Fantastic Artifacts’: Peggy Guggenheim and African Art at Mid-Century

African art was also gaining popular attention throughout the 1950s. As [Julius] Carlebach observed in 1959, “interest in primitive art has gone beyond a mere handful of collectors to embrace the rich and poor alike,” adding that it was both fashionable in interior decor and available at affordable prices. (13) Indeed, just six months prior, a New York Times magazine feature, “Living with Sculpture,” showcased the non-Western collection of Life photographer Eliot Elisofon on display in his New York apartment.

Taking special note of the current fascination with African art, the article highlighted the home decorating potential of masks and figural sculptures while accompanying photographs offered “many ideas for dramatic display” on pedestals and wall shelves and as table accessories. “Today, good sculpture is available at very reasonable prices,” readers were advised, a point illustrated with examples of “typical inexpensive pieces” of non-Western art available for sale, all under one-hundred dollars; many were African sculpture from Carlebach’s gallery. (14) Carlebach’s inventory reached an even wider public through its prominent positioning in the 1958 romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak (and for which Elisofon served as color consultant). The masks and figures that Carlebach provided were not merely set dressing but integral to Novak’s character, a modern-day witch who owns a “primitive” art gallery in bohemian Greenwich Village. (15) Art historian Susan Vogel has commented on how the movie expressed “mid-century pop-culture associations of African art with sex, magic, bongo drums and radical avant gardes”—a sensibility that the adventurous Guggenheim surely embraced
in seeking a new and more affordable category of collecting