A Fang Betsi. Sold.

Provenance

Michel Gaud who bought it from Jean Cambier a private Brussels-Belgium collector.

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NOTES:

Northern Fang Betsi figure. Wood, metal.

Period: end XIXth

Height: 36 cm.

Price: sold

This one is quite similar to the one owned by Marc Ginzberg, and published as lot 851 in "African Art in American collections"

The Northern Fang Betsi reliquary figures have characteristically long Torso's and metal eyes.

The Fang reliquary figures were heads, complete persons, even busts. They were placed on a cylindrical bark receptacle containing the skulls of the ancestors of lineages or extended families over which they watched. Placed at the front of the receptacle, as if seated on the edge, or at the back, the legs resting on the lid, the sculpture was fixed thanks to a stalk situated, for the complete figures, at the vertical of their spines .

For the Fang, the guardians of the relics were considered both as children and as older men. Thus, a number of sculptures have childish features. Perceptible here, this phenomenon expresses itself by the swollen stomach, the umbilical hernia, the stylized eyes, often round, evoking the wide-open regard of the small child, and by the proportions of the statues whose "size of the torso, the large size of the head, the disproportionately small flexed legs...are precisely of an infantile character." (J.W.Fernandez).

In Fang thought, the new-born are moreover particularly close to the ancestors, the infant separating himself progressively from the world of forefathers in becoming, through ritual (notably initiatic) and through time, adult.
Many Fang works have a dark patina and ointments intended to protect the wood, isolating it from possible aggressions by insects and hardening it so that it resisted the climate of the equatorial forest better. Like the round and brilliant eyes of certain figures, made of brass, the shininess  made the figures glow and thus rendered them visible in the half-light, testifying thus their role of guardian, signaling the presence of relics and protecting them. Deeply sacred, the relics were in fact taken out of their box only during rituals and could be seen exclusively by the initiated.

Price: SOLD . Tell me if you are looking for this kind of items. I'll put you on my Short list....