Ngbandi Male Ancestor Figure, Ubangi River Region, Democratic Republic of Congo

By Heinrich Schweizer

Until very recently, Ubangian sculpture was the last major unstudied area of art from sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks to Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers' important exhibition and encyclopedic 2007 monograph Ubangi: Art and Cultures from the African Heartland, this rich cultural ground has now begun opening up. The Ubangi region in central Africa spans three different countries: the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan. It houses a cluster of societies with strong historical, linguistic, and anthropological interrelations. As Grootaers (2007: 17) notes, the "crossing of a variety of frontiers created a vast melting pot, a Ubangian 'culture area' - however problematic that term may be."

According to Burssens (in Grootaers 2007: 114), the "Ngbandi live in two regions between the Ubangi and Congo rivers [and their statuary] has by far the most recognizable characteristics. For example, Ngbandi sculptors certainly made fairly slender statues with pointed, cut-out hairstyle. At the time, the hair of both men and women was shaved in an inverted 'V' above the forehead [...]."  Meurant (in Grootaers 2007: 199) continues: "In some Ngbandi statues the heads are ovoid, the faces are tilted to a greater or lesser extent and slightly raised, and the chins are of two types: the volume is truncated and the chin short, or the shape is elongated into a pointed chin as in Sango sculptures. The high foreheads have a vertical middle line which divides the face in two, a typical feature of Ngbandi scarifications."

Notwithstanding the exceptional rarity of Ubangi statuary, its inventive and powerful aesthetics have always enjoyed the interest of collectors, in particular of the early 20th-century avant-garde. The significance of African sculpture as the crucial inspiration for Cubism is well-known, already pointed out by Picasso's dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler who went so far as to call Picasso's interest in it "the decisive discovery which allowed painting to create invented signs, freed sculpture from mass, and lead to its transparency" (quoted after FitzGerald 2007: 38). While no written record dates Picasso's acquisition of the offered lot, as is the case with virtually all works in his collection (the master's interests were understandably not of a bureaucratic nature), we have strong evidence that he already owned this Ngbandi figure before 1912-13: a photograph of Kahnweiler and his wife in their apartment on Rue George Sand dated to this time period shows another Ngbandi figure on the mantelpiece (see Rubin 1984: 301). Kahnweiler's collecting interest in African art concentrated on works with direct reference to Picasso's œuvre, especially sculptures the artist drew inspiration from such as the famous Krou (Grebo) mask visible on the wall of Kahnweiler's apartment in the same 1912-13 photograph. As William Rubin (then Director of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art) learned in the 1970s, Picasso himself had told Kahnweiler about the conceptual leap Krou (Grebo) masks (of which Picasso owned two examples) provided for Guitar (1912-13). Kahnweiler's ownership of another specimen from the exceedingly rare corpus of Ngbandi statuary (less than ten large-scale statues are known), then, both indicates that Picasso had acquired his figure earlier, and that its role in the artist's evolution had been so significant that Kahnweiler deemed it necessary to acquire one for his own collection.

Picasso's Ngbandi figure features a multitude of oil paint splashes on its surface, including blue, white and pink, suggesting that the sculpture was once placed not only in Picasso's studio but in direct proximity to his easel. But what were the works for which the Ngbandi figure served as inspiration? Picasso's admission of the decisive influence of Krou (Grebo) masks for Guitar is a nearly unique case of the artist revealing and explaining one of his sources. In later years, tired of questions about his "borrowing" of African forms, the artist turned to tongue-in-cheek fibs, as in his famous line "l'art nègre? Connais pas." Comparing the features of Picasso's Ngbandi figure with work from the early Cubist period, however, one cannot help but note an uncanny echo in the treatment of the eyes, starting with Portrait of Gertrude Stein 1905-1906, further developed in three preparatory studies for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907; two in pencil from Carnet 13, 10 recto and 11 recto; one gouache; all published in Stepan 2006: 32), on to the three left figures in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and reaching a peak of resemblance in later works such as Mother and Child (1908). While the idea of a single source remains unsatisfyingly simplistic in light of Picasso's omnivorous exposure to art, and while one can certainly surmise other influences for the treatment of the eyes in Picasso's work from the years 1905-08—most notably ancient Iberian stone sculptures (cf. the so-called Tête trouvée à Redobán, 5th - 3rd century BCE, which Picasso might have seen in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, see Küster 2003: 225; as well as other works published by Rubin 1984: 247-251)—his Ngbandi figure stands as the most tangible of all possibilities. In this context let us recall Kahnweiler's view of African art's contribution to Cubism's development: "It would be wrong to suppose that the Cubists were led to these solutions [...] by Negro art, but in it they found a confirmation of certain possibilities." Picasso's ownership of the Ngbandi figure, and his placement of it beside his easel, attests to the delight the artist took in this artwork’s animating confirmation of aesthetic possibility.