Antique African Wood Carved Baga Tribal Sculpture

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Offered here is this striking Antique African Baga Tribe (of Guinea Bissau) wooden sculpture. Although we refer to pieces like … Read more Offered here is this striking Antique African Baga Tribe (of Guinea Bissau) wooden sculpture. Although we refer to pieces like this as "art", authentic African art was and is never executed for any other reason than for use of the tribe in a ritual or functional way, never for decoration or sale. Even though there are a lot of fakes on the market, a piece cannot truly be classified as a fake unless it was executed for the purpose of selling. In fact, within the same tribe there are to be found numerous and successive productions of objects of the same type which are always similar in design to the preceding series. Even if, technically, a reproduction of an ancient original that is recreated generation after generation, these copies are indisputably authentic (African art) due to the fact that they were executed for practical purposes. Also, to be authentic, the "artist" must be working for the good of the community. It does not matter whether the piece was created yesterday or hundreds of years ago, mediocre or of the highest quality to be authentic, although, the older pieces of high quality craftsmanship can and do sell for thousands and even millions.

The sculpture we offer here is very old (most like 19th century but could be older) not ancient, but guaranteed to be authentic African tribal art (which has been authenticated by one of our experts) created for practical purposes and not for sale. The provenance is from the collection of a Larchmont, NY woman (a long time collector).

It is a primitive wooden hand carved piece which had arms hinged on at some point in time and was painted. A much older, beautifully executed Baga tribal sculpture brought over 30,000 Euros at Christie's in Paris in 2013. We have chosen to reprint below, the very fine explanation of Baga tribal art and its purposes, which was published in the Christie's auction catalog for the 2013 sale, noted here. It is one of the best descriptions we have seen. Our piece, offered here, is guaranteed to be authentic and is a wonderfully primitive original work of art that is an affordable addition to any collection.

Christie's Paris Auction Catalog, December 10, 2013

Baga figure, Guinea 
Nimba sculpture (as it is known in the more frequently used Susu language; also known as D'mba in Baga language) created by the Baga people, is amongst the Rarest yet most emblematic forms of African art. The singularity of its visual language, especially the striking outline of the archetypal "Nimba head" - perceptible in the imposing shoulder masks and in the smaller statues, which, as in this piece, are related to the human body, became a staple of modern artists' inspiration from the beginning of the 20th century, especially so in the case of Picasso. Baga statuary, the interpretation of which is a complex matter, is beautifully illustrated in this piece, which is probably one of the most archaic expressions of Baga art.

According to oral tradition, the Baga originally came from the mountainous region of Fouta Djallon, in the centre of Guinea, whence they were ousted for good by the Fula people who had converted to Islam in the 18th century. Their migration and their gradual resettlement in successive waves, since the 15th century, in the coastal lagoons of southern Guinea Bissau and of western Guinea, are, according to Frederick Lamp, what caused a "reinvention of themselves as a people and a culture" (Lamp, 1996, p 155). That is how they came to create "a new and revolutionary art form" (ibid.)whose most spectacular expression were the shoulder masks, referred to, at the time of their discovery, as "Nimba goddesses". See Sweeney (1935, pl. 40) for the mask held in the Georges Salles collection (Paris) displayed in the MoMA in 1935, and RMN (2000, p. 71), for the example collected by Henri Labouret in 1932, now on display at the Pavillon des Sessions in the Louvre museum.

The lack of information gathered by early collectors, along with the ban on ancestral ceremonies and the destruction of ritual objects in the 1950s by the Sékou Touré government, kept this major art form of the African continent concealed for a long time. Aside from a short study published by Denise Paulme in 1956, it was not until 1985, and the field research conducted by Frederick Lamp, that the meaning of the D'mba (or Nimba) was fully understood: this term refers both to the shoulder mask and the statues, and its sculptural form features massive prognathic heads whose profile are framed in a set of taut curves. 

The D'mba, which was long interpreted as the "fertility goddess", is in fact, according to Lamp ( ibid, p. 155, 158-159, 163), neither a deity, nor an ancestor, nor even a spirit, but rather an "idea", which combines "beauty, comportment, righteousness, dignity, and social duty". Although the shoulder masks are exclusively female - their nourishing breasts linking them to representations of fertility - the statues represent both male and female figures, and are sometimes even kept in collections as couples  (cf. Lamp, ibid, p. 181, fig. 171). According to Lamp (ibid), this double gender within the statuary suggests that the D'mba "represented the unattainable. The beauty, goodness, and high comportment that were epitomized was beyond what any woman - or man - could be."

These statues came to Europe long before the masks: as early as 1867 in the case of the statues held at the Nationalmuseet of Copenhagen, before 1883 for the ones at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and 1885 for the ones collected by Coffinières de Nordeck and now held at the quai Branly museum.  None however were brought back with any collection information, which leads Lamp to believe that 'they held a more sacred and prohibited role than the D'mba headdress, and that perhaps the figural tradition, especially, is of even greater antiquity" (Lamp, ibid, p. 163).

Within the very restricted corpus of this ancient statuary, which draws from the very sources of Baga art and thought, the striking energy emanating from its outlines singles this piece out: it flows from the arrangement of its successive rhythms, of its triangulation, of the juxtaposition of different planes and of the accent placed on its breaking points. It is an arresting evocation of the vocabulary of cubism, and, for modern artists in general, of the aesthetic research on movement. The Perfectly formed expression of the impressive archetypal "Nimba" head, emphasised by the motion of the arms that converge underneath the chin, is coupled in this piece with the presence of a cup placed on the top of the head. According to Frederick Lamp (personal communication, September 2006), its small size and the perforations around its lip are reminiscent of the wickerwork containers adorned with beaded fringes that brides carry on their heads during marriage dances and where offerings are placed (cf. Lamp, 1996, in situ photograph, p. 127).

William Rubin (1984, p. 275-279) grants particular importance, within Picasso's oeuvre and the birth of Primitivism, to the discovery of Baga art. According to Rubin, among the drawings that can be linked, as early as 1907, to African art, "none are more revealing of Picasso's way of thinking and working than those relates to Nimba, assumed at the time to be the Baga people's godess of fertility". HisHead in Profile (held at the Picasso museum in Paris) is, according to Rubin, probably the first interpretation inspired by the Nimba statues that would already have been in Picasso's possession by 1907. See Barbier and Daix (1998, p. 23, fig. 13), for the photograph, taken after Picasso's death, of his "primitive" artwork in a room of the "La Californie" villa, in Cannes, among which his two Nimba statues can be seen; and Bassani and McLeod (1989, p. 27, n° 31) for the female figure of the Jacob Epstein collection. See less