Sacred Africa. Ancient Art from Sub-Saharan Africa. Works from the Collections of the Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Redpath Museum, McGill University

While the Musée des Arts premiers (Musée du Quai Branly) prepares for its grand opening – a major event in Paris – the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts spotlights African art with the presentation, starting June 6, 2006, of Sacred Africa: Ancient Art from Sub-Saharan Africa – Works from the Collections of Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Redpath Museum, McGill University. The selection features fifty stunning pieces of high-quality, traditional African art – objects, sculpture and masks – from the sub-Saharan region.

With thirty-six objects, the Cirque du Soleil is the main partner of these new galleries of African art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Almost ten years ago, Cirque du Soleil founder and Chief Executive Officer Guy Laliberté began assembling a museum-quality corpus, which provides a classic, representative overview of works from sub-Saharan Africa. All these acquisitions were made according to rigorous selection criteria that include age, authenticity, quality and aesthetic appeal. They come from former –sometimes historic – collections that were assembled by famous European and American art lovers, including Paul Guillaume, Charles Ratton and Helena Rubinstein, among others. On display is an extremely rare object, a Gouro female figure, purchased in 1949 in Paris by American painter John Graham and his friend, New York collector Max Granick. These mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century pieces of sculpture are being shown in Montreal for the first time.

It was F. Cleveland Morgan, an enlightened art lover and the Museum’s Curator of Decorative Arts from 1917 to 1962, who purchased the first object of African art for the Museum’s collection in 1940. A dozen works from the Museum’s collection are included in this presentation, including a major N’duleri figure of the Dogon (Mali) created between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. It represents a figure whose jewellery suggests an elevated rank.

The majority of the works in the collection of McGill University’s Redpath Museum come from Central Africa (Angola and Congo) and were collected at the end of the nineteenth century. Five major works from this collection will be on view in Sacred Africa for a two-year period, including a nineteenth-century Nkondi power figure, or nail figure, from the Congo, into which various metal objects have been driven.

“Through the generosity of Cirque du Soleil and Guy Laliberté, the Museum is privileged to present such important works over an extended period. A complementary selection of objects from this collection illustrating the plastic approaches of other peoples of the African continent will be presented in two years, as part of this exciting new partnership between the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Cirque du Soleil. In addition to this corporate collection, this presentation includes works from a university collection, that of McGill’s Redpath Museum. As a result, visitors will be able to familiarize themselves with art that inspired the Western world’s great painters and sculptors of the twentieth century,” declared Guy Cogeval, Former Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. A bronze sculpture by Julio Gonzáles, Cactus Man No. 1 (1930-1940), has been installed at the end of the presentation. It is reminiscent of the Nkondi nail figures from the Congo, a very beautiful example of which has been lent by the Redpath Museum.

 

 

African Art Gallery
Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Photo: Christine Guest