Jukun Ancestor Figure, Nigeria

Roger Azar, Paris, by 1989
By descent from the above
Sotheby's, New York, May 5, 1997, lot 68
Private American Collection, acquired at the above auction

Liliana Albertazzi, "Roger Azar", Galeries Magazine, No. 30, April - May, 1989, p. 129
Kevin Conru, Anonymous Collectors, Brussels, 2007, unpaginated, 1989, fol. 15 recto (left)

The imaginative figurative sculpture from the Jukun people of the Benue River Valley of Nigeria was little known in the west prior to the late 1960s, and specific functions and iconography are not well understood.  Like the neighboring Mumuye people, they are responsible for a corpus of remarkably abstract geometric conceptions of the human body. The present figure, although significantly eroded, can be linked to a group of figures photographed in situ in the 1960s by Arnold Rubin, and related examples in American collections (see Fardon in Berns, Fardon, and Kasfir 2011: 272-277), in which the arms are held with elbows bent at the sides, the hands clasped at the center and often holding an upright spear. The remains of pendant braids as well as angular openwork ears support this identification. The effects of time and the elements on the cubist architecture of the present statue have resulted in an image of unusual beauty.