Mossi Bolsa Doll

Mossi Bolsa doll, ex personal collection Ladislas Segy (1904-1988). Born in Hungary, Segy was raised in Germany before moving to Paris to pursue a career as an artist while earning a living in fashion. He immigrated to the United States in the 1930s. It was in Germany at the age of eighteen that he was first exposed to African art. In a 1951 radio interview with New York municipal radio personality Lloyd Moss, Segy described being thunderstruck by a carved African figure at an ethnological museum. In the same interview he went on to say, naively, that traditional African art no longer existed on the continent and that as a result he sourced all the material for his gallery (founded 1950) in Europe from “old colonial collections.” Over the course of his career, Segy produced over forty books on African art. One of these volumes, whose publication date has not been determined, was titled The Mossi Doll: An Archetypal Fertility Figure, A Morphological-Phenomenonolical Investigation. Segy was survived by his widow for over twenty years. This doll and others remained in their household until the end. According to the great collector Jay T. Last, Segy was notoriously thrifty. Apparently this included making his own bases from lumberyard leftovers hand-sawn into squares, painted and tacked to figurative objects. This figure retains Segy’s vintage base and a variety of vintage stickers.

8″

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