Objects in the archive of Hans Himmelheber (1908-2003) at the Rietberg Museum
Description
The Rietberg Museum is the only museum of non-European art in Switzerland. The internationally renowned collection houses important works from Asia, Africa, America and Oceania.
For Hans Himmelheber, objects were the focus of his art ethnological approach. He was one of the first to conduct empirical studies in Africa on art-historical issues. On site, he observed and documented the production, use and meaning of masks, figures and everyday objects and interviewed the creators of the works. In addition, Himmelheber analysed the aesthetic principles of artifacts and classified them historically and stylistically into an art history of Africa.
Hans Himmelheber did not attach much importance to old or used pieces, which were considered particularly valuable or authentic in museums and for the art market. Instead, he documented a figure or mask at the moment of its production, interviewed the sculptor at his work and then bought the piece made on his behalf. He was also interested in sometimes never or hardly any use of works of art. As an aesthetically oriented ethnologist, he tried to consider criteria for the indigenous evaluation of an object, but was also repeatedly guided by what he himself felt as “beautiful” and “of good quality”. In the 1960s, more and more studies were developed by American and above all African researchers, in which the local perspectives of the artists and their aesthetic practices were taken into account even more consistently than in the case of skylifters.
His acquisitions mainly stem from his repeated stays in the Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia (Baule, Dan, Guere, Guro, Senufo) and his unique journey through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Chokwe, Cuba, Pende, Songye, Yaka). In the border area between Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, Himmelheber repeatedly returned to the same Dan places and tried to collect the entire cultural inventory of this population over a period of almost thirty years (1949-1976). In addition to masks and figures that were part of the canon of African art in the West, these included household items, mats, cooking spoons or clay barrels. This resulted in a dense, historically deep ethnography that covers various aspects of the art and culture of the Dan region, from the creation of art to the masking, to religion and oral history.
The Rietberg Museum now houses more than 930 objects purchased by Hans Himmelheber between 1933 and 1976 on his travels in the Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and the Congo. Most of them (95 %) are Himmelheber’s private collection, which his family handed over to the Museum Rietberg as a gift after his death between 2013 and 2022.
Resources
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Description |
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8 |
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https://data.stadt-zuerich.ch/dataset/mrz_himmelheber_objekte/download/mrz_himmelheber_objekte.csv |
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0 |
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https://data.stadt-zuerich.ch/dataset/mrz_himmelheber_objekte/download/mrz_himmelheber_objekte.parquet |
Tags
- alaska
- gebrauchsgegenstande
- ethnologie
- afrika
- reisen
- archiv
- kunst
- objekte
- maske
- himmelheber
- sammlung