Keeping Watch Over the Dead - Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the New York Times, is she an infant, a wrestler, a goddess or what? Sunk in thought or entranced by sounds only she can hear? Her flawless skin is dark but glows. Her body is organic but abstract, with seeds for eyes, succulents for arms, and mushroomlike shoulders melting into breasts. In the perfect sleek globe of her head, her face is a scooped-out heart.

You’ll find this stunner, beaming with ambiguity, in “Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Because exhibitions of African art almost always are.

So, sleepers, awake. This African show isn’t esoteric at all. Anyone familiar with Western religious art, particularly art before the modern era, will recognize its basic theme: life as a cosmic journey homeward, with parental spirits, embodied in materials and images, coddling, counseling and chiding us every step of the way.

The opening gallery is about connecting cross-cultural dots. Apparently not common enough, though, to let museum audiences easily embrace African art on its own terms. Through much of the 20th century, African art was valued primarily as source material for a European avant-garde. Alisa LaGamma, the Met curator who organized “Eternal Ancestors,” acknowledges the real investment that Modernism had in African culture. Several of the show’s most beautiful items have an early-20th-century art world pedigree. A spectacular Fang reliquary figure, combative and unflinching, once belonged to the painter André Derain. A jocund Kwele mask from Gabon was prized by the Dada poet Tristan Tzara.

It reads: “This room is devoted to a series of intact shrines. Upon entering, we request that you show respect for these devotional works.”

All three shrines consist of alluring figures set atop, or emerging from, receptacles of some kind. Two of the figures are Fang in origin, similar in style to the Venus. What’s hidden is the contents of the shrines’ containers: bones, ashes, bits of cloth or earth. To the late-19th-century European colonialists who first collected many of the works in this show, notable for its wealth of important international loans, the sculptures meant everything, the relics nothing. This figure is a commemorative portrait of a Bangwa chief named Fosia, carved by the artist Ateu Atsa (around 1840-1910). Full-length Fang figures, taut as clenched fists, are among Africa’s most familiar sculptural types, although bust-length Fang heads, also meant to top reliquary containers, are no less gripping. One of the most famous, visiting from the Ethnographic Museum in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, is in the show. Then, a coup de théâtre: an ensemble of dozens of Kota reliquary figures, their shovel-shape faces made of gleaming copper and brass. The lesson: In death, as in life, ambiguity rules.

See the original Article

See the Slide Show