id:			297929
accession number:	2018.307
share license status:	Copyrighted
url:			https://clevelandart.org/art/2018.307
updated:		2022-01-04 18:06:35.200000

Untitled, c.1988–93. Gérard Santoni (Ivorian, 1943–2008). Cotton, bark cloth, and dye (indigo or kola nut); overall: 89.5 x 125.7 cm (35 1/4 x 49 1/2 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Robert and Elizabeth Soppelsa, in memory of the artist Gérard Santoni 2018.307 © Gérard Santoni

title:				Untitled
title in original language:	
series:				
series in original language:	
creation date:			c.1988–93
creation date earliest:		1983
creation date latest:		1998
current location:		
creditline:			Gift of Robert and Elizabeth Soppelsa, in memory of the artist Gérard Santoni
copyright:			© Gérard Santoni

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culture:	Ivorian
technique:	Cotton, bark cloth, and dye (indigo or kola nut)
department:	African Art
collection:	African Art
type:		Textile
find spot:	
catalogue raisonne: 

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CREATORS

* Gérard Santoni (Ivorian, 1943–2008)  - artist

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measurements: Overall: 89.5 x 125.7 cm (35 1/4 x 49 1/2 in.)
state of the work:	
edition of the work: 	

support materials:


inscriptions:

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CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

	title:		Stories From Storage
	opening date:   2021-02-07T05:00:00
	<i>Stories From Storage</i>. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 7-May 16, 2021).

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LEGACY EXHIBITIONS

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PROVENANCE

	Gérard Santoni, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, sold to Robert Soppelsa
	date: 
	footnotes: 	
	citations: 	


	Robert and Elizabeth Soppelsa, Washington DC, gifted to the Cleveland Museum of Art
	date: ?-2018
	footnotes: 	
	citations: 	


	The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
	date: 2018–
	footnotes: 	
	citations: 	


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fun fact: 
A painting by Santoni with a similar color palette of white, blue, and red appears on a 1987 stamp from Côte d'Ivoire.

digital description: 
Gérard Santoni drew inspiration from the strip-woven Baule textiles he grew up around in Côte d’Ivoire. Meant for wearing, these textiles were woven on narrow-band heddle looms. In contrast, Santoni used a wide Gobelin-style (French tapestry) loom to make this wall hanging, reflecting his art school training in Paris and Nice. He handcrafted some threads from bark cloth, and dyed cotton ones with indigo. In this serene abstract landscape, those latter threads recall Baule textiles and Ivorian waterways. The diagonal red dash echoes similar markings on Baule textiles, highlighting Santoni’s interest in color rather than symbolic or cultural meanings. He once said that “I break down the traditional weavings, ‘decompose’ them, and find something personal in their decomposition.”

wall description: 
This work belongs to a small body of tapestries that Gérard Santoni, a modernist pioneer from Côte d’Ivoire, produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, inspired by his time at the Parsons School of Design in the 1980s. The work is the most abstract of his tapestry works that explore colors and the rhythms of the natural environment, especially the undulating landscape of the shoreline. Elements of nature are suggested in the work, but they are reduced to bold, jagged, and zigzag lines rendered in the artist’s recurring palette of indigo blue, white, and red. Of all his tapestries, this particular work bears the closest connection to his paintings, which consist of mainly abstract swirls and patterns in indigo blue, a gesture to Santoni’s Baule heritage. Such paintings have earned the artist critical acclaim. His tapestries are painstakingly woven in the Baule Gobelin technique with fibrous threads that the artist fashioned out of tie-dyed traditional bark cloth. He created the tapestries in his small apartment in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s commercial capital, ideally suited for tapestry work, as opposed to painting that required more space.
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RELATED WORKS

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CITATIONS

	McEvilley, Thomas. <em>Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale. </em>New York: Museum for African Art; Munich: Prestel, 1993.
	page number: 	
	url:		https://ingallslibrary.on.worldcat.org/oclc/31167850

	Oguibe, Olu. The Culture Game. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
	page number: 	23-24
	url:		https://faculty.risd.edu/bcampbel/readingsforweek11-2.pdf

	Milbourne, Karen. “National Museum of African Art Curator Karen Milbourne talks about the power of water on this #EarthDay2018.” Smithsonian Museum of African Art.
	page number: 	
	url:		https://africa.si.edu/national-museum-of-african-art-curator-karen-milbourne-talks-about-the-power-of-water-on-this-earthday2018/

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IMAGES