Bongo Stool - Sudan, New Acquisition

This stool masterfully illustrates the preoccupation with the aesthetics of bovine forms shared by pastoral peoples of the Upper Nile region in Sudan. The form is "probably suggested by the shapes of the animals, something in each design resembling the head, limbs and tail," as noted by Captain S. L. Cummins, a British medical officer who served in Sudan at the turn of the century.

If they do echo an animal form, the feet of this stool can be interpreted as an artistic rendition of hooves and fetlocks, while the lugs at each end of the seat may evoke the head and tail. In this stool, one finds a perfect integration of both types of supports: the shallow, receptive curve of the thin seat is gracefully counterbalanced by the tighter curve of the sturdy legs.In the late 19th century, such stools were found in every household and used exclusively by women. An early writer, Schweinfurth, tells us that stools were “used by women…but avoided by men, who regarded every raised seat as an effeminate luxury.” These stools were also used as headrests.

Gorgeous dark, glossy patina and one of the finest extant examples of a Bongo stool.

#11119H: 6 1/2" L: 13 1/2"ex Budrose Collection, USA

Jacaranda Tribal's New Acquisitions- March 2010

Jacaranda Tribal is pleased to announce that it has acquired 13 new tribal art pieces to add to its ever-expanding collection. Over the next week, we would like to highlight some of our favorite works that are part of our March, 2010 New Acquisitions. We hope you enjoy them too!

Feedback is greatly appreciated.

The Art of the Steal

Don't miss the new documentary about the Barnes Foundation and its controversial move to Philadelphia. With a collection worth over $25 billion, including some beautiful African art, its a stimulating and disturbing documentary.

Below is a review by Melissa Anderson on the Village Voice.

Matisse called the Barnes Foundation "the only sane place to see art in America." But the clamor over moving one of the world's foremost collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern art from its home in the bucolic suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania, to center city Philadelphia (4.6 miles away) has been anything but reasonable. Unapologetically on the side of those who oppose the relocation (executive producer Lenny Feinberg is, like many of the doc's impassioned interlocutors, a former student of the Barnes Foundation), The Art of the Steal presents its aesthetes versus Phila-stines argument cogently, convincingly, and engagingly.

Though he relies too heavily on Philip Glass compositions to underscore dramatic points, director-cinematographer Don Argott (who helmed 2005's Rock School) digs deep to recount the struggle for control of this legendary institution. The foundation was started in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes, a cranky physician from working-class Philly who made a fortune by developing an antiseptic, and used that money to amass his collection of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses, Picassos, and Modiglianis. Unabashedly liberal, Barnes loathed the conservative power elite of the City of Brotherly Love (which he called "a depressing intellectual slum"), particularly those affiliated with the Philadelphia Museum of Art; his foundation in Merion was strictly for art education, its magnificent pieces never to be loaned or go on tour. Barnes, who died in 1951, explicitly stated in his will that the collection never leave its two-story villa in the leafy suburbs—which, due to megalomania-fueled mismanagement beginning in the 1990s and the converging interests of philanthropic organizations, politicians, and powerbrokers, is exactly what is scheduled to happen in 2012, when the Barnes Foundation will become a major tourist destination five blocks away from the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

"Culture has become big business," one of Steal's talking heads says early on, laying out the film's thesis. The refrain is echoed by arts reporter David D'Arcy sniffing about a "McBarnes in downtown Philadelphia" and Drexel professor Robert Zaller calling the move "the greatest theft of art since the Second World War." The key backers of the move declined to be interviewed in the film—with the notable exception of former Philadelphia mayor and current Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who states that the relocation is necessary for populist reasons: It will make an invaluable collection more accessible to more people; more ticket-buyers, in turn, will restore the Barnes's depleted finances—a point that Barnes loyalists insist is a specious argument.
Argott's film makes clear that Rendell's statements are disingenuous at best—that moving the collection to the city represents the triumph of money and power not just over the express wishes of one man, but the public's opportunity to have a singular experience with an astonishing array of art in its original setting. More cynically—and more to the point—the relocation signals the use of art to grease the wheels of commerce, crassly expressed when Philadelphia's then-mayor, John Street, announces at a press conference that moving the Barnes will have "the financial impact of three Super Bowls—without the beer."

The Art of the Steal's thorough research, bolstered by many fiery talking heads, makes it one of the most successful advocacy docs in recent years and may prompt some firsthand investigating of your own. As for claims about the Barnes Foundation's inaccessibility—the linchpin of the argument for those supporting the move—visiting, as I discovered during a recent trip, requires not much more foresight than making a dinner reservation and not much more walking than it takes to get from the closest subway stop to the Met. Once inside, slowly drifting from room to room (five of the 23 galleries are now closed in preparation for the move), Stendhal syndrome begins to set in; it seems almost inconceivable that so much beauty could be assembled in one small, intimate setting. On the second floor, as a docent was concluding a tour, I heard someone ask her why the Barnes was moving. After a pause, she answered, "There were money problems . . . ," trailing off as if she herself were unconvinced of her response.

Review of "Kindgom of Ife" from the Guardian

By Jonathan Jones:

This is an exceptional exhibition, even by the high standards the British Museum has established in recent years. It is extraordinary because it brings together such a large number of masterpieces that have rarely or never been exhibited outside Nigeria before – and when I say masterpieces, I mean artworks that rank with the Terracotta Army, the Parthenon or the mask of Tutankhamen as treasures of the human spirit.

For European artists a century ago, African sculpture was powerful precisely because it did not conform to the smooth idea of beauty that Picasso's generation had been brought up on – ideas that went back to classical Greece. But they had not seen the art of Ife, a medieval city-state that flourished from the 12th to 15th centuries in West Africa, trading across the Sahara with the Islamic Mediterranean world.

The superb sculpted heads in this exhibition – statues of sick people, monuments to warriors, royal heads whose strange vertical scars tell of the ceremonies of the court – were first rediscovered in quantity in an amazing find on a building site in the modern Nigerian city of Ife in 1938. This art was so different and unexpected, so "un-African", that one of its first students thought it must be the lost art of Atlantis.

But these works were not Greek, let alone from Atlantis. The faces that gaze coolly past you from these cases are challenging and formidable in their beauty. And they are disturbing to anyone who has any lingering belief in the uniqueness of European art. Sculptors in Ife imitated the human face as accurately and sensitively as any Greek, and matched the Greek feeling for harmony, balance and proportion.

What we see here is an African classical art – by which I mean an art with a strong concept of order that gives it a special authority, whether it comes from Athens, China or Ife. Like that of ancient Egypt, the art of Ife is perfect, remote, godlike and yet – as with Egypt – when you look again it is highly observational, rooted in the real life of this lost civilization.

Ife remains mysterious. The catalogue admits there's so much still to learn about this art and the world that created it. Hopefully this exhibition will be the starting point for new archaeology. It elicits awe. To behold these royal heads is to travel to a fabled realm far beyond your imagination, a place richer than Atlantis.

The Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures of West Africa at the British Museum

This major exhibition presents exquisite examples of brass, copper, stone and terracotta sculpture from West Africa.

The Kingdom of Ife (pronounced ee-feh) was a powerful, cosmopolitan and wealthy city-state in West Africa (in what is now modern south-west Nigeria).

Ife flourished as a political, spiritual, cultural and economic centre in the 12th–15th centuries AD, and was an influential hub of local and long-distance trade networks.

The exhibition features superb pieces of Ife sculpture, drawn almost entirely from the magnificent collections of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria.

The artists of Ife developed a refined and highly naturalistic sculptural tradition in stone, terracotta, brass and copper to create a style unlike anything in Africa at the time. The technical sophistication of the casting process is matched by the artworks’ enduring beauty.

The human figures portray a wide cross-section of Ife society and include images of youth and old age, health and disease, suffering and serenity.

The exhibition will run from March 4th through June 6th, 2010. For more information and to watch an video about the exhibit visit: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/future_exhibitions/kingdom_of_ife.aspx.

Tomorrow, we will include a review of the exhibit that was featured in the UK's Guardian.

African Art's European Influences at The Detroit Instutue of Art

“Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to Present” is a new exhibit at The Detroit Instutue of Art that will run from April 18 through August 8, 2010.

According to the museum, this exhibition explores the artistic consequences of the variations and dynamics of cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans over 500 years, making it the broadest analytical overview on the subject to date. Through African Eyes will illustrate how African artists from diverse cultures have used and continue to use visual forms to reflect their particular societies' changing attitudes toward Europeans, as the latter evolved from stranger to colonizer to the more inclusive Westerner.

The exhibition features 100 of Africa's finest three-dimensional artworks and utilitarian objects executed in wood, ivory, metals, and textiles in diverse materials from the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) and other leading American and international museums and private collections. The DIA is the opening venue.

Through African Eyes will offer broad insights into various strategies that diverse African cultures have employed to engage the European outsider. In particular, it will explore Africans' delicate balancing of assimilation and confrontation of European culture when stimulated by shifts in the relationship. Moreover, the exhibition will show that dynamic cultural exchanges that occurred not only produced new African art forms but also stimulated new social values and modes of governance.

Through African Eyes rests on the premise that African perceptions of the European over time were neither monolithic nor static. It recognizes that many African societies alternately incorporated, rejected, and transformed elements of European cultures. By examining evolving trends in African use of European objects in particular cultures, the exhibition addresses the complexity of African responses to the European presence, presenting exciting new interpretations of this cultural dialogue.

By contextualizing African works that imitate, distort, criticize, or poke fun at the white "other," Through African Eyes will raise compelling questions: for instance, when is parody humor, and when is it a form of resistance against Western domination? The exhibition casts the European as the cultural "other" and this reversal of the usual Eurocentric perspective suggests the exhibition will be sobering and thought-provoking. African voices will permeate the exhibition and its interpretive strategies to insure that its intellectual conclusions are reinforced by opinions expressed by Africans.

A 200-page exhibition catalogue will include essays by recognized experts and numerous color and black-and-white illustrations that will expand on the ideas conveyed by the exhibition.

Tickets are $12 for adults, $6 for ages 6-17, $10 for groups of 15+ and free for DIA members.

Art Dealer and Collector Legend Ernst Beyeler Dies in Switzerland

On February 25, 2010, Ernst Beyeler passed away at his residence in Riehen, Switzerland. He was eighty-eight years old.

Born on July 16, 1921, in Basel as the son of a Swiss railway employee, Beyeler became one of the most renowned art dealers of our time. In the course of 60 years, he organized over three hundred exhibitions at the Galerie Beyeler at Bäumleingasse 9 in Basel.

Beyeler and his wife Hildy, who died in 2008, were gifted art collectors and philanthropists. Together they amassed one of the most significant collections of modern art, including works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse. It was transferred to a foundation in 1982 and was first publicly exhibited in its entirety at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1989. Today, the collection is accessible to the public at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen. Housed in a building that was designed by Renzo Piano in 1997, the collection ranges from works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh to Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Francis Bacon. These works are contextualized with tribal art objects from Africa, Oceania and Alaska. Last year, Ernst Beyeler resigned from the foundation presidency and named Hansjörg Wyss as President of the Foundation Council, Georg Krayer as President of the Administration Council, and Sam Keller as Museum Director.

Besides his various art related activities, which included co-founding the established Art Basel art fair, Beyeler was also actively engaged in the protection of nature and the environment. In 2001, he and his wife established the Art for the Tropical Forests Foundation in order to direct part of the gains from his museum to protecting the world’s tropical forests.