GURUNSI MASK

Origin: Burkina Faso

Region: West Africa
Size: 27.95 inches

Weight: 2.5 pounds
Material: Wood

Pollitt Collection

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurunsi_peoples

Pre-colonial history and origins

Oral traditions of the Gurunsi hold that they originated from the western Sudan near Lake Chad. While it is unknown when the migration occurred, it is believed that the Gurunsi were present in their current location by 1100 AD. Following the 15th century, when the Mossi states were established to the north, Mossi horsemen often raided Gurunsi areas for slaves, but the Gurunsi peoples were never fully subjugated, remaining independent.

GURUNSI MASK

Origin: Burkina Faso

Region: West Africa
Size: 27.95 inches

Weight: 2.5 pounds
Material: Wood

Pollitt Collection

According to doctor Salif Titamba Lankoande, in Noms de famille (Patronymes) au Burkina Faso, the name Gurunsi comes from the Djerma language of Niger words “Guru-si”, which means “iron does not penetrate”. It is said that during the Djerma invasions of Gurunsi lands in the late 19th century, a Djerma Jihadist leader by the name of Baba Ato Zato (better known by the Hausa corruption of his name: Babatu) recruited a battalion of indigenous men for his army, who after having consumed traditional medicines, were said to be invulnerable to iron.

Partition

The 1884 Conference of Berlin, which partitioned the continent of Africa into European colonies, saw the French, British and Germans each claiming part or all of Gurunsi territory. After establishing the protectorates of Yatenga (1895) and Ouagadougou (1896), the French annexed Gurunsi lands in 1897. Eventually the Germans withdrew to Togoland (modern Ghana & Togo), and an 1898 Anglo-French agreement officially established the boundary with the Gold Coast (now Ghana). This partition divided Gurunsi peoples among French and British administrative systems, facilitating the political and cultural divergence of sub-groups on each side of the boundary.

Sub-groups

There are numerous ethnic sub-groups among the Gurunsi, such as: the Frafra, Kusasi, Nabt and Talensi in Ghana; the Ko, Lyele, Nuni, and Sissala in Burkina Faso; and the Bwa of Burkina Faso and Mali. The sub-groups Kassena and Nankani inhabit both Ghana and Burkina Faso. Although characterized by neither a common language nor common political institutions, the social, economic, and religious practices of these sub-groups are sufficiently similar for them to constitute a distinct cultural unit.

AFRICAN TRIBAL ART

GURUNSI MASK

Origin: Burkina Faso
Region: West Africa

Material: Wood

Pollitt Collection

GURUNSI MASK

Origin: Burkina Faso
Region: West Africa

Size: 27.95 inches

Weight: 4.4 pounds
Material: Wood

Pollitt Collection

GURUNSI MASK

Origin: Burkina Faso
Region: West Africa

Size: 27.95 inches

Weight: 4.4 pounds
Material: Wood

Pollitt Collection

GURUNSI MASK

Origin: Burkina Faso
Region: West Africa

Size: 27.95 inches

Weight: 4.4 pounds
Material: Wood

Pollitt Collection

Source: http://zyama.com/gurunsi/index.htm

Gurunsi is a collective term, which includes Gurensi, Kasena, Lyele, Nuna, Nunuma, Sisala, and Winiama. These ethnicities speak dialects of the Gur language, and it was the Mossi who gave the Gurunsi name to the tribes who live in the west and south of the Mossi plateau. Together they number about 200,000 people, the most numerous of which are the Nuna, estimated at 100,000. The Gurunsi live in a region where the tsetse fly, carrier of sleeping sickness fatal to domestic animals, is rampant. As farmers, the Gurunsi adopted the slash-and-burn system of cultivation. During the dry season they also organize large collective fishing expeditions and hunt. The people believe in a creator god, Yi, who withdrew from humankind after the Creation; in the centre of the village a shrine is dedicated to him. Moreover, each clan shelters magic objects in a hut – these allow them to communicate with the vital forces of nature.

The masks represent the spirits of the bush. They are made in the shape of poles or in the form of animals. They are coloured red, black, and white. The eyes protrude, surrounded by concentric circles, with a rather short snout on the animal masks, and a large and protruding mouth on the more abstract masks. They are decorated with geometric motifs, and often repainted. The wearer of the mask may be invisible underneath the fibre skirt and must behave as the animal does, imitating its gait. The mask’s role is important during ceremonies at the end of initiation, at the funerals of notables, and as entertainment on certain market days.

Gurunsi statues kept inside huts or on family shrines are reserved for divination.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska 1891–1915

Henri Gaudier was born in Saint-Jean-de-Braye near Orléans. In 1910, he moved to London to become an artist, even though he had no formal training. With him came Sophie Brzeska, a Polish writer over twice his age whom he had met at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, and with whom he began an intense relationship, annexing her surname although they never married. (According to Jim Ede the linking of their names was never more than a personal arrangement.) During this time his conflicting attitudes towards art are exemplified in what he wrote to Dr. Uhlmayr, with whom he had lived the previous year:

"When I face the beauty of nature, I am no longer sensitive to art, but in the town I appreciate its myriad benefits—the more I go into the woods and the fields the more distrustful I become of art and wish all civilization to the devil; the more I wander about amidst filth and sweat the better I understand art and love it; the desire for it becomes my crying need."

Self-portrait, 1909

He resolved these reservations by taking up sculpture, having been inspired by his carpenter father. Once in England Gaudier-Brzeska fell in with the Vorticism movement of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, becoming a founding member of the London Group. After coming under the influence of Jacob Epstein in 1912, he began to believe that sculpture should leave behind the highly finished, polished style of ancient Greece and embrace a more earthy direct carving, in which the tool marks are left visible on the final work as a fingerprint of the artist. Abandoning his early fascination for Auguste Rodin, he began to study instead extra-European artworks located in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. As he was unable to afford the raw materials necessary to attempt projects on the scale of Epstein's Indian and Assyrian influenced pieces, he concentrated initially on miniaturist sculpture genres such as Japanese netsuke before developing an interest in work from West Africa and the Pacific Islands.

In 1913, he assisted with the illustrations of Haldane Macfall's book The Splendid Wayfaring along with Claud Lovat Fraser and Edward Gordon Craig. Gaudier-Brzeska's drawing style was influenced by the Chinese calligraphy and poetry which he discovered at the "Ezuversity", Ezra Pound's unofficial locus of teaching. Pound's interaction with Ernest Fenollosa's work on the Chinese brought the young sculptor to the galleries of Eastern art, where he studied the ideogram and applied it to his art. Gaudier-Brzeska had the ability to imply, with a few deft strokes, the being of a subject. His drawings also show the influence of Cubism.

At the start of the First World War, Gaudier-Brzeska enlisted with the French army. He appears to have fought with little regard for his own safety, receiving a decoration for bravery before being killed in the trenches at Neuville-St.-Vaast. During his time in the army, he sculpted a figure out of the butt of a rifle taken from a German soldier, "to express a gentler order of feeling"

Ornement Torpille, 1914 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (French, 1891 - 1915)

Bird Swallowing A Fish by Henri Gaudier Brzeska

Bird Swallowing A Fish

Vorticism Movement and Other Influences

Not long after settling in London, Gaudier-Brzeska joined the Vorticism movement of Ezra Pound and Percy Wyndham Lewis, a short-lived offshoot of Cubism and Futurism. This, and the publication of some of his drawings in the art magazine Rhythm, in 1912, brought him into contact with the two individuals who were to be extremely influential on his aesthetics and technique: the poet Ezra Pound and the sculptor Jacob Epstein. Pound introduced him to Chinese art, and to the philosophical form of oriental drawing known as calligraphy. He also bought a number of Gaudier-Brzeska's carvings and commissioned a special portrait, for which he bought the artist a block of marble. Epstein - himself something of an enfant terrible on account of his rejection of High Classical Greek sculpture in favour of African sculpture, the primitivism of tribal art and Assyrian-style Mesopotamian art - urged Gaudier-Brzeska to reject the academic conventions of stone sculpture and follow a more innovative direction. At the same time, his contacts with other Vorticists engendered a respect for Cubism and its faceted forms. Later, his work was illustrated in the Vorticist magazine Blast.

Gaudier-Brzeska's Style of Sculpture

As a result of Epstein's influence, Gaudier-Brzeska determined to forsake the highly finished, sculpture of ancient Greece and embrace a more expressive carving technique. He even dropped his admiration for the rough modelling methods of Rodin, and instead began to take an interest in Japanese art, as well as West African artifacts and Oceanic art, studying works at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and elsewhere.