YET ANOTHER VIRTUOSO AFRICAN PIECE.

By Nii B. Andrews.

A legendary and iconic piece of classical African art executed by an unknown Fang master will go on sale late this month at Sotheby’s in New York.

For the first time ever, art from the classic African canon will be sold alongside contemporary work from masters such as Basquiat, Bacon and de Koonig.

Sotheby’s took this momentous decision in order to “highlight the natural aesthetic affinities between these works”.

It is also an acknowledgement of the Fang piece’s influence on modern art movements, including Cubism and Expressionism; a fact that is not disputed by art historians.

Once again like almost all great pieces of traditional African art, the Fang piece comes from outside Africa – The Collection of Sidney and Bernice Clyman.

It is listed in the catlog as “The Clyman Fang Head”!

It has impeccable provenance.

“The Clyman Fang Head” was first published in 1931 by its first known Western owner, Charles Ratton – but we do not know how and when it first came into his possession.

“[Ratton] promoted [non-western] art, but at the same time bought objects that weren’t supposed to leave the African continent,” says Maureen Murphy, the art historian. “Beauty came first and then ethical considerations, but Ratton wasn’t worse than other art dealers of the era, just more prudent. He was a man of his times, with all the contradictions it implied.”

Catalog cover for Charles Ratton exhibit at the Quai Branly 2013.

In the late 1930s, it sold to James Johnson Sweeney the visionary American modern art curator and writer, who, with the assistance of Ratton, organized the 1935 exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, according to Sotheby’s.

In 1986, the statue was sold from Sweeney’s estate at Sotheby’s in New York to William McCarty-Cooper, heir to British historian and collector Douglas Cooper.

The sculpture last appeared on the market in 1992, when the Clymans acquired it at auction in New York.  

It was shown in 1995-96 at the Royal Academy in London and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the monumental exhibition Africa: Art of a Continent and was later included in the 2008 exhibition Eternal Ancestors: Art of the Central African Reliquary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The sculpture, a female head, is stunning and powerfully conveys the groundbreaking aesthetic ideas of pre –colonial African artists; ideas which later clearly influenced the likes of Modigliani, Brancusi and Picasso.

Its concave elongated triangular face, pursed lips and enlarged coffee bean eyes convey the eternal enigma; the mystery that is life, death and immortality. The ability to compose and constitute the volumes in such an elegant manner could only have been accomplished by a master working within an enlightened culture.

Sidney and Bernice Clyman state in the auction catalog,

“When African sculpture and the work of expressionism, cubism and abstraction are placed side by side, they ‘work’ together and ‘belong’.

This is what we find so exciting……a far cry from the conventional art we all knew. Even though years have passed, the thrill of seeing and holding these wooden sculptures has not passed.”

The Fang head is estimated at USD 2.5 – 4 million.

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