Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn/Winter 2008

(Excerpt from the article by Louis Perrois)

In African art, as elsewhere, one sometimes fails to see the forest for the trees. The stir caused a few years ago by the record-breaking sale of the ngil mask formerly in the Vérité Collection––well deserved though it may be for its outstanding quality––might reasonably lead the general public to believe that this sort of elongated face mask was the only type produced by the Fang of Gabon. In truth, they also made and used many other types, each with specific forms and designs that varied according to region, sub-group, and historical period.

Although many Fang masks were collected and have been known since the end of the nineteenth century, Western collections, particularly private ones, tend to emphasize only two or three types. First among these are the above-mentioned ngil masks, which are sought after because of their smooth and stylized sculptural lines. A fine example of such a mask, lot 193 of the Vérité auction, made a record price of over five million euros when it was sold in June of 2006. A second type is the "lunar" mask, the graphic purity of which made them so attractive to the artists of the early twentieth century that they often hung on walls of their ateliers. A third commonly seen type is the ngontang helmet mask, which appeared later.
Careful examination of the information on Fang masks in the specialized literature and in museum collections reveals that this simple tripartite typology is more the result of fad than reality. A much larger variety of mask types exists and examples vary according to ethnic group, period, and the rituals for which the masks were intended.
This diversity of Fang masks is actually quite well represented in collections and in museums, but it is generally ignored in exhibitions and in literature on the subject. This state of affairs is, as I point out in Fang(Perrois, 2006: 46), largely due to indifference on the part of collectors and curators to in situ realities, coupled with ignorance of the documentation and ethnographic literature that is, in fact, available for those who are willing to dig a little. This lack of curiosity about Fang masks, which persisted throughout the nineteenth century, led to a simplification of perceptions about the objects, and the only ones deemed worthy of attention became those with the most spectacular and established forms. The rest, sometimes atypical and thus perhaps more difficult to appreciate, were ignored.