Acrylic on linen canvas, 120 x 120 cm

ORIGIN : 2 seated male statues of 50 and 41 cm

BAOULE people from Côte d’Ivoire, west Africa Made of wood

Last location : Alain Schoffel collection, Sotheby’s Paris in 2003, estimated at 25 000 et 40 000 Euros par Sotheby’s en 2014 no result of auction online

Statue on the left: (Source E&Eve, details on the piece):

Baoulé statuette - Republic of Côte d'Ivoire / Ghana wooden border - Sitting on a stool, hands resting on thighs, back straight. The face is scarified, the eyes bulging and the headdress finely engraved. Gaps and visible cracks.

Statue on the right: (Source Sotheby's, details on the piece):

Also seated on an Akan-type seat, this male statue is clearly linked to this "hand of master”, remarkable for the elegance and exceptional naturalism of the style.

Breaking with the traditional canons of Baulé statutes, the same freedom animates the naturalistic face and the body with fluid limbs, each imprinting the beginning of a gesture or a movement. To the great refinement of the details was originally added a loincloth - adornment which, from the 1920s, will be carved directly in the wood.

Baulé statuary is one of the works of African art whose aesthetics imposed itself earliest in the West. At the time when modern artists discovered Negro art in Paris, it was she who, from the French colonies, reached the market most easily. It is also her that Paul Guillaume - who was the first to attempt the American adventure of Primitivism - chose, by exhibiting in 1914, at Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291 in New York, eighteen works from Gabon and the Côte d' Ivory from his collection.

Within the very vast corpus of Baulé statues have imposed themselves, with the requirement dictated by time and the progress researchers have made on the identification of regional styles, the criteria of appreciation allowing to distinguish the most exceptional of them.

The Baoulé are a people of Côte d'Ivoire, living mainly in the center of the country, near the cities of Bouaké and Yamoussoukro.

The name Baoulé comes from the sacrifice, by Queen Pokou, of one of her sons in order to cross a river, while she was leading the flight of her people from Ghana: "ba ou li" ("the child died ").

The Baoulé settled between the Bandama and Comoé rivers. There are about twenty sub-groups belonging to specific geographical areas. These subgroups actually speak the same language with some nuances, especially in tone and pronunciation. (Source Sotheby's)