate, and Ashanti. The
French were having similar trouble in subjugating populations which were organised
in small-scale village communities, such as the Toma, Senufo, Bambara, Dogon, Dan and
Ngere-Wobe. Indeed, it was not until the twenties, and even the late twenties, that
some areas could be considered pacified. Consequently, it was largely from the coastal
areas, many of which had had contact with European traders for hundreds of years,
that pieces reached Europe, rather than the unsettled interior. So, in its small
way, the Apollinaire collection demonstrates how the political situation may restrict
ethnocrsphic collection and, as we shall see in a moment, hew military operations
may open up new areas.

I now wish to move on to the implications of the Apollinaire collection for the
history of ethnography itself. Apollinaire had stated that artists and art-lovers
alike were eager to appreciate Negro art from a purely artistic point of view. But
when we look at the actual pieces in his collection, we may well wonder what he
- 6 -

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meant by this.
From the published photographs it would appear that only a Kongo nail fetish and a
Kuyu head-dress mask bear signs of much authenticity (to put it at its best) or artistic
interest- We may add to these the two Bembe figures, the female which I have seen and
its male companion which has presumably disappeared; and finally tbe best piece of all,
the so-called Oiseau du Benin (Cailler, 1965, no. 138). This is a late 19th century
Fon brasswork from Abomey, possibly representing the Giant Kingfisher (Caryle maxima) ,
probably brought back from Dahomey after the French campaign that led to King Behanzin's
downfall in 1900. A similar piece from King Behanzin's treasury representing a guinea-
fowl is in the Pierre Verite Collection in Paris (Leiris and Delange, 1968, p. 305),
but in silver, not in brass. Apollinaire used the nickname 'L'Oiseau du Benin' for his
portrayal of Picasso in his autobiographical fantasy, Le Poete assassine, eventually
published in 1916 but begun at the turn of the century. It therefore offers no evidence
as to when Apollinaire obtained the piece, but it does suggest that Picasso himself was
familiar with it. By one of those anachronisms of history, the misattribution to Benin
has recently been rectified by the re-naming of Dahomey.
As to the remainder of the collection, generally speaking one must confess that it is
'rather mediocre'. These are the words that Tristan Tzara, who knew what he was
talking about, used to described Picasso's African pieces which had been stored in
cases in about 1913 and which he saw later, still in the cases, at Antibes (Laude,
1968, pp. 88-9n). It is largely what ah Irishman might call 'turn of the century
airport art1. At least it was produced in West Africa by West Africans and not by
Algerians working in a dealer's factory in the South of France. Nor, as Mary Kingsley
somewhere records seeing - and I wish I could retrieve the reference - was it the work
of English sailors on the West Coast run who used to carve African fetishes to sell
to the bric-a-brac shops in Liverpool! Nevertheless, if it were not for the date and
the association, these pieces would raise little interest today on either aesthetic
or ethnographic grounds.
It is not generally realised that the regular production in West Africa of masks and
figures specifically as gifts or for sale to Europeans goes back to the 1880's or even
earlier. Secondly, neither is it generally realised that the word 'art' in the sense
that we commonly use it today hardly dates back before that period. The Oxford
English Dictionary, after the definition, 'The application of skill to the arts of
imitation and design

adds this rider:

This is the most modern sense of art, when used without any qualification. It
does not occur in any English Dictionary before 1880, and seems to have been used
chiefly by painters and writers on painting, until the present century.
Consequently, much of what we would described as 'art' today was not so called by
ethnographers in the nineteenth century on semantic grounds, while much that was
called 'Negro art' at the beginning of this century would not be so considered today
on aesthetic grounds.
I am not trying to belittle the reaction of European artists to African art at the
beginning of the twentieth century (though on art historical grounds I prefer to see

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it in terms of 'confirmation1 and 'inspiration1 where others speak of 'influence'),
nor do I wish to denigrate Apollinaire1 s collection, which should be considered in the
light of the age in which he lived and with regard to what was available to him in
Paris before 1918.

But when I consider the profoundly perceptive and appreciative studies of decorative
art published in that wonderful decade for ethnography - the 1890fs - by Balfour, Boas,
Grosse, Haddon, Stolpe, and the parallel work carried out by their contemporaries or
predecessors, Collyer, Pitt-Rivers, Riegl, Andrée, Semper, going back to Owen Jones
and even further, I feel that these were the real 'discoverers' of 'art nègre' rather
than the Fauves, the Cubists and Die Brücke, and that their achievement as ethnographers
is no longer given its due, and appreciation of their pioneering work has been too
long withheld«
At the same time, Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, deserves our admiration for
assembling a collection of African objects of considerable historical and ethnographic
interest for its day, while Jacqueline Apollinaire deserves our gratitude for having,
in a spirit I am sure all Museum Ethnographers will applaud, so carefully and
tenaciously preserved a heritage which had been entrusted to her to pass on to posterity.

J B Donne

NOTES

(1) I am most grateful to M.Gilbert Boudar, who enabled me to visit the collection
on 19 September 1974, and with whom I was able to discuss it at length.
(2) Further photographs are to be found in Cailler, 1965, nos. 16, 17, 19, 21 and
138, and Adema and Décaudin, 1971, p. 163. However, the reproductions are generally
very poor and considerably reduced in size. Even looking at them under a glass merely
enlarges the screen. Consequently it is quite impossible to identify some of the
objects shown in them.
(3) For the subsequent publication history of these two articles, see Apollinaire,
1960, pp. 483-4.

(4) See Leiris, 1953, p. 337. But Leiris is referring to a line at the close of
the poem Zone, written at the end of 1912, which introduces Apollinaire1 s most famous
volume, Alcools (1913):
Tu marches vers Auteuil tu veux aller chez toi à pied
Dormir parmi tes fétiches d'Oceanie et de Guinée
and there is no reason to take this too literally.
(5) Leon Underwood illustrates two similar figures from the British Museum which
are attributed to the Bamum of former German Cameroon (Underwood, 1964, figs. 32A and
B). In an earlier edition, he reproduces another figure in the same style from the
then Cockin Collection (Underwood, 1951, fig. 8), which is erroneously attributed
to the Ashanti. Maurice Cockin formed his collection in Southern Nigeria in 1911-14
(Donne, 1972, pp. 88-0), so such pieces were clearly available before the First World
War outside German Cameroon.

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REFERENCES

Adéma, Pierre-Marcel, and Michel Decaudin. Album Apollinaire. Bibliothèque de la

Pleiade, Paris, 1971 .

Apollinaire, Guillaume. Anecdotiques. Paris, 1955.

Apollinaire, Guillaume. Chroniques d'Art (1902-1918). Paris, 1960.

Bibliothèque Nationale. Apollinaire. Exhibition catalogue. Paris, 1969.

Cailler, Pierre. Guillaume Apollinaire. Documents iconographiques. Paris, 1965.

Donne, J.B. 'The Celia Barclay Collection of African Art', The Connoisseur,
June, 1972, pp. 88-95.

Donne, J.B. 'African art and Paris studios 1905-20' in Art in Society,
ed. Michael Greenhalgh and Vincent Megaw. London, 1978.

Gebauer, Paul. Art of Cameroon. Portland and New York, 1979.

Laude, Jean. La Peinture française (1905-1914) et "l'Art nègre".

2 vols. Paris, 1968.

Leiris, Michel. 'Les nègres d'Afrique et les arts sculpturaux', iñ

L'Originalité des Cultures, UNESCO, Paris, 1953.

Leiris, Michel, and Jacqueline Delange. African Art. London, 1968.

Underwood, Leon. Figures in Wood of West Africa. London, 1951.

Underwood, Leon. Figures in Wood of West Africa. London, 1964.

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