Fang Reliquary Head, Gabon

on a base by the Japanese wood artist Kichizô Inagaki (1876-1951), Paris.

Charles Ratton, Paris
Private Collection, Saint Louis
S. Thomas Alexander III, Saint Louis
Balene McCormick, Santa Fe, acquired from the above on September 15, 1997

Louis Perrois, La statuaire fan, Gabon, Paris, 1972, p. 348, pl. 172, no. 143

LaGamma (2007: 206, text to cat. 48) notes: "Günter Tessmann claimed that the earliest form of Fang ancestral sculptures consisted of freestanding heads terminating at the base in a stem that was inserted into the cylindrical bark vessel containing a family's relics.  According to James Fernandez's Fang sources, the container was seen as the torso that completed the head positioned at the summit. He noted that these two centers of the body were seen as complimentary opposites in Fang culture: while the stomach is considered to be the locus of power and thought, the head is responsible for apprehending and directing one's actions."

The offered lot is mounted on a base by the Japanese wood artist Kichizô Inagaki (1876-1951), Paris.  The importance role of Inagaki within the Parisian avant-garde of the eraly 20th century and his collaboration with Auguste Rodin, Paul Guillaume and Charles Ratton has recently been highlighted by Hourdé (2012).  Ratton, who began his involvement in African Art in 1923 and was one of the biggest lenders to the 1935 landmark exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presumably commissioned the base for the offered lot from Inagaki himself.