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Claude Lévi-Strauss, né le 28 novembre 1908 à Bruxelles, est un anthropologue, ethnologue et philosophe français. Professeur honoraire au Collège de France, dont il a occupé la chaire d'anthropologie sociale de 1959 à 1982, et membre de l'Académie française, dont il est devenu le premier centenaire, il compte parmi les premiers théoriciens de la pensée structuraliste.

Depuis ses premiers travaux sur les Indiens du Brésil, qu'il a étudiés sur le terrain entre 1935 et 1939, et la publication de sa thèse Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté en 1949, il a produit une œuvre scientifique dont les apports ont été reconnus au plan international. Il a ainsi consacré une tétralogie, les Mythologiques, à l'étude des mythes. Mais il a également publié des ouvrages qui sortent du strict cadre des études académiques, dont le plus célèbre, Tristes Tropiques, publié en 1955, l'a fait connaître et apprécier d'un vaste cercle de lecteurs.

 Biographie

 Enfance et formation
Claude Lévi-Strauss, issu d'une famille juive d'origine alsacienne, est né à Bruxelles de parents français. Son père était un peintre portraitiste, qui fut ruiné par l'arrivée de la photographie et son grand-père maternel était le rabbin de la synagogue de Versailles. Il fait ses études secondaires à Paris aux lycées Janson-de-Sailly et Condorcet ; puis des études supérieures à la faculté de droit de Paris (licence) et à la Sorbonne (troisième à l'agrégation de philosophie en

Georges Braque

Georges Braque, né à Argenteuil (Seine-et-Oise, actuellement Val-d'Oise) le 13 mai 1882 et mort à Paris le 31 août 1963, était un peintre et sculpteur français. Il fut, avec Pablo Picasso, l'un des initiateurs du cubisme.
 
 Biographie
Georges Braque : « Je fuis mon semblable, dans tout semblable il y a un sosie. »

Georges Braque grandit au sein d’une famille d’artisans. Il passe sa jeunesse au Havre et étudie à l'École des Beaux-Arts de 1897 à 1899 dirigé par Charles Lhuillier. Il y fait la connaissance d'Othon Friesz. Sa première formation comme peintre décorateur, il la doit à son père, Charles Braque, entrepreneur-peintre en bâtiment.

À Paris, il suit les cours d'un maître décorateur et obtient son certificat d'artisanat en 1901. L'année suivante, il entre à l'académie Humbert qu'il fréquente jusqu'en 1904. C'est là qu'il rencontre Marie Laurencin et Francis Picabia.

 Du fauvisme au cubisme
Il peint ses premières œuvres sous l'influence de l'impressionnisme jusqu'à ce qu'il découvre au Salon d’Automne de 1905 les toiles d'Henri Matisse et d'André Derain. Puis débute une collaboration artistique avec Othon Friesz avec qui il fait un séjour à Anvers, puis l'année suivante à L'Estaque (Bouches-du-Rhône) d'où il rapporte des tableaux fauves aux couleurs pures et aux compositions géométriques. ( « Souvenirs d'Anvers » ). Ses tableaux sont exposés en mars 1906 au Salon des indépendants.

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Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was an Italian artist of Jewish heritage, practicing both painting and sculpture, who pursued his career for the most part in France. Modigliani was born in Livorno (historically referred to in English as Leghorn), in northwestern Italy and began his artistic studies in Italy before moving to Paris in 1906. Influenced by the artists in his circle of friends and associates, by a range of genres and art movements, and by primitive art, Modigliani's œuvre was nonetheless unique and idiosyncratic. He died in Paris of tubercular meningitis, exacerbated by poverty, overworking, and an excessive use of alcohol and narcotics, at the age of 35.

Early life

Amedeo Modigliani was born into a Jewish family at Livorno, in Tuscany. Livorno was still a relatively new city, by Italian standards, in the late 19th century. The Livorno that Modigliani knew was a bustling centre of commerce focused upon seafaring and shipwrighting, but its cultural history lay in being a refuge for those persecuted for their religion. His own maternal great-great-grandfather was one Solomon Garsin, a Jew who had immigrated to Livorno in the eighteenth century as a religious refugee.

Modigliani was the fourth child of Flaminio Modigliani and his wife, Eugenia Garsin. His father was in the money-changing business, but when the business went bankrupt, the family lived in dire poverty. In fact, Amedeo's birth saved the family from certain ruin, as, according to an ancient law, creditors could not seize the bed of a pregnant woman or a mother

The Quai Branly museum is set on quai Branly in the 7th district of Paris, where was located the Foreign Exchange Market Department. Ambitious project led by Jacques Chirac (passionated by « primitive art ») and realised by Jean Nouvel, it has been unveiled the 20th of June 2006.

History

Jacques Kerchache, art seller and african art expert, tried from the begining of the 1990’s to bring the « primitive arts » into the Louvre museum. In 1990 he signed in the newpaper Libération an article on this topic ; the same year he met Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris.

The latter is elected president of the Republic in 1995. As soon as he arrived at the head of the State, he askes for the opening of a primitive art department at the Louvre museum. One year later he announced the project of creation of a new museum, which quickly meet an opposition, especially  with a strike of the personnal of the Man museum in 1999, to stand in the way of the disassembly of the museum’s collections and criticize the primacy of the aesthetic choice instead of the scientific factors.

An architecture competition is sent out in 1999, designating Jean Nouvel as the architect.

This museum is unveiled the 20th of June 2006 by Jacques Chirac, in the presence of Kofi Annan, Rigoberta Menchú, Paul Okalik, Dominique de Villepin, Lionel Jospin and Jean-Pierre Raffarin. The Quai Branly museum has the status of public administratove institution. It’s placed under the guardianship of the Department of Culture and

Anne-Louise Amanieu
Ecole du Louvre
Specialty Arts of Africa
December 2007

Fang mask society Ngil, Gabon, Pavilion des Sessions at the Louvre

IDENTIFICATION

Fang mask the Pavillon des Sessions consists partly of wood covered with kaolin and measure about 70 cm high. It dates from the late nineteenth century or early twentieth. Listed under the inventory number 65-104-1, it comes from the former collection of André Lefèvre and was acquired in 1965 by the Museum of Man.

DESCRIPTION

This great helmet mask represents a stylized human face, whose face and elongated heart-shaped and slightly concave is shared by a long thin nose. On the top of the forehead develops a studded headband for attaching ornaments and who bears a ridge with extension to the front leads by three strokes for joining the nasal bridge and deployed above the eyebrows. The C-shaped ears stand out in high relief on both sides of the face, as the eyes and mouth, they are barely mentioned by simple incisions highlighted by thin slits etched tattoos that recall that arborist and the Fang Ntoumou Mvai by Günter Tessmann.

ANALYSIS

The mask of Ngil (NGI) exists only among the Fang, the people established the Sanaga River (southern Cameroon) Ogooué River (northern Gabon) and in Equatorial Guinea after a period of migration to the eighteenth and

Tristan Tzara (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; April 4 or April 16, 1896 – December 25, 1963) was a Romanian and Frenchavant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishmentDada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolulwith Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilisticside, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.

After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the first step in the movement's evolution toward Surrealism. He was involved in the major polemics which led to Dada's split, defending his principles against André Breton and Francis Picabia, and, in Romania, against the eclecticmodernism of Vinea and Janco. This personal vision on art defined his Dadaist plays The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924). A forerunner of automatist techniques, Tzara eventually rallied with Breton's Surrealism, and, under its influence, wrote his celebrated utopianpoem The Approximate Man.

During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his humanist and anti-fascistperspective with a

Arman (November 17, 1928 – October 22, 2005), was a French-born Americanartist.Born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman is a painter who moved from using the objects as paintbrushes ("allures d'objet") to using them as the painting itself. He is best known for his "accumulations" and destruction/recomposition of objects.

Biography

Arman's father, Antonio Fernandez, an antiques dealer in Nice, was also an amateur artist and photographer, as well as a cellist. From his father, Arman learned oil painting and photography. After receiving his bachelor's degree in philosophy and mathematics in 1946, Arman began studying at the Ecole Nationale d'Art Decoratif in Nice. He also began learning Judo at a police Judo School in Nice where he met the artists Yves Kleinand Claude Pascal. The trio would bond closely on a subsequent hitchhiking tour of the nations of Europe. Completing his studies in 1949, Arman enrolled as a student at the École du Louvre in Paris, where he concentrated on the study of archaeology and oriental art. In 1951, Arman became a teacher at the Bushido Kai Judo School. During this time he also served in the French military, completing his tour of duty as a medical orderly during the Indo-Chinese War.

Early career

Early in the development of his career, it was apparent that Arman's concept of the accumulation of vast quantities of the same objects was to remain a significant component of his art. Ironically, Arman had

André Breton (February 19, 1896 – September 28, 1966) was a French writer, poet, and surrealisttheorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism.

Biography

Born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray(Orne) in Normandy, he studied medicineand psychiatry. During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the spiritual son of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24 and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.

From Dada to Surrealism

In 1919 Breton founded the review Littérature with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. He also connected with DadaistTristan Tzara. In 1924 he was instrumental to the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research.

In The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs Magnétiques), a collaboration with Soupault, he put the principle of automatic writing into practice. He published the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, and

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was an Andalusian-Spanishpainter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in twentieth-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubistmovement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937)

Biography

Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima TrinidadClito, a series of names honouring various saints and relatives. Added to these were Ruíz and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish custom. Born in the city of Málaga in the

Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller is a Swiss collector, born in Geneva in 1930.

Biography

He has been under the influence of a passionnate father : poetry, philosophy, musicor science (he got his PhD in biology at the age of 47).

After law studies in Geneva and London, he registers at the Bar and become manager, at the age of 28, of a financial society. In 1960, he creates his own society, the Private Society of Managment, specialized in the managment of the housing stock and construction of social flats.

Collector as his father-in-law Josef Mueller, he goes in for « non-western » arts. With his wife Monique, he creates in 1977 the Barbier-Mueller museum, which organize more than seventy-five exhibitions, most of them attended with importants catalogues, presenting the differents sections of the familial collection, with the contribution of major european, american and asian museums. He carries out or finances researches in Sumatra, in Ivory Coast and Guinea. He’s one of the best expert of the Batak ethnic group, in the north of Sumatra. In may 1997, the Barbier-Mueller precolombian art museum opens opposite to the Picasso museum, in Barcelona. The town council offers a long-time loan from the Nadal Palace to expose around 400 works of art from Pre-Hispanic America.

Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller is also a recognized specialist of the poetry and the french history of the 16th century. Bibliophile since the age of 13, he has gathered one of the most full library devoted to Ronsard and other authors of the Pléiade. Entitled « Ma Bibliothèque poétique », the catalogue of this collection count 7 volumes already published. Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller has also written many articles for journals such as « Bibliothèque d’humanisme »,

Sir Henry Morton Stanley , GCB, born John Rowlands (January 28, 1841 – May 10, 1904), was a Britishjournalist and explorer famous for his exploration of Africa and his search for David Livingstone. Stanley is often remembered for the words uttered to Livingstone upon finding him: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?", although there is some question as to authenticity of this now famous greeting.

Biography

Stanley was born in Denbigh, Wales. At the time, his mother, Elizabeth Parry, was nineteen years old. According to Stanley himself, his father, John Rowlands, was an alcoholic; there is some doubt as to his true parentage. His parents were unmarried, so his birth certificate refers to him as a bastard, and the stigma of illegitimacy weighed heavily upon him all his life. He was raised by his grandfather until the age of five. When his guardian died, Stanley stayed at first with cousins and nieces for a short time, but was eventually sent to St. Asaph Union Workhouse for the poor, where overcrowding and lack of supervision resulted in frequent abuse by the older boys. When he was ten, his mother and two siblings stayed for a short while in this workhouse, without Stanley realizing who they were. He stayed until the age of 15. After completing an elementary education, he was employed as a pupil teacher in a National School. In 1859, at the age of 18, he made his passage to the United States in search of a new life. Upon arriving in New Orleans, he absconded from his boat. According to his own declarations, he became friendly with a wealthy trader named Stanley, by accident: he saw Stanley sitting on a chair outside his store and asked him if he had any job opening for a person such as himself. However, he did so in the British style, "Do you want a boy, sir?" As it happened, the childless man had indeed

Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazzà, best known as Pierre Paul François Camille Savorgnan de Brazza (January 26,1852 - September 14, 1905), was a Franco-Italian explorer, born in Italy and later naturalizedFrenchman. With the backing of the Société de Géographique de Paris, he opened up for France entry along the right bank of the Congo that eventually led to French colonies in Central Africa. His easy manner and great physical charm, as well as his pacific approach among Africans, were his trademarks. Under French colonial rule, Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo was named in his honor.

Early  years

Born in Rome on January 26,1852, Pietro Savorgnan di Brazzà was the seventh son of Count Ascanio Savorgnan di Brazzà, a nobleman of Udine with many French connections and Giacinta Simonetti. Pietro was interested in exploration from an early age and won entry to the French naval school at Brest, graduated as an ensign, and went on the French ship Jeanne d'Arc to Algeria.

Exploration to Africa

His next ship was the Venus, which stopped at Gabonregularly, and in 1874, de Brazza made two trips, up the Gabon Riverand Ogoue River. He then proposed to the government that he explore the Ogoueto its source, and with the help of friends in high places, including Jules Ferryand Leon Gambetta, he secured partial funding, the rest

Jean Rouch (31 May1917 - 18 February2004) was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.

He began his long association with African subjects in 1941 after working as civil engineer supervising a construction project in Niger. However, shortly afterwards he returned to France to participate in the Resistance. After the war, he did a brief stint as a journalist with Agence France-Presse before returning to Africa where he become an influential anthropologist and sometimes controversial filmmaker.

He is considered as one the pioneers of Nouvelle Vague, of visual anthropology and the father of ethnofiction. Rouch's films mostly belonged to the cinéma vérité school – a term that Edgar Morinused in a 1960 France-Observateur article referring to Dziga Vertov's Kinopravda. His best known film, one of the central works of the Nouvelle Vague, is Chronique d'un été (1961) which he filmed with sociologist Edgar Morin and in which he portrays the social life of contemporary France. Throughout his career, he used his camera to report on life in Africa. Over the course of five decades, he made almost 120 films.

He died in an automobile accident in February 2004, some 16 kilometres from the town of Birnin N'Konni in central Niger.

Main films

• 1954: Les Maîtres Fous (The Mad

Julien Michel Leiris (April 20, 1901 in Paris – September 30, 1990 in Saint-Hilaire, Essonne) was a Frenchsurrealistwriter and ethnographer.

Biography

Michel Leiris obtained his baccalauréat in philosophy in 1918 and after a brief attempt at studying chemistry, he developed a strong interest in jazz and poetry. Between 1921 and 1924, Leiris met a number of important figures such as Max Jacob, Georges Henri Rivière, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Despos, Georges Bataille and the artist André Masson, who soon became his mentor. Through Masson, Leiris became a member of the Surrealistmovement, contributed to La Révolution surréaliste, published Simulacre(1925), and Le Point Cardinal (1927), and wrote a surrealist novel Aurora(1927-28; first published in 1946). In 1926, he married Louise Godon, the step-daughter of Picasso's dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and traveled to Egypt and Greece.

Following a fall out with André Breton in 1929, he joined Bataille’s team as a sub-editor for Documents, to which he also regularly contributed articles such as “Notes on Two Microcosmic Figures of the 14th and 15th Centuries” (1929, issue 1), “In Connection with the ‘Musée des Sorciers" (1929, issue 2), "Civilisation" (1929, issue 4), “The ‘Caput Mortuum’ or the Alchemist’s Wife” (1930, issue 8), and on artists such as Giacometti,Miró, Picasso, and the 16th

In 1983, a Parisian trader, Jean-Michel Huguenin, makes discover seats Sénoufo. In 1985, another Parisian trader, Réginald Groux, discovers the ladders of lofts Dogon — coming from the cliff of Bandiagara — and Lobi in the region of Mopti (Mali).He acquires a first lot of fifty, makes them socler and sells them in his gallery by making a pretty benefit.

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Achi - Adangmé - Adio - Afar - Afo - Aka - Akan - Akyem - Akwaim - Alagya - Aman - Amhara - Amba - Ambo - Angoni - Anga - Ankwé - Ano - Anyi