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Lot Essay
ODE TO THE ESSENCE OF FEMALE BEAUTY: THE BOUFFARD GU MASK
With its smooth patina and highly stylized features, the Bouffard gu mask sits at the apogee of the art of the Guro. As a testament to his taste, Dr. Bouffard also collected another exceptional Guro mask with a strong Bete influence in 1904; and published in 1988 in Utotombo (p. 150, fig. 65). The Bouffard mask made its debut at the Rietberg Museum’s seminal exhibition on the subject – Die Kunst der Guro – organized by Eberhard Fischer and Lorenz Homberger in 1985. The style of this master sculptor with its pure lines and smooth surface shares an affinity with the most well-documented and celebrated Guro ateliers of the Bauflé master and the Bron-Guro master. The two corpuses are well-documented by Fischer in his 2008 major monograph, Guro.
The Bouffard gu mask represents a young woman with features that correspond to traditional Guro ideals of feminine beauty. The Guro find aesthetically pleasing, a narrow, well-proportioned face with a small chin, arching eyebrows, small slit eyes, a high forehead with a presumably shaven hairline - mirroring the eyebrows - and a long narrow nose with delicate nostrils. The compact mouth of this mask is closed, bringing it more to an essence and interiority. Many other Guro masks are comparatively expressionistic with an open mouth baring filed teeth. Another exceptional feature of the present mask is the absence of any scarification patterns, which one can often find in the form of bulges on the forehead. Omitting these markings, the sculptor concentrated on the pure lines of this face. The head is crowned by an upward single tress – a coiffure once worn by the wives and daughters of influential men. When François Fasel asked in his fieldwork the reason for the great variety of gu masks, the Guro explained that there are many forms of womanly beauty which must be reflected in the masks (in Barbier, Art of the Côte d’Ivoire, 1994, p.94). The impressive hair arrangement would indicate that her family would be wealthy enough to support her during the time between puberty and marriage without her having to work - i.e. carry anything on her head. Viewers of this mask would immediately make the association with a high social rank, and this prestige was enforced by a second adornment: the 5 leopard teeth that encircle the tress at the crown of the head – a clear reference to the power of this mask by means of the association with this much-respected animal.
Together with the Baule, the Guro are the largest population group in central Ivory Coast and live to the west of Lake Kossou. Linguistically, they belong to the large Mande family and are therefore related to the Dan and Tura of the West, the Wan and Mwan of the North, the Yaure of the East and the Gagu of the South. The best-known cult among the northern Guro relates to a group of masks that is considered as one family. It consists of Zauli, a grotesque animal mask with long horns; Zamble, a horned mask whose face it meant to recall a leopard or a crocodile; and Gu, a human mask. Gu, who is usually thought of as Zamble’s wife, performs after the two zoomorphic masks, who are responsible for resolving quarrels and detecting sorcerers, or who dance at funerals and other important ceremonies. During her performance, which is accompanied only by flute music, gu moves slowly and graciously, singing songs in honor of Zamble.
The Guro mask is an archetype most classically associated with the work of Amedeo Modigliani. It is well known that this avant-garde artist freely modified aspects of African masks in his artistic output. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the Paris vanguard, who appropriated African art expressionistically as an abstract deformation of the human form, Modigliani’s manner of borrowing was far more respectful. The influence of such masks is visible in the shape of the face, slit eyes, and especially the long delicate nose of his sculpted heads. But also in his paintings, these influences can be easily discerned. The open, oval ‘empty’ eyes of this mask can be found in many of his portraits. The best evidence we have today of his stylistic assimilation of African art comes from what could be considered an ‘eye witness account’ - the 1926 words of Paul Guillaume, his dealer and a major figure in African art history: ‘Artists like Picasso and Matisse… have found [African art] a confirmation of their beliefs and a stimulus to go further along that road. Several other prominent contemporaries, especially Modigliani and Soutine in painting, Lipchitz and Modigliani in sculpture, owe an obvious debt to African art’ (in Primitive Negro Sculpture by Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro, Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania). Unlike Picasso, for example, who mentions his visits to the Trocadero and can be seen in photographs from his studio surrounded by masks and sculptures, Modigliani's chronology and exposure becomes more of a process of extrapolation. The aesthetic evidence, however, leaves no doubt of his debt to African art. Even his technique aligns with African sculptors themselves who worked directly with the material without an intermediary maquette. He looked outside the European tradition to non-Western art as a way to revitalize and reinvigorate his work (see A.G. Wilkinson, "Paris and London: Modigliani, Lipchitz, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska" in W. Rubin, ed., "Primitivism" and 20th Century Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984, vol. II, pp. 417-452).
With its smooth patina and highly stylized features, the Bouffard gu mask sits at the apogee of the art of the Guro. As a testament to his taste, Dr. Bouffard also collected another exceptional Guro mask with a strong Bete influence in 1904; and published in 1988 in Utotombo (p. 150, fig. 65). The Bouffard mask made its debut at the Rietberg Museum’s seminal exhibition on the subject – Die Kunst der Guro – organized by Eberhard Fischer and Lorenz Homberger in 1985. The style of this master sculptor with its pure lines and smooth surface shares an affinity with the most well-documented and celebrated Guro ateliers of the Bauflé master and the Bron-Guro master. The two corpuses are well-documented by Fischer in his 2008 major monograph, Guro.
The Bouffard gu mask represents a young woman with features that correspond to traditional Guro ideals of feminine beauty. The Guro find aesthetically pleasing, a narrow, well-proportioned face with a small chin, arching eyebrows, small slit eyes, a high forehead with a presumably shaven hairline - mirroring the eyebrows - and a long narrow nose with delicate nostrils. The compact mouth of this mask is closed, bringing it more to an essence and interiority. Many other Guro masks are comparatively expressionistic with an open mouth baring filed teeth. Another exceptional feature of the present mask is the absence of any scarification patterns, which one can often find in the form of bulges on the forehead. Omitting these markings, the sculptor concentrated on the pure lines of this face. The head is crowned by an upward single tress – a coiffure once worn by the wives and daughters of influential men. When François Fasel asked in his fieldwork the reason for the great variety of gu masks, the Guro explained that there are many forms of womanly beauty which must be reflected in the masks (in Barbier, Art of the Côte d’Ivoire, 1994, p.94). The impressive hair arrangement would indicate that her family would be wealthy enough to support her during the time between puberty and marriage without her having to work - i.e. carry anything on her head. Viewers of this mask would immediately make the association with a high social rank, and this prestige was enforced by a second adornment: the 5 leopard teeth that encircle the tress at the crown of the head – a clear reference to the power of this mask by means of the association with this much-respected animal.
Together with the Baule, the Guro are the largest population group in central Ivory Coast and live to the west of Lake Kossou. Linguistically, they belong to the large Mande family and are therefore related to the Dan and Tura of the West, the Wan and Mwan of the North, the Yaure of the East and the Gagu of the South. The best-known cult among the northern Guro relates to a group of masks that is considered as one family. It consists of Zauli, a grotesque animal mask with long horns; Zamble, a horned mask whose face it meant to recall a leopard or a crocodile; and Gu, a human mask. Gu, who is usually thought of as Zamble’s wife, performs after the two zoomorphic masks, who are responsible for resolving quarrels and detecting sorcerers, or who dance at funerals and other important ceremonies. During her performance, which is accompanied only by flute music, gu moves slowly and graciously, singing songs in honor of Zamble.
The Guro mask is an archetype most classically associated with the work of Amedeo Modigliani. It is well known that this avant-garde artist freely modified aspects of African masks in his artistic output. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the Paris vanguard, who appropriated African art expressionistically as an abstract deformation of the human form, Modigliani’s manner of borrowing was far more respectful. The influence of such masks is visible in the shape of the face, slit eyes, and especially the long delicate nose of his sculpted heads. But also in his paintings, these influences can be easily discerned. The open, oval ‘empty’ eyes of this mask can be found in many of his portraits. The best evidence we have today of his stylistic assimilation of African art comes from what could be considered an ‘eye witness account’ - the 1926 words of Paul Guillaume, his dealer and a major figure in African art history: ‘Artists like Picasso and Matisse… have found [African art] a confirmation of their beliefs and a stimulus to go further along that road. Several other prominent contemporaries, especially Modigliani and Soutine in painting, Lipchitz and Modigliani in sculpture, owe an obvious debt to African art’ (in Primitive Negro Sculpture by Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro, Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania). Unlike Picasso, for example, who mentions his visits to the Trocadero and can be seen in photographs from his studio surrounded by masks and sculptures, Modigliani's chronology and exposure becomes more of a process of extrapolation. The aesthetic evidence, however, leaves no doubt of his debt to African art. Even his technique aligns with African sculptors themselves who worked directly with the material without an intermediary maquette. He looked outside the European tradition to non-Western art as a way to revitalize and reinvigorate his work (see A.G. Wilkinson, "Paris and London: Modigliani, Lipchitz, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska" in W. Rubin, ed., "Primitivism" and 20th Century Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984, vol. II, pp. 417-452).