Tribal in Paris at the Parcours des mondes
This month Paris hosts the world’s premier tribal-art fair. Annie Blinkhorn explains its importance to this booming market and previews its highlights.
Annie Blinkhorn, Monday, 25th August 2008
Liliane and Michel Durand-Dessert unveil their collection of African art at the Hotel de la Monnaie. It is unsurprising, given Europe’s colonial history and a long tradition of collectors’ interest in the continent, that the arts of Africa dominate at the fair. Africa provides the subject for the majority of the fair’s themed exhibitions, such as ‘Arts Magie et Médecine en Afrique Noire’ at Galerie Alain Lecomte, which examines the use of tribal objects in faith, healing, superstition and magic. Figurines, such as a statuette from the Vili kingdom in the Congo (Fig. 5), often contained potions and were intended to protect individuals, homes and sometimes whole villages from harm. Pace Primitive from New York, who are showing at Galerie Nicholas Deman, bring a Mossi figure from Burkina Faso formerly in the collection of the Musée Barbier-Mueller (Fig. 2). At his gallery, Bernard Dulon offers the collection formed by Alain Javelaud, who was prompted by a visit to Cameroon in 1970 to begin ‘patiently, sometimes laboriously’ collecting the art of Nigeria, Benin and the Ivory Coast as well as Cameroon. Contemporary Africa is the focus at Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, where Antoine Schneck shows his large-scale photographs of villagers from Mahadaga, Burkina Faso.
However, Parcours des Mondes has a global reach. Galerie Furstenberg showcases pre-Columbian ceramics in ‘Masks and Figures in Mesoamerica’, as well as minerals, gems and precious metals. North America is represented by ‘Totems and Shamans’, featuring work from Alaska and north-west Canada, at Galerie Flak on the rue des Beaux-Arts, and Belgian dealers Alain Guisson and Yannick van Ruysevelt bring Haida totem art from the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. Aboriginal art of Australia is also here. Arts d’Australie-Stephane Jacob offer Ngoia Pollard Napaltjarri’s Swamp Around Nyruppi at (Fig. 4). Napaltjarri’s paintings represent both the topography of her Northern Territory home and the watersnake, which has a spiritual significance to the Warlpiri people to whom she belongs.
The relationship between ‘primitivism’ and early-20th-century art is not overlooked here, either. Entwistle are showing a Grebo mask from Eastern Liberia (Fig. 1). Christian Elwes of Entwistle describes it as ‘very similar to a mask bought by Pablo Picasso in 1912 and which served as inspiration for his sculpture Guitare, now hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York’. Galerie Jeanne-Bucher present a selection
of modern and contemporary pieces informed by the aesthetic of tribal art, including works by Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee and a late sculpture by Jean Dubuffet (Fig. 6).
For full details of the participating galleries, including addresses, go to www.parcours-des-mondes.com or telephone +32 (0) 2 502 87 60.
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