[Catalogue d'exposition de Kalifala Sidibé] Výstava. Obraz? ?ernocha Kalifala Sidibé A Kreseb A Grafiky Václava Fialy [avec] 3 vignettes de collection

Extremely rare first edition of the exhibition catalog of paintings and photographs by Kalifala Sidibé and drawings by the Czechoslovak artist Václav Fiala at the Krasoumná Jednota Gallery in Prague.

[With:] 3 original 1930's German cigarette cards depicting 3 Sidibé paintings in color: "The Judgment of Pâris", "On the banks of the Niger River" and "Elephant Hunt". These are very rare reproductions of Sidibé's paintings, which have all but disappeared today. Each card is numbered and includes a short biography of the painter on verso.
Two of the paintings featured on the cards to our knowledge have never been reproduced in the rare illustrated press articles on Sidibé - Der Querschnitt, n°IX, Cahier 12, 1929, p. 890; La Lumière, November 2, 1929, p. 11; Der Cicerone, n° XXII, Cahier 2, 1930, p. 54-55; Omnibus, 1931, p. 32; Comœdia, March 7, 1931, p. 3. A poor-quality black-and-white reproduction of "Elephant Hunt" was published in La Liberté, October 19, 1929, p. 1.
These colorful objects of popular culture keep a visual record of the work of an unjustly forgotten and trailblazing artist. This type of illustrated vignette used to stiffen soft packets of cigarettes was essentially a marketing device intended to promote sales by encouraging people to acquire complete sets - in this case, the series "Die bunte Welt" (The Multicolored World), to be housed in special albums, known as "Sammelalbums", as indicated on the card's verso.
Prague Exhibition catalog of paintings by Sidibé
The booklet lists twenty of Sidibé's paintings, with titles and sale prices; the last line also indicates a set of 24 of his photographs, with its price crossed out and corrected.
An exceptional document recording the presence and reception of artworks by Sudanese (present-day Mali) painter and precursor of modern African art Kalifala Sidibé, in Prague's most important avant-garde exhibition gallery in the inter-war years.
Considered the first African painter working on canvas, Sidibé was "discovered" by French banker Henri Hirsch, during a visit to French West African colonial territories. In 1929, Hirsch sent portraits of the artist and photographs of his work to his friend Georges Huisman. Within a few months, Huisman attracted the interest of gallery owner Georges Bernheim who exhibited Sidibé's paintings for the first time in 1929. The event enjoyed a great success with connoisseurs and rave reviews from leading figures in the art world: Le Corbusier, Michel Leiris, Roland Dorgelès. After the first show in Paris, Sidibé's paintings soon toured Europe and were exhibited in Prague from May 8 to 25, 1930. Most of his artworks created during his short career – Sidibé died at the age of 30 a mere months after this exhibition – has now been lost. The only surviving works are now part of prestigious European collections, including the Le Corbusier Foundation and the Michael Graham-Stewart collection.
As in France, "primitive art" had entered Czechoslovakia with the dissemination of Cubist aesthetics. In 1913, "Negro sculpture" appeared alongside artworks by Braque, Picasso, Derain, Cézanne and Juan Gris at the third exhibition of the Cubist movement's Groupe des Beaux-Arts in Prague. This first exhibition remains famous for displaying no original works from Africa: only including a single African statuette which turned out to be a fake, since attributed to the artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, mixing the aesthetics of Cameroonian statues and Oceanian wooden reliefs from Palau. It also included photographs of African sculptures from the collection of the French art dealer Kahnweiler. The following year, five statuettes from the Belgian Congo and Cameroon made the journey to Prague also displayed with photographs of other non-European works of art. The aim was to demonstrate the universality of art bringing together classical and folk art, the European and the ethnographic. The result in these avant-garde exhibitions was a seemingly incoherent melange of European and non-European artworks of different periods and styles, in an attempt to find formal parallels to associate with a new canon Cubist artists were then creating.
Except for Sidibé's exhibition, African art in Czechoslovakia was only about fetishes, masks and statuettes, which certain great Czech artists, such as Josef Čapek would progressively add to their aesthetic influences and artistic theories. This vision would also continue in the 1930s, with the exhibition of works by avant-garde painter Emil Filla accompanied by businessman Joe Hloucha's collection from sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, pre-Columbian America and Asia (Emil Filla - Černošská a tichomořská plastika ze sbírky Joe Hlouchy, February 5-26, 1935, Prague).
In 1930 Prague, Sidibé's exhibition radically differed from the usual non-European mélange of art, where anonymous creations were displayed with no apparent connection between them. The exhibition of Sidibé was organized by the Krasoumná Jednota, Prague's most important association for the promotion of contemporary and avant-garde art founded in 1850. In the 1920s, it exhibited the great names of Czech painting as well as Paul Klee and Emil Nolde. The year before Sidibé's exhibition, the gallery featured works by Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault and Auguste Rodin. The Jednota gallery made Sidibé the headliner of this unprecedented event in the history of the Czech avant-garde, having already created a sensation at Bernheim in Paris. Few traces of the Prague event survive today. The exhibition is not listed in the extensive database of Art Exhibitions in the Czech Lands, 1820-1950. This catalog is one of the few surviving sources for understanding the European reception of Sidibé's work: the attraction of the exotic which still largely prevailed, is reflected in the soaring prices of his paintings, between 2,500 and 6,000 Czech crowns - an average of $12,000 today. Sidibé shared the gallery space with Czech artist Vaclav Fiala, academic painter and illustrator who exhibited more drawings for a much lower average price ($800 today). This exhibition remains a unique event in the early 20th-century Czech art world: the few exhibitions of African art held between 1910 and 1930 were confined to primitivist comparisons between modern art and the indigenous cultures of America, Africa and Oceania.
Due to his premature death and a limited number of artworks, Sidibé was soon forgotten despite the honors he received from the most prestigious modern art galleries and leading centers of artistic avant-garde. Perhaps his marouflaged canvases - antithesis of dark wooden fetishes - didn't fulfill European preconceived ideas of African art.
The story of Sidibé and his work illustrates the ambivalent reception of modern African art in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century: praised by avant-garde critics, the painter was nevertheless forbidden to leave French Sudan to attend his first Parisian exhibition. This small booklet is probably the only documentary record of Sidibé's artworks and their journey to Eastern Europe, where they were exceptionally displayed as the creations of a contemporary artist in his own right.