Human world
Baga, Guinea, late 19th century
Accession Number 20.8.97.20
Baga mainly live along the coastal regions of Guinea but this d’mba figure was collected in Sierra Leone, probably through Temne middlemen. We know very little about this type of figure, even though Pablo Picasso owned two like it.
“I have felt my strongest artistic emotions when suddenly confronted with the sublime beauty of sculptures executed by the anonymous artists of Africa. These works of a religious, passionate, and rigorously logical art are the most powerful and most beautiful things the human imagination has ever produced.”
Pablo Picasso
We or Bete, Côte-d’Ivoire, before 1967
Accession Number 1967.327
The We live in small communities without powerful chiefs. They have a wide variety of masquerades that play important roles in regulating and policing the community. This mask would have been worn in one of those masquerades.
The European artists, critics and connoisseurs who helped to reassess the value of ethnographic artefacts as ‘art’ knew very little about the original meaning and function of these objects. They analysed them according to Western ideas and viewed them as heroic, yet anonymous, expressions of universal aesthetic values. This led to an expansion of the Western category of ‘art’ to include artefacts produced by diverse peoples across the globe. Although this is widely seen as a positive move, it does not help us to understand African artefacts as unique cultural achievements in their own right .