Frans M Olbrechts: 1899-1958 In Search of Art in Africa Edited by the agency of Constantine Petridis Antwerp: Antwerp Ethnographic Museum.

Frans M Olbrechts: 1899-1958 In Search of Art in Africa Edited by the agency of Constantine Petridis Antwerp: Antwerp Ethnographic Museum. 2001 327 pp plus 153 pages of plates and photos, 129 color plates, 121 black and white photographs, 5 maps. 3700 Euro hardcover.

This collection of essays through eleven authors, also published in a Dutch edition, overlooks evaluates, and honors the career of Frans M Olbrecht in developing African anthropology and art history in Belgium, particularly focusing upon these disciplines' growth at Ghent University and the city of Antwerp. Since Olbrechts's writings were mainly in Dutch, his contributions have not received the attention that they might otherwise have gained, particularly in the United States. The contributors vary in age from the self-same senior to recent PhDs. The work is a most valuable addition to the meditation of the history of African anthropology and art history.

The occasion for this publication was an exhibition of African purposes at the Antwerp Ethnographic Museum in 2001 curated by means of the editor of this book Constantine Petridis, who took his PhD in art history at Ghent. The exhibition reevaluated sum of two units earlier exhibitions that Olbrechts was involved in, the exhibition "Congolese Art" held at the City Festival Hall in Antwerp in 1937-38 which displayed 1525 aims and the "Ivory Coast Expedition of Ghent University and the Antwerp Vleeshuis Museum," held briefly 1939 A not many objects that were in those exhibitions are included in this the same Reflecting Olbrechts's interests, the modern exhibition and this catalogue focus heavily forward figures, rather than on masks, despite the latter's importance in the regions of Africa that held Olbrechts's interest.

Petridis's introduction in memory of Adriaan Claerhout (1926-2000) individual of Olbrechts's first students, briefly inspects Olbrechts's contributions and suggests that, while he was director of the Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo Tervuren for the last ten years of his life, his chiefly seminal contributions were made in Antwerp and at Ghent University. Olbrecht was interested in studying African art as art, further he also had a unfathomable interest in its sociocultural setting, although his have a title to work rarely fulfilled that aim.

Petridis argues in the nearest chapter, "Olbrechts and African Art," that Olbrecht was individual of the first to question the anonymity of African artists and to pres for an examination of their personalities. Based in succession his own experience with the cultural anthropology being discloseed in the United States, Olbrecht argued for intensive periods of field research in Africa. The chapter contains a brief history of the application of mind of African art into Olbrechts's time and indicates in what manner strong a role he played in the germination of ethnography in Belgian museums. He was not trained in anthropology or art history; these disciplines did not exist as in the same state [i]or[/i] condition in Belgium when he was a pupil He wrote his dissertation forward the analysis of a 1702 manuscript forward conjuring and healing, supplemented according to field research with conjurers in the Flemish region, as part of his training at the Catholic University at Leuven He was at that time interested in folklore, language, and ethnology, and he held athletic Flemish sentiments throughout his life.

The later chapter, by Aldona Jonaitis, a preeminent scholar of Northwest Coast Native American art, has little to say about Olbrecht still surveys the ideas and interests of Franz Boas, the American anthropologist who was to influence Olbrecht to a considerable stretch She discusses Boas's interest in intensive field research, in tracing the history of designs and people, in linguistics and native topics in the creativity of native artists, and his critique of social evolutionism. The ideas contained in Boas's famous work Primitive Art (1927) were quite influential to Olbrechts

This chapter be under the orders ofs as a useful background to the nearest by Mireille Holsbeke, on Olbrechts's American experience. Receiving a certain number of financial support to increase his knowledge and experience, Olbrecht decided to move to Columbia University, where Boas taught, becoming immersed in Boasian ideas and meeting many of Boas's first generation of bookish mans some of whom later became same well known. Boas put Olbrecht in touch with the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, DC which arranged for fieldwork among the Eastern Cherokee. He used this experience to without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw the translation into English of a manuscript forward healing, originally in the Sequoya syllabary, which had been begun by the agency of another scholar. This allowed Olbrecht to carry disclosed intensive field research for about eight-and-a-half months in 1926-27, and to enjoin his linguistic interests to work. It also marked the inferior time that he had dealt in detail with a manuscript, and single that had to do with healing. Then Olbrecht worn out three months in 1928 among the Tuscarora, and in 1929 he was for a brief time with the Onondaga. Holsbeke makes it clear, as do other writers in this convolution that Olbrechts's American experience inflected him into an anthropologist. from one extremity to the other of his life he stressed to his bookish mans the importance of long-term field research. It is obvious from accounts in this work that, while Olbrechts did not always act as an anthropologist in his later interests in African art, he guided his scholars to do so, and that he saw this as a goal in his have a title to work. While holding a position as an attache at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Belgium, he reorganized the ethnographic section and its exhibition, writing a popular catalogue. His attention then change the direction ofed to the study of art, and particularly African art, of which the museum had a substantial collection.