Male Figure (by 1931): Art, History and Details

Male Figure (by 1931) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Totokro Master.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Purported to be the earliest surviving work by a Baule carver who art historians have dubbed the "Totokro Master," this Male Figure typically comes as a pair of male and female sculptures, and serves as a bridge between the spirit (asye usu) and human worlds in the hand of Baule diviners. Representing idealized humans in their prime, the diviners consider them suitable forms used to cast out disruptive spirits. It is featured here without the female example. The African Art Sponsors—a group of donors associated with Cleveland’s Karamu House, the oldest African American theater group in the country—purchased this Baule male figure in 1929 and donated it to the museum in 1931.

Object facts

• Title: Male Figure
• Date: by 1931
• Creator attribution: Totokro Master
• Culture: Africa, West Africa, Côte d'Ivoire, Baule peoples
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: wood
• Dimensions: Overall: 44.8 x 9.3 x 7.7 cm (17 5/8 x 3 11/16 x 3 1/16 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 1931.204

A detail from the museum

In Baule society, the name of the artist who made a sculpture is not always public knowledge. In 1999, art historian Susan Vogel gave the sculptor of this work and others similar in style the nickname "Totokro Master" for the geographic region they came from.

Collection credit

Gift of the African Art Sponsors of Karamu House

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Three Pieces of Negro Sculpture." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 19, no. 3 (March 1932): 38-39.
• Petridis, Constantine. "A World of Great Art for Everyone." In Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display. Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke, 104-121. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011.
• Nzewi, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Second Careers : Two Tributaries in African Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2019

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.