A SUPERB, EXTREMELY RARE AND IMPORTANT SENUFO KNEELING FEMALE FIGURE, Ivory Coast

Merton D. Simpson, New York, 1950s
Chaim and Renee Gross, New York, acquired from the above prior to 1960

Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., The Sculptor's Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross, 1976 (additional venues: Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, November 5, 1976 - January 2, 1977; Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, March 27 - May 1, 1977; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, May 17 - July 17, 1977)

Arnold Rubin, The Sculptor's Eye, Washington, D.C., 1976, inside cover and p. 1, cat. 10b
Warren M. Roberts and Nancy I. Nooter, African Art in American Collections, Washington and London, 1989, pp. 118-119, fig. 167

Excellent condition overall; minor chips on proper right ear, the lips and the chin, some abrasion on the knees, and the tips of the toes, consistent with traditional handling; abrasion on the reverse of the ankles, caused by the western mount; minor chip on reverse of proper right armlet; exceptionally fine encrusted medium to light brown patina with craquelure on the head and frontal body surface.
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The Senufo Kneeling Female Figure from the Gross Collection

 

The kneeling female figure from the Gross Collection is, by virtue of its quality and iconography, an extraordinary work of art. Measuring 29.8 cm high, it was created in the 19^th or early 20^th century by an unknown Senufo artist. Though anthropomorphic figures are widespread among the Senufo, the kneeling posture of this sculpture is very rare.

The sculpture shows the typical style of the Fodombele (Fodonon) villages in the central region of Senufoland in northern Côte d'Ivoire. The region is mainly inhabited by Tyebara-speaking Senufo, who also produced most of the artworks that were collected in the area after World War II. The late 1940s and early 1950s were a time when a movement of religious revival—the cult of Massa—rocked Senufo culture and society. The priests of the cult urged many owners of such artworks to abandon them in favor of the new and iconoclastic cult. They also penetrated the villages that were inhabited by the small minority of the Fodombele, who spoke another dialect and still maintained a rural culture with sacred forests, to which very few Tyebara had access. The famous sculptures of Lataha, now in major international collections, were also abandoned at the time and then "discovered" by a missionary and subsequently collected by art traders.

It is likely that this kneeling figure was collected around the same time and probably in the same region. The style of the figure, in particular its head and upper body, comes close to the one of the standing figure now in the Rietberg Museum, Zurich (accession no. 'RAF 301', published in Goldwater 1964: ill. 94, Phillips 1995: 459, and Gottschalk 2002: 98-99). Though the comb representing the hairdo is slightly bigger and more dominating, the facial expression is very similar. It shows the same protruding jaws, mouth, and lips. The fine, gently-curved line that separates the cheeks from the frontal part of the face is also similar to the one that present scholarship associates with the so-called workshop of Lataha.

The style of this workshop is also visible in the treatment of the arms. Though the lower arms and hands do not show the same grace and downward-bound shape of the most famous Lataha sculptures, they are still close to how the carvers elaborated the hands of their figures. The long and straight ornamental scars on the cheeks and also on the upper arms, however, do not belong to Fodombele culture. Since the Fodombele had no carvers, they ordered their wooden figures and masks from the neighboring Senufo groups, in particular from the Kulibele, another Tyebara-speaking subgroup, which specialized in wood carving. The Kulibele carvers possibly depicted what they were familiar with and added scarification marks representing their own cultural context.

The backward bend of the body and, in particular, the kneeling posture of the figure, make it a unique example of Senufo art. Almost all Senufo ceremonies and rituals demand upright figures, while the kneeling and forwardly-bent body is a typical position in daily work. Women often do fieldwork and housework in such postures. The figure is comparatively high for an object that might have been part of a diviner's ensemble, but it is also too small for an object of poro, the men's secret society. The figure, however, shows clear signs of use, and it has a fine patina that points to a long integration into ritual practices. It may have been part of the female sando'o society, which was a complement to the male dominated poro. This secret society had paraphernalia that were kept undisclosed to men, and later to researchers, which may explain why no other example with similar iconography was ever recorded.

Merton D. Simpson owned the figure in the late 1950s, which indicates that it may have left Senufoland around the same time the figures of Lataha were collected. The age of the Lataha figures, as well as of the Gross figurine, however, is much greater and seems to go back to the early 20^th or even 19^th century, as in the case of the other artworks that were given up because of the cult of Massa.

Professor Dr. Till Förster
Institute of Social Anthropology
University of Basel, Switzerland