AA pivotal report calls for thousands of artworks to leave French museums and return to West Africa. An artist, a historian and a philosopher debate what should happen — and what these objects could mean to young Africans who have never seen them.
When Emmanuel Macron, the French president, told students in Burkina Faso in 2017 that he wanted to see a “temporary or permanent restitution” of African art in French collections, no one in the museum world could be sure whether it would happen.
Then came publication on Nov. 21 of a blockbuster report, written for Mr. Macron by Bénédicte Savoy of France and Felwine Sarr of Senegal, which calls for the return of possibly thousands of works of art. Suddenly, the door was opening to what could be the largest shake-up ever of European museums with objects acquired during the colonial era.
Mr. Macron’s office then announced the return “without delay” to Benin of 26 sculptures in the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly, which holds more than two-thirds of France’s 90,000 African treasures. But doing so, the report allows, may require new legislation to enable national museums to deaccession state-owned art. The report has now made waves across Europe, and directors of museums with large colonial holdings, including the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Berlin’s soon-to-open Humboldt Forum, have expressed serious reservations about Ms. Savoy and Mr. Sarr’s call for restitution.
But how do Africans see the challenges, both practical and philosophical, of restituting works of art? What does the Savoy-Sarr report augur for African museums, African governments and African artists? And what new meanings might these works of art accrue if they are returned to where they were made centuries ago?
I posed those questions recently to three people with deep experience in African art. Souleymane Bachir Diagneis a Senegalese philosopher and professor of French at Columbia University who advised Ms. Savoy and Mr. Sarr on parts of the report; Cécile Fromont, associate professor at Yale University, is a French art historian who specializes in exchanges between African and European populations; and Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-American artist, whose painstaking fictional portraits were seen last year in a Whitney Museum solo show and are on view through Feb. 3 in “For Opacity,” at the Drawing Center in Manhattan. These are edited excerpts from the conversation, over dinner at a Harlem restaurant. (The menu, suitably, was French/West African.)
The Ife Head, which entered the collection of the British Museum in London in 1939. It was created around 1400 by a Yoruba artist in present-day Nigeria.CreditTrustees of the British Museum.
PIX SAVED AS ARTWORK IN 2019
CAPTION: From left: Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Cécile Fromont discuss the potential return of art to Africa at Ponty Bistro in Harlem.
Credit: Nina Westervelt for The New York Times