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African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting
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Female Figure with Raised Arms
Mali, Bondum region, village of Tintam; Dogon peoples, 15th–18th century
Wood, clay, pigment; H. 29 7/8 in. (76 cm)
Provenance: Emil Storrer, Zürich, before 1950; Josef Mueller, ca. 1950
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Dogon communities situated in the elevated rocky heights of Mali's spectacular Bandiagara Escarpment manage to wrest subsistence crops from poor soil in an arid climate. The most distinctive subject of Dogon devotional sculpture is that of a standing figure with raised arms—a gesture commonly interpreted as a prayer or an appeal for rain. Dating back possibly as far as the fifteenth century, this female figure has been related to a group of at least ten sculptures originating from the Bondum region, in the village of Tintam. Among this corpus, four figures are entirely covered with the same distinctive, thick, ochre-red clay slip. The other three are: a mother and child figure in the collection of the Musée du quai Branly, Paris (inventory no. 70.199.9.3); and two female figures in the collection of the Museum Rietberg, Zürich, one carrying a jar on her head and the other with raised arms. The latter is almost identical to this one and can be attributed to the same hand. See a comparative example in the Met's collection.
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