72 FIGS. 6a & b (below and right): Bird figure. Unidentified artist. Wood. H: 138 cm. Reported provenance: Private collection, before 1964; Merton D. Simpson, New York; Wilmer Jennings Gallery, New York; James C. Jamieson III, St. Louis. Private collection. Images © Sotheby’s. When he published L’art sacré sénoufo in 1978, Bohumil Holas, then director of the Musée National in Abidjan, reproduced a photograph of this sculpture. He characterized the work as a “masterpiece of liturgical Senufo art” and explained the figure merges images of a large hornbill and pregnant woman in a “deliberately streamlined style” (Holas 1978: 246). Observers and scholars have questioned Holas’ methods and analyses (compare Knops 1958), but connoisseurs still often assert that the bold synthesis of form typical of hornbill sculptures refers visually to male-female forces of procreation. FIG. 4 (above): Caryatid vessel. Unidentified artist. Wood. H: 36 cm. Reported provenance: Acquired by Karl-Heinz Krieg in Mbengué, Côte d’Ivoire, c. 1966; Sotheby’s (Paris), 11 December 2013, lot 33. The Kronos Collections. Photo: © Edward Parrinello, New York. British archaeologist Timothy Garrard (1995: 456, cat. 5.123) suggests that a stylistically similar sculpture in a New York private collection belonged to a malefigure pair and served as an abode for otherworld entities during divination consultations. FIG. 5 (right): Staff. Unidentified artist. Wood. H: 110 cm. Reported provenance: Acquired by Emil Storrer in Côte d’Ivoire, 1950s; Edith Hafter, Solothurn, Switzerland; Galerie Olivier Castellano, Paris. Muri Collection. Photo: © Hughes Dubois, Paris/Brussels. A note accompanying a 1907–9 Deutsche Inner-Afrikanische Forschungs-Expedition illustration of two different staffs (Frobenius-Institut KBA 10417), each topped by the figure of a hornbill bird, indicates the objects are “Diulla” (Jula) from “Papara in the area of Furru” (probably Fourou). The information clouds later twentieth-century labeling of similar forms as Senufo.
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