Maeve: First Day in the Archives!

While walking into the museum this morning, I met Salas (?), the consulting scholar Dr. Zuberi was meeting. He was very friendly and told me that he worked at the Penn in the African collections as a student when there was no curator or keeper! After I led him to Dr. Zuberi, I met Lara at the cafe, because I couldn't swipe myself into the closed museum. We went to the archives and met Alex and Isabella. Alex gave us a quick refresher on how to hold our places/mark things for copying and then we got to work! I started with the Umlauff collection, most of which documents a 1912-1913 purchase of Kongo objects. Without the actual object list, I wasn't sure what to search for in the catalogues, which were entirely in German. The letters were mostly asking for confirmation of payment or shipment, with Umlauff trying to convince the director to buy some of his Oceanic collections as well. It seems the museum managed to get the Kongo collection (they go back and forth on the spelling a few times) for half the price it should've sold for, after a salesperson in Umlauff's showrooms made a mistake, and Umlauff was forever trying to squeeze more money from the Penn. He also briefly discusses a Herero collection the director might be interested in, lamenting and then rejoicing over a pair of difficult-to-obtain "legrings." There is also a collection "from the interrieur from Kamerun, containing very interesting carvings from Bamum...masks, idols, house doors, windows very fine shields and weapons, pipes and many others." Umlauff brags about this Kamerun collection, saying it's better than Berlin's and promising catalogues. He also says of the Herero collection: "the collection as it is now, gives a complete representation of the Herero culture and all that this interesting tribe possessed," a statement that contradicts his concern over lacking an example of some form of legwear. By the 1930s, the museum suggested Umlauff drop his prices, and the exchanges slowed to a stop. I'll compare the object list with the catalogues to find out what we actually purchased from Umlauff. I tried to compare some of the objects to the listings on the digital collections website, but I can't read German, especially not in cursive, so that slowed me down. I recognized a handful of place names, but nothing helpful.
I also started going through box 3 of the administrative records of the African section, beginning with a collection of letters from a Parisian missionary, Ladiskas Szecsi, who worked in the Ivory Coast. He sent along his catalogue, which had detailed paragraphs about each object that are exactly what Tukufu is looking for. Szecsi attempts to describe the "different races" (tribes) of the Ivory Coast and their predominant artistic styles, revealing more about his own assumptions, of course, than about the meanings of the objects in their lives:

• "Although coast regions, as a rule, are particularly liable to forfeit their individuality in consequence of their traffic with the outer world, the Ivory Coast, in spite of its site, was able to maintain its own styles and the purity of its expressive form--which is by not means the case with the Dahomey people in its neighbourhood." 
• "there is no disturbing exaggeration, but an almost classical oneness that appears to be idealized only by the fact that the eye-grooves are quite round" -- the mask this is describing is in a photo with another mask, so they were compared. it's unclear if they're related at all, or why they're so different--did they serve different purposes? were they just different artists? 
• "one could say refined"

The catalogue mostly consists of aesthetic descriptions and vague generalizations about "tradition." He does provide context for some objects: "here we have again the idea of making the radiation of the spirit of the ancestors, only the manner of making it is more primitive." Obviously, this is not very clear or helpful. The objects seem to mostly be of the Dan people, but he's very unclear about where some objects came from--once I have an object list, I'll trace their paths more closely. It's unclear what the Penn ended up buying from Szecsi--the receipt just described the purchase as "African collection," so I'll have to go through it object by object. They seemed particularly interested in a Baoulé drum, which Szecsi described as well-crafted from animal skins. I thought I might recognize a few Kota figures, but I'll definitely be revisiting these files. He included many photographs, mostly of the objects against white backgrounds. 

The next file in the box was that of Charles Thomas, a strange little tale of a single object and how these stories get lost. He wrote to the museum in 1892 to offer them a carved idol he'd received from a missionary. The sculpture was being offered or loaned out (his handwriting was hard to read and I foolishly didn't take a picture!) to a few museums around the country, and the Penn was (maybe?) going to get to keep it. The idol was notable, he wrote, because its hands were in fetters, and it had come from a man who had picked it up somewhere in a slaving port. As I'm recalling this, I'm kicking myself for not taking a picture of this file--I took photos of so many others! The only other pieces in the file were a note about the sculpture written by the director on the back of an event card and a letter from Thomas's wife, saying that since he had died, the museum could keep the sculpture. It's unclear whether we still have it. 

I began searching the J. Noble White collection, but it was quite thick, and I got caught up in long descriptions of struggles to obtain satisfactory photographs of the objects. He constantly insisted on the rarity and scientific value of his collections. I remembered the digital collections, and started to search for the Charles Thomas statue. I found it. 

From this picture alone, you might not be able to tell the statue is wearing chains (if it's the one from the letters, but I'm pretty sure it is). It mentions that the donor guessed at the wood, but nothing else seems to have been notable about this sculpture. The page also mentions that it was featured on "What in the World?", the museum's TV program from the 1950s. However, when I checked the objects featured in the WitW videos online, I couldn't find it. Hopefully I can keep searching Thursday!