Art from Africa in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

I found myself the proud possessor of twelve fantastic artifacts, consisting of masks and sculptures from New Guinea, the Belgian Congo, the French Sudan, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, and New Ireland.

Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century (London: Andre Deutsch, 1979)

As Peggy Guggenheim recalls in her autobiography, in 1959 she purchased what she described as “twelve fantastic artifacts” from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas from the New York dealer Julius Carlebach, a collection she expanded throughout the 1960s. The sculptures from Africa that she acquired, some of which are displayed in this room, reflect prevailing aesthetic preferences consolidated during the first half of the twentieth century by European and North American artists, collectors, museums, and even cultural journals like Cahiers d’Art, which illustrated similar works. Guggenheim integrated these works into her broader collection of European and North American art and displayed them together in her palazzo. In doing so, she followed earlier conventions established by collectors and artists who valued sculpture from Africa for its formal abstraction and perceived affinities with transatlantic modernist art. Like most Western collectors of her era, Guggenheim was oblivious to historical contexts: the sculpture she placed in dialogue with transatlantic modernist art remained far removed both geographically and conceptually from its origins.

This decontextualized approach obscured, if not ignored, the original purposes and meanings of the sculptures. A lack of recorded information about dates and makers—often a casualty of Western collecting practices—further detached the works from their historical specificity. Nearly all were produced in the first half of the twentieth century, making them broadly contemporary with the European and North American modern art displayed in the museum. This period also coincided with the often-violent ruptures of the colonial era, which impacted their creation, use, and ultimately their path to market. Forced religious conversions and iconoclastic movements contributed to the abandonment or destruction of ritual practices, while economic pressures, theft, and commodity production redirected objects from Africa toward foreign markets.

When Guggenheim began collecting these works in 1959, the continent was rapidly moving toward independence, and the emergence of new commercial networks further increased the circulation of art from Africa. The monumental D’mba headdress by an unrecorded Baga artist in Guinea offers one such example. Embodying an abstract idea of womanhood, it was worn by a male dancer performing in a costume of raffia and cloth. By the late 1950s, religious conversion and state campaigns against traditional belief systems led to the temporary abandonment of Baga ritual practices, and D’mba headdresses entered foreign museums and private collections.

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