Warrumbi war shield, Mendi population, Nembi Valley, Southern Highlands. Wood, pigments, lime, fiber. Height: 1.21 m / Width: 0.48m Provenance: - Former Marie Josée Guigues Collection - Padovani Collection Unlike the majority of shields from Papua New Guinea New Guinea, the manufacture of which generally involved engraving, some Highland shields stand out from the traditional classical corpus, offering polychrome surfaces, painted with abstract and geometric motifs, such as this beautiful shield. Two symmetrically arranged triangles on either side of a central horizontal band stand out from the flat surface, whose red color symbolizes victory and blood. These darker geometrical elements, whose contours are highlighted with white paint, symbolically represent the human figure. Among the warrior's attributes, the shield was the most important. The name warrumbi - literally "wall of the war tree" - comes from the wood from which these shields are made, and whose name means "war". Beyond their purely defensive function, these objects concentrated, through their colors and ornamentation, a powerful magical and spiritual force. Carl Einstein foresaw the highly symbolic dimension of Oceanian shields, which, "adorned with symbols, [...] always represent and signify something specific and are perhaps intended to capture certain forces." (Carl Einstein, in "La statuaire des mers du Sud", 1926) The ornamental character of Highland shields can be interpreted as an extension of the polychrome body painting that, among the Mendi people Mendi people, play an important role in ceremonies, linking the owner to a group and an identity. A resolutely modernist weapon of symbolism and identity, whose shapes and colors are reminiscent of certain works by Wassily Kandinsky.