ART on view 66 LEFT, TOP TO BOTTOM FIG. 5: Mask, bagle, called Ngedi with a hairy coiffure. Western Dan region, Nyor Diaple village, Liberia. C. 1940. Attributed to Tame. Barbara and Eberhard Fischer Collection. Ex. George Wowoa Tahmen, c. 1980. Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger. © Museum Rietberg, Zurich. FIG. 6: Mask, deangle, with female traits. Western Dan region, Nyor Diaple village, Liberia. C. 1930. Carved by Tame. Barbara and Eberhard Fischer Collection. Collected by Hans Himmelheber in 1949. Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger. © Museum Rietberg, Zurich. FIG. 7: Mask, deangle, with female traits. Western Dan region, Nyor Diaple village, Liberia. C. 1930. Carved by Tame. Barbara and Eberhard Fischer Collection. Collected by Hans Himmelheber in 1949. Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger. © Museum Rietberg, Zurich. FIG. 8 (near right): Mask, seli, sculpted by Sabu bi Boti, danced in Tibeita in 1975. Photo: Eberhard Fischer. © Eberhard Fischer. FIG. 9 (middle right): Mask, sauli, surmounted by figures. Tibeita, northern Guro region, Côte d’Ivoire. 1975. Attributed to Sabu bi Boti. Museum Rietberg, Zurich. Donated by Barbara and Eberhard Fischer. Photo: Rainer Wolfsberger. © Museum Rietberg, Zurich. motivated him to take innumerable field photographs in the Guro, Dan, Lobi, Senufo, and Baule regions between 1933 and 1975 (figs. 1 and 2), for which subsequent generations of scholars owe him a debt of gratitude. Drawing on ethno-artistic research that took place over the course of decades, Afrikanische Meister: Kunst der Elfenbeinküste (African Masters: Art from the Ivory Coast) puts the authors of the works it shows in the foreground, as the Rietberg Museum has been successfully doing since the 1970s. The selection of objects—drawn from leading worldwide museums and private collections such as the Musée des Civilisations de Côte d’Ivoire in Abidjan, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, and the Musée Royal d’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren—includes notable masterpieces as well as less exceptional works, which though not as well known nevertheless unveil unique artistic personalities. Most of the sculptures and masks presented date from the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, from both the pre-colonial and colonial periods. In many cases they are exhibited along with videos showing the artists at work and within a setting that gives space to each artistic region and to each of its masters. This gives the visitor the opportunity to gain a clear understanding of, among other things, the elements that are unique to individual past traditions and that inspired sculptors’ work while at the same time comparing them to contemporary creations from the same area. The result is a panorama of the various styles of Ivorian art, presented through a synthesis of the current state of knowledge of and research on regional art historical development. The question that is central to the exhibition is the identification of African artists. The singular character of the various personalities revealed here becomes apparent through close examination of individual works rather than through an analysis of larger corpuses. Creations that can be attributed to students or successors of the masters in question provide an additional aesthetic experience. Since the end of the 1940s, Hans Himmelheber and Eberhard Fischer worked to document the Dan artists of Liberia, based on in-situ interviews, and observations, and on photographs and films of their work techniques. This research made it possible to learn the names of active artists, primarily ones working in the first half of the twentieth century. Sra was undoubtedly the most important and famous of these. It also was possible to identify several generations of sculptors in the village of Nyor Diaple (figs. 3, 5, and 6). In the absence of a name, other terms can serve as a means of identifying an artist’s hand. Names based on ge-
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