Provenances

My experiences with Western provenances are very small...Heinrich Schweizer from Sothebys NY reported about this topic recently in Boston and I heard something about his statements from a friendly collegue. But an official seminar paper wasn´t available.

"But you told me, you had personally cotact to him about this topic..." (from an unpublished comment) "No, I hadn´t we only had a short e-mail correspondence and I told him the story of an untypical provenance with a Lobi statue. It was a gift Piet Meyer once made to his informant Binaté Kambou. Untypical of this story is on one side the fact, that an "European provenance-piece - from a wellknown Lobi ethnologist - went back to Africa" and on the other side the Binaté Kambou´s information, that the Lobi are making portraits. For a valuable provenance-piece of the Western Art market it´s probably only interesting, that this statue is coming from Piet Meyer and not the things Binaté is telling.

..anyhow, more interesting for me are the roots and these are - without any doubts - the African provenances. They are not forged. They don´t have brandnames. But many of them are mistakenly referred. The reason isn´t only a lack of knowledge, very often in literature the place, where an object is collected, is mixed with the stylistic origin. So the Bamana Rietberg catalogue cat. 134; 150 and the Bamana Vision of Africa, Colleyn, plate 2; 122 is speaking about a Jonyeleni sculpture related to the "Bougouni region or it´s neighbourhood" (Colleyn). Stylistically this sculpture is coming from the Baniko region, far away from Bougouni. But it is possible the sculpture was collected in the destrict of Bougouni, which would be an important information how this origin style was dispread in the Bamana country. I know that the Baniko-style exists in some parts of the Bamana Do region on the other side of the Niger river. But without a distinction of the local- and the stylistically-provenance the information "Bougouni-region" is more confusing than helpful.



...On page 123, Colleyn, Bamana Vision of Africa, 2009, is pictured an extremly rare sculpture of the Meret-complex. Labeled "Maani or Jonyeleni", Horstmann collection, Switzerland. This sculptutre is a mixture of two stylistically elements, the feet are related to the Kala and the top of the figure to the Bamana/Saro style with the head of a Meret Sogo Bo puppet. Only in some regions of the Segou district these figures were used for an "exhibition" before the Sogo Bo masquerade starts. But this sculpture is neither a "Maani" nor a "Jonyeleni-sculpture". "Maani" is the Bamabara word for "statuette/sculpture" (like a Gwandusu-, a Bozo- or a Malike- statuette) etc) and "Jonyeleni" is a "Jo" related "initiation-figure", which has nothing to do with the Meret-complex of the Sogo Bo masquerade. (Mary Jo Arnoldi, Playing with Time, Art and Performance in Central Mali, Indiana University Press, 1995; 195). The local provenance of this rare figure is extremly interesting, because it shows a mixture of an "exhibition" and "theater"-performance of the longlasting Sogo Bo tradition close to the Niger region.

This figure is published and exhibited many times, but probably never described with it´s African provenance. It´s an classical example how African provenances are discriminated in Western view of African Art.

Publication(s): Gardi (Bernhard), "Mali: Land im Sahel", Basel: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1988:58, Expo cat.: "Closeup. Lessons in the art of seeing African sculpture from an American collection and the Horstmann collection", by Vogel (Susan) and Thompson (Jerry), New York: The Center for African Art, 1990:86, #3 Expo cat.: "Meisterwerke afrikanischer Plastik aus Schweizer Privatbesitz", Kunshaus Zug, Wiese Verlag, 1995:49, #35; Expo cat.: "Sehen lernen. Eine Sammlung afrikanischer Figuren", Köln: Dumont, 1999:18, #6 & 7 in text. Bassani (Ezio), Bockemühl (Michael) & McNaughton (Patrick), "The Power of Form. African Art from the Horstmann Collection", Milan: Skira, 2002:46-47, #7; Expo cat.: "Femmes dans les arts d'Afrique", Paris: Musée Dapper, 2008:94 Exhibition(s): Basel, Switzerland: "Mali: Land im Sahel", Museum Für Völkerkunde, 1988; New York, USA: "Closeup. Lessons in the art of seeing African sculpture from an American collection and the Horstmann collection", The Center for African Art, 12 September 1990-11 March 1991; Zug, Switzerland: "Meisterwerke afrikanischer Plastik aus Schweizer Privatbesitz", Kunsthaus Zug, 9 June-3 September 1995; Paris, France: "Femmes dans les arts d'Afrique", Musée Dapper, 10 October 2008-12 July 2009). Source: Guy van Rijn Arcive, Yale University

According of the great number of publications and exhibitions this figure will have a high economic value, if it would appear one day at the international auctionmarket, but it is shameful how poor the knowledge about it´s real origin is.


photo: Petra Schuetz

In 2003 I collected a simple Kómó-mask from the Senufo region close to Sikasso, not knowing how rare these ritual objects are nowadays. It was carved by a Bamana blacksmith for the Senufo people. The Senufo people themselves don´t produce this type of mask, because the carving-production itself is "extremly dangerous". So it is a Senufo-mask with a Bamana-provenance. On the contrary to the Kónó-masks the Kómó masks weren´t stored in the village. There are little, lonely huts in the bush, where these "dangerous" ritual objects were preserved with the consequence: most of them were stolen similar like the Gwandusu-sculptures, which were once posted in the fields far outside of the villages. More than 90 percent of all Kómó masks - I guess - were stolen/looted by African runners for the Western art market. No chance to get any background informations about the relation between Senufo- and Bamana-provenances with it´s local stylistic and ritual differences.

ps the information about the Bougouni provenance, 123, Colleyn, Bamana Vision of Africa, 2009, is correct. Even it´s stylistically a Baniko sculpture this style is prevalent in the Bougouni region. We could even identify the village, where it is coming from. Similar like a bar code the scarification patterns of these sculptures are giving informations about the exact origin. The village is called Njala and is located in the Bougouni region, about 10 km from Massigue. According of the scarification-patterns we could also identify a Baniko sculpture, which is coming from the village Dekora, near Doila, and another sculpture of this style from the Korodougou village, also close to Doila. All these sculptures are correlated to the Baniko style, even the distances, where this style appears, are more than several hundred kilometers, from the Sonango village on the other side of the river to a village close to Massigue, like the sculpture Colleyn is describing in his Bamana book.