Crediting plundered art

The Oct. 18 Style and Arts article "At the Phillips, Black and White but Never Plain" was accompanied by a photograph of an African statue labeled as "collected around the turn of the century in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo."

Talking about such art as "collected" is the equivalent of saying that a menorah from the Poland of 1939-45 was "collected" without mentioning that its availability was the result of the Nazi genocide that wiped out families and friends and nearly their cultures.

The genocide in the Congo during the administration of King Leopold II of Belgium (1885-1908) with the agreement of Western European powers was notorious at the time. (Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" was inspired by it).

Man Ray, Picasso and the curators of these objects in our museums cannot be credited with sufficient incompetence not to be aware of this inconvenient history.

I think we owe those victims at least the courtesy of remembering how and at what price their art came to grace our museums.

R.A. Metcalf, Rockville