Discovering African Art in Geneva, Switzerland

The year I graduated from high school, the Musee Barbier-Mueller started in the old town in Geneva, Switzerland. In between winter and spring classes, I had the great good fortune to discover these elegant galleries filled with esoteric African art.

The collection was started by Josef Mueller in 1907 and contains over 7,000 items from tribal as well as 'classical antiquity.' It seems Monsieur Mueller was quite the collector. And his heirs appear to be continuing the legacy by publishing extensive catalogs of artwork for all to see.

The current exhibition was on "Les Gans du Burkina Faso" which reminded me a tad of a Dr. Seuss book. Burkina Faso is a little kingdom of about 6,000 people who came from Ghana in the 15th Century. From the video I saw, artists in that same area are still working with the same bestial images they did in the 1400's while the Renaissance was just beginning in Italy.

Jewelry from these people were on display—great bronze amulets and bracelets of snakes and human forms. There were rams who looked like daschunds and snakes that were braided with three heads. There were "Amulettes relevant to the personal protection" of the wearer, if my french serves me. I spent a long time drawing and basking in the relative silence of the place. Whispered french was all I heard over the playing of a video that showed a twentieth century Gan artist working on a sculpture.

I don't know much about African art and I find myself more drawn to cultural differences. I was always a big fan of dead, white European male painters because that was my education. I find myself stretching into realms that make little or no sense to me. And at the same time I find myself inspired to see artists creating across time, cultures and space around the Earth.

The most poignant piece was a tiny little sculpture of a two headed fused body with four legs adjacent to one another and only two arms. It seems the others had fused at the shoulders and the head had a pair of faces flatly staring into space. Yet these two were joined, not provocatively, but intimately, as if married for a very long time. These little iron people were frozen in time together, not looking at one another, but looking outward in the same direction. It was simply titled, "Double Figurine" and this lacked all the sweetness of the pose, all the nuance of a couple that had simply grown together over time. How gracious of the artist to capture something so pure and universal that a 21st century viewer could be as captivated by something six hundred years older.

And with that, a lovely African couple walked in with exquisite clothes: she in a white pashmina and he in a traditionally elegant suit seen on most men in Geneva. They quibbled about the price of entrance and then agreed to give in. I watched them walk around together, holding hands, their elegant brown faces peering into cases of artifacts from the continent of their ancestors. There they were: looking outward in the same direction.