Collecting African Art: Authenticity as Cultural Interpretation and Objective Reality. Problems and Meanings of Modern Forgery

The complexity of meanings conveyed by the African objects produced between the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century is related to the social, cultural, and religious worlds to which each of them belonged. That is to say that a Yoruba statue is different from a Chiwara crest or a Luba headrest, not only as far as the shape is concerned, but – most of all – regarding its cultural meanings. Arriving in the European and American collections, all of these objects became something different: legitimized and valued as artistic (and/or exotic) masterpieces, or otherwise considered as curious things, as evidence of “human primitivism”. Their authenticity was questioned, considering two types of “criteria”: both anthropological and aesthetic evidence was involved in their evaluation, two references that were the two faces of the same concept of authenticity or forgery. What are the terms of the problem today?