A rare Bembe Mask

eluba or emangungu, hollowed at the reverse, the plank-like facial plane with a pair of demi-lune eyes in circular sockets beneath another face of avian form in high-relief with a pointed nose and pierced, demi-lune eyes in scooped circular sockets with a small central crest leading to the rounded crown, with incised zigzag motifs; the medium brown surface with areas of red and white pigment.

Jacques Boussard, Paris
Gustav and Franyo Schindler, New York
Lucien Van de Velde, Antwerp

Palais Miramar, Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie, 1957: number 282, catalogue of the exhibition, Cannes, 1957
Musée de l'Homme, Arts primitifs dans les ateliers d'artistes, 1967: figure 98, catalogue of the exhibition, Paris, 1967.
Leiris and Delange, Afrique Noire: Univers des Formes,  1967: 361
Wassing, L'art d'Afrique Noire, 1969: 86
Drouot, Paris, December 18, 1990, lot 17
Herreman and Petridis (eds.); Het gelaat van de geesten - Maskers uit het Zairebekken, 1993:185, number 90, catalogue of the exhibition, Ethnographic Museum, Antwerp, September 18-December 31, 1993; and at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., The Face of the Spirits, Masks from the Zaïre Bassin, April 20-September 25, 1994
African Arts Magazine, 1995: XXVII, number 1, page 84

 

The well-known Boussard mask offered here demonstrates a refined abstraction of form and a surrealistic suggestion of 'double vision'. Jacques Boussard (b.1915), a French artist, began collecting African art after seeing F.H. Lem's collection of African art in Paris. For other works formerly in Boussard's collection see Laude (1967), and Sotheby's New York, May 19, 2001, lot 107.

As noted by Biebuyck (in Herreman and Petridis, ed. 1993: 183-196) specific contextual information about how the flat plank masks were used traditionally is scarce as the Bembe themselves were influenced by the many traditions of their neighbors. Biebuyck notes the strong relationships between the centrally important bwami society of the neighboring Lega and that of the Bembe.

The elegant and abstract plank masks with their deeply carved eye sockets were used throughout the Bembe area in regional variants of the butende circumcision rites, adapted to the bwami circumcision, under the supervision of high-ranking bwami members (Petridis ibid.: 184).