Fang Reliquary Guardian Figure, Gabon

This small Fang figure was acquired by the great American composer George Gershwin between 1929 and 1936, a time when Fang (then most often called “Pahouin”) sculpture enjoyed a particular vogue among avant-garde American collectors, with the 1932 exhibition of Paul Guillaume’s collection at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York (Early African Heads and Statues from the Gabon Pahouin Tribes), and the historic African Negro Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935. In January of the following year, the painter, collector, and theorist John D. Graham organized the pioneering Exhibition of Sculptures of Old African Civilizations, to which George Gershwin was a lender, at the Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York. The slim catalogue that accompanied the exhibition contains Graham’s lapidary observations on the qualities he perceived in African sculpture. Of the “Pahouin Civilization”, Graham observed “an art – justly called classical. Its abstractions are the result of profound and final argumentation.” (John D. Graham, Exhibition of Sculpture of Old African Civilizations, New York, 1936, p. 10). Graham viewed Fang sculpture as “classical” because he believed it to be “an art that has finally formulated and realized its plastic aspirations, an art, in short, that is definitely poised […]” (ibid., p. 7).

While Graham was concerned with a purely aesthetic approach, the plastic qualities of Fang sculpture exemplify deeper cultural meanings, several of which are embodied in this sculpture. The rounded head of this figure is of “classical” form, with a slightly downcast and almost quiescent face that bears a deeply meditative expression, which embodies the Fang qualities of nlem mvore, or composure, and mvwaa, or tranquil equilibrium. The abrasions to the nose and the mouth are evidence of ritual scrapings which “were intentionally wrought upon such works throughout their ritual lives.” (Alisa LaGamma, ed., Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary, New York, 2007, p. 208). The sense of introspective containment is also conveyed in the body of the sculpture, with the rounded masses of the shoulders and arms clasped tightly to the torso, and the hands held together in a votive gesture below the heart. The clear delineation of the joints of the shoulders, arms, and legs denotes the transition from one generation of ancestors to the next (J. W. Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa, Princeton, 1982, p. 88).

Although the precise source of this sculpture is not recorded, its style corresponds closely with that of a reliquary figure acquired in Paris in the 1930s by the Swiss collector Josef Mueller (see Christie’s, London, The Collection of the Late Josef Mueller, of Solothurn, Switzerland […], Part II, March 20, 1979, lot 138).