Lot n° 45
Estimation :
70000 - 120000
EUR
Ɵ Gouro mask surmounted by a figure,
Ivory... - Lot 45 - Giquello
Ɵ Gouro mask surmounted by a figure,
Ivory Coast
Wood with red-brown patina, traces of kaolin
H. 58 cm
Guro mask, Ivory Coast
H. 22 ¾ in
Provenance:
- Jay Collection. C. Leff, Los Angeles
- Gustave and Franyo Schindler, New York
- Hélène and Henri Kamer, Paris
- Private collection
Publication/Exhibition:
- African sculpture from the collection of Jay C. Leff, Exhibition at the Museum of
Primitive art, New York from November 25, 1964 to February 7, 1965, No. 64.
- Exhibition at the Creative Art Center, Morgantown, West Virginia, March 1969.
- The Art of black Africa: Collection of Jay C. Leff, Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg, October 24, 1969 to January 18, 1970, No. 100 of the catalogue.
- Sotheby's NY sale, Important African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian Art property of Jay C. Leff, October 10 and 11, 1975, lot 153.
- Robbins, Warren M., and Nancy Ingram Nooter, African Art in American Collections, Survey 1989. Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, p. 173, no. 341.
In the Sudanese savannahs, human statues are frequently enthroned at the top of zoomorphic masks, particularly among the Dogon, Senufo, Mossi or Gourounsi; further south, the Gouro, a population of central Côte d'Ivoire, have made this a specialty and the top of their masks is often used as a support for animated scenes. This tradition continues during the Zaouli dances where more recent representations featuring Mami Wata the mermaid or wrestlers in floats and brightly coloured shirts have replaced the mythical love couple that once adorned André Breton's living room. The sculpture - zuhu - illustrated here is as rare as the one shown here and offers an easily decipherable allegory. To perch on the skull of a harnessed guib or a Buffon's cob does not require the same determination as to take the bull by the horns, but it does require skill, flexibility and balance. The image, in any case, expresses dominance. The man is clutching the animal's horns like a rudder in a storm, his will and reason trying to direct and order the wild and unstable nature beneath his feet. As far as we know, the genre of this mask makes it unique among the Gouro, as the very few other variations on this theme, two of which seduced Félix Fénéon, feature a female character. The bewitching Gu poses, full-length, on the sinciput1 of her beautiful husband, the mythical hero Zamblé, a complex character usually represented in the guise of an antelope with a leopard's head. For the Gouro, a patrilineal group, offering such a pedestal to a woman shows to what extent she was "the basis and the articulation of society", as the anthropologist Claude Meillassoux has stated.
In contrast to the massive, opulent and keloid-ridden counterparts of the other sex, the statue of our male character is paradoxically striking in its great delicacy and sobriety, without the slightest hint of mawkishness: the body is powerfully muscular, untied, well-proportioned, the expression of the face fierce, almost ferocious; the whole is harmonious, the line nervous and precise as evidenced by the chiselling of the hairstyle, the contours of the spine or the finely drawn hands. The base of the mask itself shows all the ambiguity of Zamblé : if the horns are still present, the traditional feline muzzle disappears in profile of a mouth and a tapered nose obviously human.
This subject is part of an old tradition since the two female masks of Fénéon, mentioned above, were collected by the lieutenant Raoul Soffrey Berthier Allemand de Montrigaud between 1911 and 1913, during operations that led him to travel through the entire Gouro country, from Gohitafla to Frefrerou, with a few incursions among the Bété of the Haut-Sassandra.
A certain similarity between the Zamblé base of these masks and the Kpélié of the Sénoufo, their northern neighbours, has led to them being attributed to a hypothetical "master of Duonou", a name borrowed from the component of the Gouro people situated furthest north in their territory. At the geographical opposite end of the spectrum, two Yohoure masks, although carved in the style specific to this group, show a male figure2 in a posture totally identical to the one described here, one of which was acquired by Louis Carré from Antony Morris between the two wars. It is commendable to pay tribute to the lost masters of African sculpture, but to give them the name of a village or sub-region from which they originated is a bold speculation. Without any other indication, even the place of collection is far from conclusive: the first proven Gouro style mask, which entered the Trocadero Ethnographic Museum in 1895, was found in Tiassalé, a Baule village. The objects circulate, the tribes s
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