Encounter with the Villi Sculpture

The Villi Sculpture (c. late 1800s)

In a 1941 interview with art critic Pierre Courthion, French painter Henri Matisse recalls one of his earliest encounters with African Art in a shop of curiosities on Rue de Rennes in Paris. Mentioning the shop’s collection of small African statues, Matisse states:

I was astonished to see how they were concieved from the point of view of sculptural language, how it was close to the Egyptians. That is to say that compared to European sculpture, which always took its point of departure from musculature and started from the description of the object, these (...) statues were made in terms of their material, according to invented planes and proportions (Flam, 32).

As can be drawn from this interview, Matisse recognized a different mode of seeing in the works of African artists. On one spring day in 1906, Matisse finally purchased one of the sculptures, a seated figure from the Vili people of the Congo, sculpted with large slit-like eyes and a swollen tongue. Although Matisse’s interest in the sculptures preceded the purchase, this figure of just twenty-four centimeters, would come to represent a turning point for Matisse.