Standing female figure "asie usu" or "blolo bla" · Côte d'Ivoire, Baule · ID: 3046523
Serge Brignoni (1903-2002), Bern, Switzerland (mid-1950s)
Walter Stanley Schwab, Murten, Switzerland (“WS 464”) (1996)
Description
wood, residues of black paint, pigments, small original repair, pedestal
This beautiful figure was acquired in-situ by the well-known travel writer,
photographer and filmmaker René Gardi during one of his many trips to Africa in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Gardi undertook extensive research trips to the African continent between 1948 and 1992. In radio and television programs, as well as in book form, he brought Africa and his art closer to people in the German-speaking region. To finance his projects, he regularly sold objects that he had collected there.
It was in this way the present figure came into the possession of the Swiss painter and sculptor Serge Brignoni in the mid-1950s.
Brignoni studied in Paris in 1923 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he met Alberto Giacometti, Picasso and other avant-gardists and where he first came into contact with African art.
In 1926 he started collecting these objects and soon expanded his collection area to include works of art from Melanesia and Indonesia. From 1985 he donated his collection to the city of Lugano in several batches, where it is now housed in the Museo delle Culture.
Publications
AHDRC: 0170833