This is the rating and price for Important Reliquary Head, 1992
Description : Important Reliquary Head Fang Betsi Gabon H: 27 cm (approx. 11”) Estimated age: end of the 19th or early 20th century Certificated by Louis Perrois Provenance: M. Rivier/Paris, Formerly part of the Arman Collection, French private collection “Betsi heads carved by the southern Fang are often of great aesthetic quality, which suggests that they are the culmination of a long sculptural tradition” (Perrois, Byeri Fang. Sculptures d’ancêtres en Afrique, 1992, p. 151). Symbolic representations of ancestors, these comparatively rare heads hold a special place in the corpus of Fang statuary. A sculptural interpretation of the ancestor pared down solely to the head, they became a source of fascination as early as the 1910s and 1920s for some of the most prominent pioneers of African art, including Joseph Brummer, Paul Guillaume, Carl Einstein, André Lefèvre, and Jacob Epstein. Like full-length statues, the heads were part of the practice of ancestor worship, protecting the ancestral relics, which served as guarantors of the genealogical identity of each lineage. These contrasts between the serenity of the effigy and the protective strength that it conferred place this Fang head from an old French collection among the most eloquent manifestations of this rare corpus, the aesthetics of which are as sensitive as they are unique.
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