This expressive Mumuye statue was collected by the French art dealer Michel Huguenin at the end of the 1960s. In her book ‘Collectors’ Visions’ (Milan, 2018, p. 167), Christine Valluet wrote about Huguenin’s remarkable career. Born in Biarritz in 1929, he set off for Bamako in French Sudan (today’s Mali) in 1951, where a trading company had promised him a job. He stayed for ten years, until independence. A bargain hunter collecting antiquarian books from a young age, he discovered Dogon sculpture, which held no interest in expatriates and colonial officers at the time. He immediately put as much fervor into hunting down these objects as he did in unearthing rare books and dropped his ambition to one day run a bookshop. In Bamako he met the publisher François Di Dio, who gone there to collect artworks on behalf of René Rasmussen and Pierre Loeb. He also came across various other travellers, including Emil Storrer, Marie-Angie Ciolkowska, and Henri Kamer, leading him to decide to deal in African art too. Through another friend he was able to establish relations with the New York dealer Julius Carlebach, to whom he sold an important shipment of objects from Mali. On his return to France in 1961, Michel opened a shop, initially in Biarritz (Galerie Majestic, from the name of the building where it was located) for a few months, later relocating to another gallery at 27 rue Guénégaud in Paris. He continued to travel in search of interesting objects with which to stock his gallery and left fro Gabon with Philippe Guimiot in 1962, then continuing to Sierra Leano and Guinea-Bissau alone. Like his Parisian colleagues, he too bought artworks from African dealers such as Mamadou Sylla or Diongassi Almami – traders that had begun to provide artefacts for Paris galleries since the early 1950s.

Michel Huguenin held several veruy popular exhibitions at Galerie Majestic in Paris. One of the most memorable, being the first in France on the subject, was undoubtedly ‘Mumuye’, which in 1968 displayed fifteen of the fifty or so statues Michel Huguenin and Edward Klejman bought in Cameroon, in the border zone near Nigeria. The art of the Mumuye was virtually unknown at the time and the only previous exhibition of works by this ethnic group had been organized at the Moesgard Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, by the field ethnologist Mette Bovin in 1965. In 1969, Phillipe Guimiot would also bring back a group of Mumuye statuary to Paris, which he sold mostly to Jacques Kerchache, who also became an important promotor of the art of this region.