African Slave Beads & The Folly Of Art Nouveau

Last Saturday and Sunday was a Museum Weekend in Amsterdam. You can visit most museums free, some for a reduced fee and many historical monuments that normally are off-limits for visitors - office buildings or private houses - are open to all and sundry.

This year I went to the Allard Parson Museum (Egyptican, Greek, Roman, Etruscan etc. antiquities) and the Hermitage Amsterdam (our local branch of St. Petersburg's grand). Both are typically Amsterdam "klein maar fijn" - small but nice, although the Hermitage is slated to expand greatly in the near future.

The Allard Parson houses amongst other things an extensive collection of beads. Yawn? I thought so too. It turns out however that it was a vast and highly profitable industry until as late as shortly after WWII. You know why?

Also known as African money, trade or slave beads were produced so cheaply and in such huge quantities that they were used as ballast in slave/trade ships for the outbound trip. However, you could buy a human slave for a 3-inch string of white beads that, say, in Venice, a major bead-manufacturing centre, would cost 2 pennies to produce. Get where the catch is? Africans were duped to trade their land, men, gold, ivory and other valuable assets for next no nothing - and that lasted centuries and centuries.

They did eventually wise up, but so did the White folks - now they deal in finance, mostly currency futures accounting for 90% of the world international trade. Africa's share is the meagre 2% that however makes up the bulk of real commodity traded worldwide, including 70% of the world's strategic minerals. Any comment would be superfluous.

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The only exhibition now held by the Hermitage Amsterdam is of Art Nouveau (known in Russia as stil' modern) artefacts. In the late 19th century, the French freshly defeated by the Prussians were seeking allies for revenge and they saw a good candidate in the "gendarme of Europe". The strategic courtship included lavish gifts in the then cutting-edge and highly fashionable Art Nouveau made by the French Republic to the Russian Imperial Family.

While I always liked this style in architecture since my childhood fascination with Riga, it was the first time that I was confronted with such an extensive array of Art Nouveau objects and for the first time my eyes opened to the roots of modern kitsch.

Dutch art historian Henk Zantkuijl once very aptly remarked that the generally accepted idea of good taste in art was lost in the West some time in the 1870s. The overflow of information brought about by massive archaeological and ethnographic discoveries of the era including the influx of Chinoiserie and Japonaiserie, developments in technology and the sky-rocketed demand for mass production industrial design - all that in the aftermath of the Crisis of Representation - led to a broad confusion as to what is tasteful and what is not.

Art Nouveau is the style born in such a situation, a bridge between Neo-Classicism that fed on the (sometimes misinterpreted) Greek and Roman aesthetic ideas and Modernism, that just broke with any previous tradition (also with mixed results). In a sense, Art Nouveau was the odd fruit of a growing process, a growing pain even, an essential period for reflection, absorption and adaptation. It was a great time and art movement, however, even if not without some bizarre by-products. Quite a slew of those are now on show in the Hermitage Amsterdam.