100 × Congo: A Century of Congolese Art in Antwerp

The exhibition at the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), a new building in the harbor of the city of Antwerp (opened in 2011), centers around a hundred Congolese art objects from the rich Congo collections of the museum, added by several valuable loans from, amongst others, the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren. The foundations of the Antwerp collection were laid in 1920 when the city bought approximately 1600 Congolese objects from Antwerp-based African art dealer Henri Pareyn and, later in that same year, received a donation of about a hundred pieces by then Minister of Colonies, Louis Franck, who had, just prior, returned from an inspection tour through the then Belgian Congo and the mandate territories of Ruanda-Urundi. It was only then that Antwerp finally became a serious contender and a competitor in the collection and exhibition of African—and particularly Congolese—arts with the then Musée du Congo Belge (now the Royal Museum...