MUMUYE FIGURE Wood and oil - 80 cm Nigeria In the late sixties, Jacques Kerchache, Philippe Guimiot, Alain Dufour, Lucien Van de Velde and others brought back from Nigeria the rst cluster, seen by the occidental market, of what will be called the Mumuye gures. They've been a major source of wonder and imagination and the creativity of the mumuye artists has been celebrated ever since in every major institutional and private collections. During his visits to the British Museum between 1922 and 1924, Henry Moore sketched, among some works catching his eyes, a powerful wooden gure brought back from Nigeria by the Captain E S Lilley in 1921 and donated to the Museum in 1922. This gure can be compared in many points to the gure presented here. The composition of the face with this large T-shaped nose, the deeply carved round eyes, the mouth,... are features shared by the two gures, even the slight head tilt giving the dynamic attitude to the gures. The compositions of the bodies are different. While the British Museum gure has compressed proportions, the presented gure is more hieratic and powerful. This difference could be explained by the different gender of the gures but also mainly by their respective sizes (48 and 80 cm). Even if the result of a scienti c analysis has to be interpreted with a lot of care, we requested a C14 test for this gure. All the signals date the death of the wood used to carved the sculpture before 1910. This estimated creation date corroborates that the presented gure and the British Museum gure have been carved at the same time but also and probably by the same artist or workshop. From the early discovery of a artwork of its type in 1921 to its own discovery in the late 1960's, we stand, with this Mumuye gure, with a rare and powerful witness of the two major events in the discovery of one of the major artistic cultures. Provenance: Lucien van de Velde, Antwerp, 1970's - Fritz Koenig collection, Landshut 1970's - Kurt Egger collection, Heidelberg – European collection