Dogon figure from the 1935 Sahara-Sudan mission
before 1935
A wooden figure stands stiffly upright, arms close to the body, face reduced to a few planes, the whole form pulled into a narrow column as if it had been carved from a branch that was never allowed to lose its shape. The surface is dark and crusted where years of offerings of millet porridge and blood have been poured over it. Dogon figures like this were kept in family shrines and on altars in the cliffs of Bandiagara in Mali, where they stood for ancestors and for the founding beings of the Dogon world, and were rarely seen by outsiders.
Dogon sculpture is admired for the way it turns the human body into geometry. Look at the angles of the elbows and knees, the flat chest, the arrow-shaped nose that continues the line of the brow, and the balance between symmetry and small deviations, a tilted head or a hand placed differently, that give each figure its personality. Carvers worked in a tradition that stretched back to the Tellem, the earlier inhabitants of the cliffs, and the oldest pieces share the raised arms and columnar bodies of the Djennenké statue nearby. The patina tells you the object was used, fed and consulted, not just displayed.
The inventory number records how it came to Paris: it was collected in 1935 by the Sahara-Sudan mission led by Marcel Griaule, the ethnographer who devoted his life to the Dogon and whose team, following the earlier Dakar-Djibouti expedition, brought thousands of objects back to the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Griaule's writings made the Dogon the most famous people in African anthropology, and the objects he gathered are the core of the museum's Mali holdings. Today those same objects are at the heart of discussions between France and Mali about the return of heritage, so the figure carries both an artistic and a political history.
Did You Know? The number 71.1935.105 in the inventory identifies the 1935 Sahara-Sudan expedition led by the ethnographer Marcel Griaule.
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