Paire De Chenets En Bronze Patiné À Décor D'hommes Tenant Des Masses Surmontées De Visages Grimaçants 

Anton Prinner made this pair of patinated bronze fire dogs, decorated with men holding mallets atop grimacing faces, sometime before his death in 1983. The figures are clearly meant to be read as primitive, perhaps even barbaric. The unsettling nature of these objects lies in their function as domestic objects. Fire dogs, holding up logs in the hearth, are meant to evoke warmth and comfort. But here, Prinner disrupts that sense of domesticity with the introduction of figures that are more at home in the realm of tribal ritual. Prinner was a Hungarian-born artist who spent most of his career in France. His sculptures often combine elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Primitivism. His life experience exposed him to a number of intellectual movements. Art history is an interdisciplinary field, and to properly understand a work like this, we can draw on cultural history, anthropology, and post-colonial theory to suggest the dynamics of power, class and race at play here. This is how the role of the historian allows us to understand art as being contingent on social and institutional context.