The Dogon Wood Sculpture Collection

Dogon Sculpture

Dogon sculpture expresses an exotic and fascinating cultural heritage. Representing complex religious beliefs and ritual practices, it has long been admired and collected especially because of its elegant abstracted forms, strong representational imagery, and its rich spiritual meaning.

Dogon sculpture was created primarily for religious purposes, to be placed in shrines or to be used in rituals and is among the oldest surviving art forms expressed in wood. Some Dogon wood sculptures are at least 200-300 years old. Radiocarbon tests done on a number of Dogon wood sculptures have produced some astonishing results, the oldest thus far being a statue approximately 1850 years old.

The earliest studies on the Dogon were started in 1904, resulting in a few of their sculptures finding their way to gallery exhibits. In the 1930's expeditions were organized which explored the Dogon country and culture. During this period important Dogon sculpture was shown in Paris and created a sensation among artists and art connoisseurs. The early admirers and collectors of Dogon sculpture include pivotal Western artists such as Pablo Picasso and Jacob Epstein, who were inspired by the unusual and dynamic Dogon sculptural forms and fascinated by their mythic meaning. More recently, other well-known Western artists such as Richard Serra and Georg Baselitz have collected and written about Dogon sculpture.

Significant exhibitions of Dogon sculpture include the 1959 Hanover Gallery show "Sculpture of the Tellem and the Dogon"; two shows in 1973 - "African Art of the Dogon: The Myths of the Cliff Dwellers" which started at the Brooklyn Museum and toured extensively, and "Les Tellems et les Dogon" at Galerie Numaga in Switzerland; the 1978 Kahan Gallery show "Dogon Cliff Dwellers: The Art of Mali's Mountain People; and the important 1988 show "Art of the Dogon: Selections from the Lester Wunderman Collection" at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which featured some 61 items. In 1995 there were two more major shows of Dogon sculpture; "Die Kunst der Dogon" at the Rietberg Museum, Zurich and "Dege: L'Héritage Dogon" at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France. "Dogon Statuary", the first major study on Dogon figurative sculpture, from Hélène Leloup, was published in 1994 in a lavish volume.

Dogon sculpture can now be seen in many major collections and institutions, including; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Rockefeller Collection; the Musee de l'Homme (Paris); the Musee des Beaux-arts (Montreal); the Museum fur Volkerkunde (Cologne); the Rietberg Museum (Zurich); and the Staatliche Museum (Berlin).

Despite the wide diversity of type, Dogon sculpture is extraordinarily homogenous and is clearly recognizable.

Dogon Culture and Myth

The Dogon of Mali number about 250,000 people today and inhabit some 700 villages. Their present home is the Bandiagara Escarpment, a row of cliffs among the Homburi Mountains, located parallel to the Niger River and about 300 kilometers south of Timbuktu. According to oral traditions, they chose to settle among and on the cliffs precisely because of their inaccessibility. This is one of the rare regions in Africa that had no contact with the West until the end of the 19th century.

The Dogon acknowledge that they are not the first inhabitants of the country they now occupy. They claim their descent from families who populated their present area after fleeing from another region sometime between the 13th and 14th centuries. In their myths, legends and traditions they retain the memory of their predecessors. Supposedly the archaic inhabitants of the region the Dogon now inhabit were small reddish-hued people who were removed from the prime living areas by persons of normal size, known as the Tellem. These people were in turn driven from the Bandiagara cliffs by the Dogon, leaving behind their cult and funerary objects, including wood sculptures, in their spiritual sanctuaries.

Alliances were established between the invaders and the older inhabitants, and marriages reinforced the bonds. New forms of sculpture were created to embody and exemplify the new spiritual ideals. It was only after Islam was established in Dogon country in the 19th century that Dogon art forms ceased to develop. Thus, Dogon sculpture has an archaic history, manifests through a number of different styles, and embodies varying spiritual themes and myths.

The Dogon believe they were originally of Egyptian descent. Some Dogon priests apparently had advanced astronomical expertise. They used four calendars, based on their knowledge of the movements of the Sun, Moon, Venus and the "Dog Star" Sirius. They knew that Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun. And they knew of the spiral structure the Milky Way, of the rings of Saturn, and the four principal moons of Jupiter. In the late 1940s, Dogon priests told French anthropologists of secret astronomical teachings connected to their origins. These teachings concern the star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, nowadays referred to by astronomers as Sirius A.

Now details of the Sirius star system can only be detected with powerful telescopes. However according to certain Dogon priests, Sirius has a companion star which moves in a 50-year elliptical orbit around it. The priests added that this companion star is small, incredibly heavy, rotates on its axis over the period of a year and is white. They also claimed that a third star exists in the Sirius system, larger and lighter than the companion star and that this star revolves around Sirius as well. They said that around it orbits a planet from which the first spiritual teachers of the Dogon - referred to as the "Nommo" - came. According to Dogon legends, the Nommo came to earth somewhere to the northeast of the Dogon's present homeland. They supposedly were amphibious creatures who "arrived in a vessel along with fire and thunder." After they arrived they deposited a great reservoir of water and disappeared into it. The Nommo were saviors and spiritual guardians who made the journey to earth for the benefit of humankind and rule the Dogon spiritual world from the waters.

What makes the astronomical part of this legend so remarkable is that the companion star of Sirius A was first seen through a telescope in the middle of the 19th century and not photographed until 1970. Now referred to as Sirius B, its great density and the fact that is the type of star known as a "White Dwarf" with an orbital period of almost precisely 50 years and rotates on its own axis was not known until the early part of the 20 th century. Furthermore, the existence of the third star was only recently confirmed by an X-ray telescope in earth orbit. The Dogon with no astronomical instruments at their disposal, appear to have known these facts for at least five hundred and perhaps several thousand years. So, how did they learn all this? Dogon legend says that this knowledge came from unearthly sources - from the Nommo themselves!

Dogon religious beliefs are concerned largely with the spirits of various types of ancestors who are intermediaries between the living and the powers of the universe. These ancestors include the original ancestors of all mankind (the Nommo), other types of ancestor referred to as "immortals" that are revered by entire clans, and "personal ancestors" who are deceased exalted members of families. The Dogon worship all these three categories of ancestors through images placed on altars, shrines and in cave sanctuaries. Sacrifices are made to them and ritual masked dances performed to invoke their blessings. The Nommo, who are the "Masters of the Waters" and credited with the control of rain, are the central focus of Dogon cosmology, ritual and art. The Nommo can be accessed by the supreme religious leaders of the Dogon, mystic high priests referred to as "Hogon," through archaic spiritual techniques that include meditation, magical rites and shamanism.

According to Dogon myth, "Amma" the Creator created the earth from a lump of clay. Another myth tells how, after the world's creation, the Creator sacrificed one of the Nommo ancestors to the sky and two trees were born from the blood. Parts of the body were thrown to the four cardinal directions and to the earth and sky, each part becoming trees. From this account it can be seen that special trees (and presumably the wood from them) have spiritual qualities connected by myth to the Creator and the original spiritual Masters.

Like many other ancient African cultures, Dogon spiritual art is made by blacksmiths. The respect given to blacksmiths derives from their role in the myth of creation, which tells how the first blacksmith (one of the Nommos) stole a piece of the sun which included molten iron and escaped down the rainbow with his prize, his descent proceeding along a spiral path. He brought mankind fire, iron, and seeds for cultivating.

Dogon sculptures were originally carved in green wood. Hélène Leloup gives the following fascinating account of the process of wood selection, acquisition and carving:

"The blacksmith carefully selects a tree, which must be located east of the new moon's first crescent. On the new moon's first day, he sacrifices a chicken whose blood is poured on the tree mixed with kola, in order to placate the tree's nyama. The branch is then chopped off, covered in sa to prevent drying, then in the leftover blood, and it is left in situ for a week. At the end of the week (on a Monday or Thursday), the sculptor starts roughing down the log......"

According to Hélène Leloup:

"Among the most spectacular sculptures we find the mysterious hermaphrodites. To understand these statues, one must clarify the Dogon concept of perfection deriving from the re-union of what was separated. For young initiates, these statues explained the necessity of the dualism existing in nature, the social differentiation between men and women, the distinction between the sexes - dualism one had to transgress in order to attain perfection and continuity in life. We have here the illustration of a typical Dogon concept: the male contains the female who also contains the male....

These atypical beings are said to represent the 'eight primordial ancestors, born of the couple fashioned by God (who) could inseminate themselves, each being double and of both sexes'.

Mythical beings symbolize the human ideal (warrior attributes for men; procreation for women). These monoxyle statues are seated in a chiefly position on a stool carved in the image of the world. The two discs are connected by a central axis surrounded by caryatids. The bottom disc represents the earth and the top represents the sky...."