MONTAGUT GALLERY BARCELONA
Spain
Calle Enrique Granados 49, 08008 Barcelona
Phone: +34 678 027 692
info@galeriamontagut.com
www.galeriamontagut.com
Montagut Gallery is an art gallery founded in 1990 in Barcelona specializing in Tribal African art.
Since its beginnings the gallery promotes African cultures and sells artworks to both collectors and institutions. Our goal is to offer a maximum guarantee in terms of quality and authenticity of our objects.
We have international representation participating every year in Parcours des Mondes in Paris, Brafa Art Fair in Brussels, Paris Tribal in Pairs and Fine Art & La Biennale in Paris.
Crest ciwara, female oryx antelope and fawn
Bamana people, Mali
19th Century
66 cm
Wood, metal
Provenance
Henri Kamer collection, Paris
Jacques Boussard collection, Paris
Private collection
Publication
Patrick Caput et Valentine Plisnier,
Arts d’Afrique Portraits d’une collection, 2016, p.154-155
Artist, painter and aesthete, Jacques Boussard (1915-1989) made his artistic research evolve through the great movements of the 20th century (realism, cubism, abstraction). Particularly sensitive to the question of form, he became interested in African art from the 1950s following his numerous visits to his friends F. H. Lem and I. Païlès, themselves collectors of primitive arts.
This encounter with distant arts then resonated throughout his work. As a lover of ancient art, his taste led him more towards statuary than towards masks. He particularly appreciated “the gravity and nobility, the serenity, the logic, the clarity” of sub-Saharan sculptures (see Primitive Arts in the Artists’ Workshops).
This beautiful crest undeniably echoes Jacques Boussard’s interest in plastic purity. Wonderfully combining the stylization of forms with the purity of volumes, it is inscribed, through the remarkable flight of the horns, in the verticality. The body of the oryx antelope is reduced to its simplest expression. It carries on its back a small fawn, dynamic and graphic. This interplay between the two characters, the mother and the child, their modeling and their touching, nuanced patina are evidence of great antiquity.