It suffered looting that left it without some of its most precious items. But Ivory Coast’s Museum of Civilisations is now back, and determined to recover its place as one of the richest museums of African art in the world
A place of incomparable wealth
Senegal’s late poet-president Leopold Sedar Senghor called it a place of “incomparable wealth” during a visit in 1971. But it was pillaged four decades later during post-electoral anarchy in the Ivorian economic capital Abidjan, according to AFP
“The items that were looted (120 items) were major works: sacred pieces, objects made of wax ... Our estimate is that almost four billion CFA francs (six million euros)” were lost, AFP quotes the museum director Silvie Memel Kassi as saying
Palaeolithic to the present
Founded in 1942 when France was the colonial power in most of West Africa, the museum is itself a work of art with 20 columns finely sculpted in wood. The first exhibition in the refurbished museum is titled ‘Renaissance’. It places the spotlight on a selection of a hundred of the museum’s finest pieces, from the palaeolithic era to contemporary art
It’s an asset—a collection of 15,000 pieces from across every region … We deliberately speak of the museum of civilisations … The museum is also the memory of a people
Museum director Silvie Memel Kassi to AFP
Picasso and Ivorian sculpture
The museum is planning an exhibition to highlight ties between Picasso and Ivorian sculpture on the heels of a “Primitive Picasso” show at the Quai Branly, the Paris museum dedicated to the indigenous art and cultures of Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas