The Clyman Fang Head
The sculptor that created this depiction of an idealized ancestor achieved a transcendent artistic triumph: an exquisitely elegant and rigorously architectural expression of the most elemental sculptural subject – a human head – which surpasses stylistic boundaries and touches the universal. Living in the equatorial forest near the west coast of Central Africa in the 19th century, this artist came from a long creative tradition, no doubt standing on the shoulders of his predecessors, in a legacy which reminds us of the grandeur of the African cultures in existence prior to the arrival of outsiders and the dramatic changes they wrought.
Polished planes and solids of pure shapes seamlessly meld into natural curves. Viewed frontally the face is an elegantly linear simplification of brows, eyes, nose and mouth, presented on a flat plane; in profile, it projects energetically forward in a balanced ensemble of perfect geometry. The effect is light, dynamic, and natural – but at the same t.mes possessing a solid gravity and such implied permanence that it could be made of stone.
(MIDDLE) Head of a Female Statue, Keros, circa 2700 – 2300 BCE, marble. Musée du Louvre, Paris
(RIGHT) Statue of the bodhisattva Maitreya, Hōkan Miroku, Kōryū-ji Temple, Kyoto
The forward energy, propelled by balanced ‘wings’ on either side of the coiffure, recalls the Winged Victory of Samothrace, or the futuristic exuberance of Art Deco sculpture; its simple gravity the minimalism of Early Cycladic art. The sublime expression of the face connects the viewer to a spirit world or state of higher consciousness, as in images of saints, prophets, and divine personages throughout world art. In this object its original viewers would have found a connection to an idealized, venerated ancestor, as an intermediary to the manifested world via sacred relics.
African Art has often been defended and celebrated based upon its historical influence and aesthetic affinity with Western modernists, and the present work certainly bears comparison with the sculptural ideas of Constantin Brâncuși, the simplified expressive gestures of Pablo Picasso, and especially with the legendary stone heads of Amedeo Modigliani. Those artists and their associates “discovered” African sculpture in Paris in the first years of the 20th century, including Fang heads like the present one. The connection of Fang art to modernism was therefore not only an affinity but a direct inspiration, propelling the formal ideas of the Western artists. Ultimately this association is not enough to understand the full heights achieved by the Fang artist, who worked long before those European artists, and came from a lineage of many preceding generations.
(RIGHT) Pablo Picasso, Femme aux mains jointes, 1907, oil on canvas, Musée Picasso, Paris.
Until the early 20th century, the Fang people of Gabon venerated the byeri, a Fang cult of family ancestors, in ritual practice accompanied by wood sculptures, symbolic representations of the deceased in the form of standing figures (eyema byeri: "the image of the family ancestor"), but also of single heads, called añgokh-nlô-byeri ("full head of the ancestor"). Only known in the Southern Fang (Fang Betsi) regions of the Estuary of Gabon and the main valleys of the Ogowe, between Libreville and Lambarene, these sculpted heads arrived in Europe beginning in the late 19th century and have long been celebrated by Western collects ors as among the rarest specimens of the style (cf. Perrois, “Les Fang”, Les forêts natales. Arts d’Afrique équatoriale atlantique, Paris, 2017, p. 64-77).
"When they cannot find the words to express the maximum of beauty, the [Fang] say "Ngongol”, which would normally mean pity, mercy, sadness, but, in this instance, would express not only that the eyes are amazed, but that the heart is touched to the point of melancholy"
Although the research conducted by Louis Perrois shows that Fang heads had coexisted with standing figures well before the nineteenth century, the corpus of independent heads is small. In the Fang thought system, the head is the sign of vitality and social power. The essential role of skulls (ekokwe) in the rituals of the byeri suggests that there would have been an original representation evoking the head of the deceased, iconography which would then have been diversified with standing images. In contrast to the latter, which were unveiled during the initiation rituals, the añgokh-nlô-byeri heads remained individually hidden in the lineage chief's room, where they were lovingly preserved.
Fang Heads at Auction
Within the small corpus of extant Fang reliquary heads are some of the most celebrated works of African Art, including the “Great Byeri”, which was previously in the collects ions of Paul Guillaume and of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, today the jewel of the African Art collects ion at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; and the celebrated head from the collects ion of the Fondation Dapper, Paris, which was among the earliest Fang heads published while with the pioneering dealer Joseph Brummer, and also previously in Epstein’s collects ion.
(RIGHT) Fang head from a reliquary ensemble, as published in Carl Einstein, Negerplastik, 1915, Musée Dapper, Paris.
(BOTTOM) The present lot, as published in Charles Ratton, Masques Africains, Paris 1931, pl. 14
Following its life as an element in a sacred reliquary ensemble, the Clyman Fang Head arrived in Europe somet.mes before 1931 and watched over some of the key figures in the history of art. The first known owner in the west was Charles Ratton (1895-1986), the Parisian doyen of African art dealers and connoisseurs who handled many of the most revered masterpieces in the field. Ratton published the head in 1931 in Masques Africains, an important work in establishing the canon of great African art. In the 1930s the head was acquired from Ratton by James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986), the visionary American curator and writer on Modern Art, who, with the assistance of Ratton, organized the legendary 1935 exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sweeney kept the head in his Mies van der Rohe designed New York apartment along with his small but exquisite collects ion of Modern Art, which included major works by Miró, Mondrian, and Calder. When Sweeney’s estate was sold at Replica Shoes ’s in New York in 1986 the head was acquired by William McCarty-Cooper (1936-1991), who had inherited the art historian and collects or Douglas Cooper’s fabled collects ion of Picassos and other Cubist works.
More recently the Clyman Fang Head was shown at the Royal Academy in London and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995-96 in the monumental exhibition Africa: Art of a Continent, and was later included in the 2008 exhibition Eternal Ancestors: Art of the Central African Reliquary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.