Encounter with the Mumuye
Introduction
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I was not the only one who fell in love with Mumuye sculpture after its discovery in the late sixties.
Jean-Pierre Lacoste, a collector of the very beginning, expressed his first encounter with the Mumuye as follows: ‘My first encounter with Mumuye statuary was at exhibitions in Parisien galleries- Jacques Kerchache, Michel Huguenin- and it sent shock waves through me. What the public discovered was a new form of sculpture, a sculpture in movement, a sculpture of an astonishing formal variety, unrivalled by that of other peoples already known and recognized.’
There is that incredible paradox in Mumuye sculpture which is so fascinating to me. There is no any group of African sculpture which is so heterogeneous in its appearance as the Mumuye, at the same time it is so obvious that all Mumuye’s belong to the same corpus. This paradox could not be expressed more properly than by that other well known collector of Mumuye statuary, Philippe Daviaud: ‘They seem be reminders of living together in a multicultural society, one were we are enough alike to be able to speak to one another, yet different enough for everyone to have something to say.’ (see for these citations: François Neyt, Mumuye, edited by Galerie Flak, Paris 2006, p. 78 and 82)
The time has come to let my Mumuye’s go. They date from the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries and were collected in situ, except for one which I obtained from a private collection. I hope they will find a home where they will just be loved as in mine.
Jan Baptist Bedaux
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