Fang - Imaginary Ancestors - Almine Rech NY - Bernard de Grunne

28 Pages·2017·0.82 MB·English

Installation views of the exhibition ‘Imaginary Ancestors’, Almine Rech Gallery, New York, from May 2 to June 15,
2017

Crédits:

Exhibition of Paintings by Derain and Early African Heads and Statues from the Gabon Pahouin Tribes,
organized by Paul Guillaume at the Durand-Ruel Galleries New York from February 10 to March 15, 1933 /
Photo: Archives Durand-Ruel © Durand-Ruel & Cie /
AndrÈ Derain © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
ADAGP, Paris

Photo Matthew Kroening;
Courtesy of the artists and Almine Rech Gallery

Ernst Wilhelm Nay
© 2018 Artists Rights Society/
Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler, Köln/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Max Pechstein
© 2018 Artists Rights Society /
Pechstein Hamburg / Tökendorf
André Derain
© 2018 Artists Rights Society/
ADAGP, Paris
Fang Sculpture: An Art—Just Called Classical
by Bernard de Grunne

The groundbreaking 1933 exhibition André Derain Paintings and Early African Heads and
Statues from the Gabon Pahouin Tribes,was organized by Paul Guillaume at the Durand-Ruel
Gallery in New York. Running from 20 February to 18 March, 1933, it was the first show in
the West to focus on a single African art style. Paul Guillaume had sent a group of 20 Fang
sculptures, some of which subsequently travelled to Chicago.1 This was the most important
exhibition of Fang statuary organized to date, surpassed two years later by the major show
African Negro Art, presented in 1935 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, in a
total of 609 pieces loaned for the exhibition, curator James Johnson Sweeney had selected no
fewer than 31 Fang sculptures.2 This was the largest group of Fang statuary assembled for
public exhibition until the remarkable exhibition curated in 2007 by Alisa LaGamma at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, 47 Fang statues and heads were exhibited. In the fall of
2017, Yves Le Fur’s exhibition Forêts Natales at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac
will present an astounding gathering of 85 Fang statues and 17 heads.
French art dealer Paul Guillaume, based in Paris, ranks as the all-time champion of Fang
statuary. In his first publication, Sculptures Nègres of 1917, coauthored with Guillaume
Apollinaire, Guillaume illustrated two Fang statues and one Fang head among the 22
sculptures included. An unpublished photographic archive of his African art collection made
in the 1930s shows that at one time Guillaume owned 41 Fang figures and nine Fang heads,
an indication of the importance of Fang art in his collecting tastes. After his death in 1934, his
widow Domenica Guillaume-Walter donated four statues and a head to the Musée de l'
Homme in Paris in 1941. In the subsequent auction of the rest of her collection at Drouot in
1965, five heads and eight figures were sold.3
One should underline, however, that Paul Guillaume has a similar commercial bent for the
arts of Ivory Coast. A show organized by Guillaume in April 1930 at the Valentine Gallery in
New York included 74 pieces, with 39—more than half—from Ivory Coast.4 Only one Fang
sculpture was included, which was sold to Nelson Rockefeller in 1956.5 If one examines the
collection formed, with the help of Guillaume, by Dr. Alfred Barnes between 1922 and 1924,
his largest holding—about one-fifth of the entire African collection—comes from the Baule
region, with eight works compared to seven Fang (five statues and two heads). As far as the
prices paid by Barnes, his most expensive piece is the standing Baule figure purchased for
FF40,000.6 The second most expensive object is the famous Dogon couple purchased for
FF30,000, followed by a Fang head for FF15,000 and the superb Baule couple for FF8,000.7
As Susan Mullin Vogel has remarked, Dr. Barnes’s attraction to Ivory Coast art and Baule
sculpture in particular distinguishes him from other collectors of the day.8
My essay will be presented in two parts: the first, a focus on the discovery, between 1915 and
1940, of the remarkable qualities of Fang statuary, which was recognized as one of the most
“classic” expressions of African Art; and the second, a short analysis on the meaning and use
of the word “classic” as applied in art-historical studies of style as it is reflected in the title of
my essay: “Fang Sculpture: An Art—Just Called Classical, from a perceptive quote by John
Graham.9
The first truly first-rate Fang statues to arrive in Europe were a group of three very fine
figures collected by the German naturalist Georg Zenker at his zoological station of Bipindi in
southern Cameroon and sold to the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin in 1897.10