Baule statue Ivory Coast Wood and polychromy H.... - Lot 159 - Giquello

Lot 159
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Estimation :
6000 - 8000 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 16 900EUR
Baule statue Ivory Coast Wood and polychromy H.... - Lot 159 - Giquello
Baule statue Ivory Coast Wood and polychromy H. 35 cm Remarkable statue of a character standing on a square base, dressed in European style, wearing shoes, trousers and frock coat, the ringed neck evoking a series of necklaces. The face is finely rendered: the eyes are swollen and half-closed, the eyelids are wrinkled, the eyebrows are represented by two flattened arches, the mouth is lined with scarification marks and expresses a slight pout, the philtrum is well defined, and the high forehead is decorated with scarification marks. The delicate headdress has been treated with great care. Blue, white and black polychromy punctuates the different parts of the object. The position of the hands, with intertwined fingers, placed on the belly, is quite remarkable, although it is difficult to define their exact meaning. The very recognisable style of the face, as well as the presence of hands with intertwined fingers, are common to several other known objects, thus indicating the same production workshop or the same master hand. Two examples in the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (inv. 73.1962.1.60) and in the Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva (inv. BMG 1007/82, entered in the Joseph Mueller collection before 1939) are depicted naked, with the torso crossed by intertwined straps. Two other statues in private collections (one of which was published in the catalogue of the Utotombo exhibition, Brussels, 1988) are dressed like our European model, with quite similar clothes, and wear a ringed neck. The presence of colonial clothing is not in itself a sign of late production or degeneration of the style, as Europeans were already present in Côte d'Ivoire in the second half of the 19th century. It is undoubtedly a sign of the sculptor's desire to endow his object with symbolic attributes - power and authority - embodied at the time by the colonists and externalized in their clothing. Publication Sacred Baule, Galerie Maine Durieu, 2014
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