On November 24th, 2021, PIASA will present its second sale of the year dedicated to the African continent and its related scenes. This sale will count several sections: the first section will feature works from the collection of Maine Durieu, a collector, gallerist and artist, niece of celebrated French sculptor Germaine Richier, and who passed away in 2015.
"I was lucky enough, forty years after meeting her in Paris in the early 1970s, to become her friend, a brother almost.
Grand Jacques, her husband, was building roads in West Africa. Maine traveled the trails, passionate about art, searching for objects first for pleasure, then for passion, to finally make it her profession, always keeping the pleasure and fire. She had several galleries in Paris, including the very famous one on the Quai des GrandsAugustins and the last one on rue Visconti. The years will be illuminated by superb exhibitions discovering the richness of the Ivorian ethnic groups and the Gan culture of Burkina Faso, of which she will exhibit treasures made of sumptuous bronze ritual bells whose patinas went, a rare thing in Africa, from antique green to an azure crystallization.
Maine maintained reserved gardens. Among these were her daughter Laurence and her three grandchildren, her collection of paintings, and the unlikely, unexpected house built on a hill in Banfora across from the foothills of Mali, overlooking a valley covered with sugar cane, with only a small village under the protection by Chief Issouf. I went there three times and the partridges and crocodiles we hunted gave rise to feasts worthy of novels. An exceptional place for an exceptional woman!
The collection presented here is a true map of who Germaine Durieu was. Her choice to collect these paintings for over 40 years is truly an expression of her deep personality, her vision, her non-conformism. Maine did not follow the beaten path. She was constantly innovating.
Pilipili Mulongoy (1914-2007, Congo)
Untitled (Poissons sur fond turquoise)
Estimate: 4 000 / 6 000 €
The niece of legendary sculptor Germaine Richier, she was also an artist, in her own way. After living in Niamey, Cotonou and Kinshasa, Maine moved to Abidjan in 1976. She enrolled at the Beaux-Arts, painting section, with Serge Hélénon as her professor. Her studio mates were called Koudougnon, Tina Meledge, Kra, Yacouba. At the same time, she opened her first gallery of ancient African arts in the Ivorian capital. From then on, she never ceased to exhibit contemporary painters in her different addresses, rue du Commerce in Abidjan, then in Paris.
At the end of the 1970s, she met Zephirin, a brilliant young painter, self-taught, with whom she shared the large straw hut workshop that adjoined her house in Cocody, on the Corniche, overlooking the Ebrié Lagoon and the Plateau district. A large straw hut with a pointed roof where they both painted for hours. Her daughter Laurence remembers that every morning, Zephirin would arrive from his neighborhood of Adjamé, impeccably dressed in a shirt with a wide collar, embracing you with his big arms, his face marked with a huge smile, his eyes always laughing.
Losseni (1959-2009, Côte d'Ivoire)
Untitled
Estimation : 1 000 / 1 500 €
With his direct, rhythmic, polyphonic language, Zéphirin was born deaf, but he listened with his eyes. Fascinated by the city, he painted Abidjan in all its light, its energy, its violence. Zephirin, poet, painter of the daily life of the streets. Under his brush, his freedom was total. Maine bought his paintings and drawings and exhibited them regularly.
Painter, collector, gallery owner, she liked to carry the work of other artists, such as Losseni, who studied at the "Centre de peinture Charles Bieth", created in 1969 by Charles and Marguerite Bieth, who welcomed school dropouts and handicapped youth in Abengourou, in the East of the Côte d'Ivoire. The painters of Lubumbashi: Mwenze, Pili Pili and Bela Sara in 1992. Serge Hélénon and Louis Laouchez of the Négro Caraïbes School in 1996. Aboudramane Doumbouya and Franck Lundangui in 1999.
Her luminous and sparkling eyes, her bright smile, suddenly disappeared in 2015, depriving us of a true lady, lover of freedom."
Albert Lubaki (1895-?, Congo)
Untitled, circa 1930s
Estimation : 15 000 / 20 000 €
Pierre Loos —
