Pigment box with peaked corners

African women in traditional societies enhanced their natural beauty with scarification and cosmetic preparations. For example, they applied black kohl to their eyes, painted their faces and bodies with a reddish powder or paste, and moisturized their skin with shea butter. These and other cosmetic substances required containers for mixing and storage. Natural objects such as gourds and shells were available to all, but those who could afford to stored their cosmetics in pots, boxes, and bowls artfully carved by sculptors.

Lidded containers, like the ointment pot illustrated on this page (cat. 85, 1981.175.A-B), were used to store shea butter, a traditional lubricant that has been a staple ingredient in Western brand-name moisturizers since the late twentieth century. Sculptors typically carved the lid in the form of a female head with carefully detailed hairstyle and facial features. This figure's elaborate hairstyle, downcast eyes, scarification marks, and long neck reflect Baule ideals of feminine beauty and comportment. The bowl of the container resembles a type of water vessel Baule women once made.

Religious sculpture in traditional Baule society was kept hidden. To advertise their skill and creativity, specialist artists and workshops produced utilitarian objects—such as loom heddle pulleys, doors, chairs, and ointment pots—in quantity, decorated them with the masks and figures found in religious art, and sold them publicly. The similarity in form and decoration in this ointment pot and three other published examples suggests they came from the same workshop.(28)

Kuba sculptors carved boxes in a variety of shapes—square, round, oval, semilunar—to store twool (or tool). This reddish powder, made from the inner bark of a hardwood tree (Baphia and Pterocarpus families), was mixed with vegetable oil to create a pigment the Kuba used to dye raffia cloth and to paint their faces and bodies.

The Kuba decorated their wooden boxes extensively with incised and low-relief motifs that have names that were probably symbolic. The entire surface of the Dallas box (cat. 86) is covered with geometric and figurative motifs. The faceted lid transcends simple geometry with its peaked corners. Each corner is filled with a circle surrounding the sun (phila or itang, a scallop-edged circle), a raised vessel-like form that may be the most abstract rendering of a design known as Mutu Chembe (head of God), and cowrie shells on a ground of vertical lines. Multiple lines of chevrons (mbish angil) dominate the center of the slanted sides of the lid and heart shapes, which complement the hearts on the center of the lid, wrap around the corners. The heart motif along with traces of basket weave and interlace patterns also appears on the box's well-worn bottom.(29)

The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum of Art, cat. 86, pp. 236-237.

____________________
NOTES:

28. Vogel, Susan M. Baule: African Art, Western Eyes. New Haven: Yale University Press and Yale University Art Gallery in association with the Museum for African Art, New York, 1997. pp. 283-284.

Boyer, Alain-Michel, Patrick Girard, and Marceau Rivière. Arts premiers de Côte d’Ivoire. Saint-Maur, France: Sepia, 1997. p. 108, plate 110.

29. Torday, Emil, and T. A. Joyce. Notes ethnographiques sur les peoples communément appelés Bakuba, ainsi que sur les peuplades apparentées Les Bushongo; aquerelles par Norman H. Hardy. Brussels: Ministère des colonies, 1910. plate 26, no. 18.

Torday attributes an oil vessel with the heart-shaped motif to the Mbala.