African Art Club

T H E   Y A L E   U N I V E R S I T Y   A R T   G A L L E R Y – V A N   R I J N   P H O T O G R A P H I C   A R C H I V E

One very usefull tool I use to authenticate African Art is the Yale-Van Rijn Photographic Archive.

This is the largest photographic digital database of African art, and is a division of the Department of African Art, established in 2004, at the Yale University Art Gallery. The Archive has been under development by Guy van Rijn, for several decades. In 2001, the project was acquired and funded for Yale by James J. Ross (Yale B.A. 1960). The ultimate goal is to make the Archive accessible online, but at present it is available for general research by appointment only at the Department of African Art at Yale, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, or at the Van Rijn Documentation Centre, Brussels, Belgium. More »

For years I have been using the “Who’s Who in African Art”, searching names and data of collectors and dealers.

Today, the “Who is Who in African Art” is available for free online on a website called Danster Research. This project is coordinated by Bruno Claessens.

The nice thing is that since it is online, the search results are instant.
You even get entries results that are phonetically close to your search, and images from the people when available.

To make Danster Project better they have a special, but interesting request:
We would like to receive photos from people who are listed in the “Who is Who in African Art”,
although there are circa 16.000 names listed, we only have ca 1.200 photos of people or galleries.

If you are interested in “the past”: provenances, data, photos etc. please contribute to these files.

1) Check the names in the Who’s Who at:
http://www.danster-research.com

2) So if you have pictures or information’s from people that are in the Who’s Who please send them to:

mailto:bruno.claessens@gmail.com?subject=(Who-is-Who)&cc=david@african-antiques.com

GIVEAWAY: Find something useful for us and you get access to a very special website(s). The first 100 people who will find 5 or more missing images, will get 6 months free in the African Art Club.

We also have a few freebies we’ll send those of you who give there address and give us interesting informations and images.

David Norden, http://www.africanartclub.com
Bruno Claessens,project coordinator at http://www.danster-research.com

in the members area some examples with the images and extra informations we found about Jan Krugier the wellknow Swiss painting dealer who died recently and had also African Art, Jacob K. Olupona, and Ivan De Pierpont and how you can  also find them and the tools I use to digg for answers, and even how to find all images related on African Art that where published in Life Magazine  :

 September 1978 Irwin Hershey started  for five years the Primitive Art Newsletter that was a paid membership newsletter sended by post. In his  volume 1, no. 2 edition of october 1978, he gave us some interesting tips and asked some good questions about provenance. His observations are still valuable today.

What Price Provenance ?

first published in the Primitive Art Newsletter  by Irwin Hershey, Editor and publisher Volume 1, No.2 October 1978

    With primitive art prices seemingly reaching highs every time you look around, provenances are growing more and more important to collectors who want to make sure the objects they’re buying are authentic and good quality .

    But does this a provenance actually insure this ?

    Experts are unanimous in their judgment that provenance do not authenticate objects, nor are they a guarantee of quality. As one expert put it”, “ALL a provenance means is that a piece was in a certain collection, or was exhibited someplace. Who owned a piece, and who bought it from him later, or the fact that it was exhibited, may not mean a thing, unless the collector involved had a first rate collection, and the piece itself is a first-rate piece. And this is seldom the case.”

Arts d’Afrique Noire recently provided a perfect example of how dangerous it is to trust the fact that an object has been exhibited – or published – in the past. More »