| FANG Gabon, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea |
| Examples for reference |
| Merton Simpson Gallery New York, NY Fang Mask Fang Mask North Gabon Size: 18 inches Inv# 8620 Photograph by Hugues Dubois in Brussels Provenance: Ex. Guy Piazzini Collection A superb Fang Helmet Mask with a prominent quarter sphere shape forehead, an elongated and concave face of perfect volumetric symmetry, double semicircle arches of the eye socket forming a prominent cap beginning above the eyes extending itself along the cheeks to stop at the chin, rectangular shape mouth with its pointy teeth, kaolin in the background reveals several dark painted bands on the forehad, helmet, eyes arches, cheeks and chin, longitudinal motifs on the nose and forehead. |
| From the Vérité auction in Paris in June of 2006 LINK to online catalog for the Verite auction (it will link to an .exe file, save it to your computer and then open it and you will have the PDF catalog. LINK to results from the Verite auction Lot 193 Ngil, Fang mask Gabon Wood covered with a layer of kaolin Height: 48 cm (19 in.) Estimate: 1 000 000/1 500 000 euros Sold for aprox 5 900 000 euros (aprox 6.5 million dollars) Exhibited and published on numerous occasions,this object is probably the most famous of the Vérité collection. It largely deserves this reputation. The fact is indisputable: it is an absolute masterpiece of art. Paradoxically it is at once both so classical and so original that it is difficult to compare it with other masks. Nevertheless, without wanting to seek formal, but only spiritual resemblance it may be estimated that the large mask of the Museum of Berlin and that in the former Lefèvre collection, now in the French National Collections, are of the same family. Within the restricted corpus of ngil masks, all authentic as well as indexed, all in all about ten examples for masks of the same large size, the Vérité mask is the most important by the perfection of its volumes, its ornamentation and its patina. The high forehead and the heart-shaped face are admirably harmonious, on the cheeks the scarifications are perfectly apposed as well as the line on the forehead and the arch of its eye-brows. (On the scarifications, see Tessmann, Plastik, 1913, pages 262 to 265; idem Dapper, Fang, 1991, pages 228-229). The layers of kaolin indicate repeated use of the mask over a long period of time: an item of this quality has been kept and preserved carefully. The extreme porosity of the light wood and its oxydation confirm the fact that the object is very old, it dates most certainly from the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century. More subjectively speaking, this mask expresses like no other mask of its kind the spirit of Fang art implying the religious spirit and brutal and obscure power, the very soul of he equatorial forest. Taking into account all Fang art, even considering primitive art as a whole, the ngil masks are, without any doubt among the rarest and the most coveted. Their rareness is to be seen in direct relation to the myth itself and their forms bordering universal concerns. Have they not been credited with every possible influence, whether officially established or occulted, in the arts of the 19th century ? Picasso himself is said to have been under their spell, when he undertook the work for one of his major works, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon“. Thus, on the occasion of the 1984 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of New York, William Rubin confronted the ngil mask of the Vérité Collection with the famous painting “Tête de Femme“ (1908) by Pablo Picasso. Today it is agreed that the Masters of Negro-African art simply catapulted themselves to the summits of art before those of the Western world. |
| Map source: http://www.ethno.unizh.ch/csfconference/files/papers/ |