German Lost Art Foundation supports project on works from Benin at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main
Of approximately 14,000 objects from Africa, 57 were inventoried at the Frankfurt museum with the geographical reference “Benin Kingdom, Nigeria”. Although parts of this collection of Benin objects have been presented in exhibitions and publications, the context of their acquisition has hardly been investigated to date. Research has consistently been hampered by the upheavals of the museum’s history: the collections of the Weltkulturen Museum originated as holdings of the natural history society Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft. Some items were given to the Historisches Museum (Museum of History) in 1877. Since the latter’s opening as the Städtisches Völkermuseum (Municipal Ethnological Museum) in 1904, it underwent numerous relocations as well as suffering bomb attacks during the Second World War.
From 1924 to 1969, the museum was associated with the Frobenius-Institut (then known as the Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie – Research Institute for Cultural Morphology). Since 1973, the museum has had its permanent home in the Villa am Schaumainkai 29. All in all, source material on the objects is sparse due to the loss of the in-house document archive during the bombing of Frankfurt in the Second World War. The museum’s remaining archival records contain few details of how the Benin objects came to be in the collection.
The results of the project are to serve as a starting point for dialogue with Nigerian partners and political negotiations.