Colon Baoulé from Ivory Coast. Piece over 50 years old.
Colonizers were often represented through institutional functions such as doctor, policeman, gendarme or judge. But African humor, the characters keep black skin and their hands in their pockets.
“Settler” art was born at the beginning of the 20th century following orders from colonizers or natives who wanted to have figures “apping” the settlers. The anthropomorphic sculptures are dressed “in the Western style” and covered in colors. We distinguish between colonist art before the Second World War and after it, up to the present day. The trend is now to create very stretched shapes, referred to as “filiforms” which are painted in very bright colors.
Several centuries after the first representations of European merchants and soldiers who carried out transactions with coastal peoples, the colonial presence had a profound impact on African statuary. In compliance with the canonical proportions in force in ethnic sculptures, the black man, armed, wearing the red chechia, the bolero and baggy pants made his appearance. The powers conferred on him within the administered communities made him a character whose favor it was necessary to attract, including through worship. Bambara in Mali, Baoule in Ivory Coast, Ashanti in Ghana, Kamba in Kenya or Makondé in Mozambique integrated it into the "pantheon" of earthly powers, in the form of wooden sculptures, often polychrome. They are part of what was later called "the Settlers". This term designates the statuettes which, across Africa, represented the Western presence or influence. The production of this art form would subsequently become widespread. It will be emptied of its religious character, under the effect of Western commercial demand for objects of art and crafts. The authoritarian attributes of the rifleman will be erased from representation in favor of avatars of social success and other external signs of modernity.
The settlers represent a category of people with whom the artists or their patrons were constantly confronted in their daily lives: colonial administrators, soldiers, traders, missionaries.
At the beginning, the colonists were statuettes dyed with vegetable dyes, representing white people as perceived by African artisans, through the filter of traditional aesthetic canons. The sculptors then left primitivism, to approach representations more faithful to reality, not devoid of a lot of naivety, favoring detail up to the anecdote. Gun, hats, boots, fashionable clothes, flat hairstyles, bras, bottles of wine... everything is good!
Collecting settlers is like preserving Africa's often naive view of Western man.
Item delivered with an invoice and a certificate of authenticity.
