Senufo-Gernsheim SOLD

Some Pieces I sold to African Art collectors, museums and dealers around the world. Visit our home page at Buy African Antiques for available items.

Used as the means of communication with the madebele, the bush spirits or, according to some informants, the ancestors, the primordial couple, or recently deceased elders. "They act as a visual reference and a substitute for the real and invisible madebele" (Glaze 1981:67). Indeed, they "speak" for the madebele, "communicating their messages from the spirit world to the diviner" through the diviner's ability to interpret the configuration of a variety of objects that she (all Sando diviners are women) casts on the cloth or mat where she and the client sit, facing in opposite directions holding one another's right hands.

The sculpted visual witnesses to the divination rite (tyele) image male and female in highly stylized representations. The face is defined in terms of a slightly concave, heart shaped area with delicately carved almond shaped eyes on either side of an inverted T-shaped nose above a small mouth just above the thrust of the chin. The coiffures are similar, although the female is a bit more elaborate. Their fully developed bodies, erect stance, and arms bent at the elbows with hands thrust forward image the fullness of human power, a power which mandebele can give or compromise.

Helmut Gernsheim-1987 
photo: Bill Wright

Bibliography:

Leuzinger; "Die Kunst von Schwarz Africa", Kunsthaus Zürich 1970-1971

(see Helmut's Gernsheim's biography at  http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/photographygs/gernsheim/ ) 

Helmut Gernsheim was famous for his photography collection and writings mainly, he re-discovered the world's first photograph, taken by Niepce in France in the 1820s,  in England 1952, but he had also a very big collection of African Art.

Helmut Gernsheim-photo: Ida Kar 1962