FIGS. 1a and b (right and facing page right): Serpent-shaped headdress (front and back). Baga or Nalu, Guinea. Possibly late 19th or early 20th century. Wood, pigment. H: 148 cm. Acquired by Jacqueline and Maurice Nicaud in Guinea in 1954. Ex Mathias Komor, New York, 1960. The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Norweb Collection, inv. 1960.37. 122 An elegant serpent-shaped headdress from Guinea is one of the undisputed highlights of the African art collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art (fi gs. 1a and b). It is one of a group of a dozen or so truly great examples of its genre that have been preserved in Western collections, including those on display at the Menil Collection in Houston and at the Musée du Louvre in Paris (fi g. 2). In his essay on the work published soon after its acquisition in 1960, former CMA curator William D. Wixom described it as “possibly the most graceful example of sev- Not Just a Snake New Light on the Serpent Headdress at the Cleveland Museum of Art eral in public and private collections.”1 Today it is prominently displayed in a freestanding case in the museum’s African gallery and has been featured in many CMA publications.2 In recent years, two examples of such serpent headdresses have sold at auction for more than three million dollars each at sales in Paris and New York (fi gs. 3 and 6).3 Recent research sheds new light on this sculpture and gives it a unique place in the small corpus of similar works that have survived. There is only one fi eld photograph known of a serpent headdress of this kind being worn by a dancer in Guinea in what appears to be a traditional context (fi gs. 4a and b). It was taken in 1954, shortly before the country’s independence in 1958. While this is a telling image, because the serpent headdress and its dancer appear outside of their ritual context, some may not consider it entirely “authentic.” Nevertheless, since there are no others, I included it as a contextual comparative in the CMA’s 2003 handbook South of the Sahara, and we also reproduced the OBJECT history By Constantine Petridis
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