BORNEO MATS 95 Banganté, the French ethnologist Henri Labouret visited the chefferie.21 In the course of his research, he collected objects for the Musée du Trocadéro (later the Musée de l’Homme) and obtained from N’jiké II this carving, which Kwayep purportedly sculpted about 1912. Created to commemorate N’jiké’s wife who bore his first son, the figure exhibits a sense of motion and naturalism that is unusual for the Grassfields. As Egerton exclaimed: “It is truly a beautiful thing. . . . If he Kwayep is not famous he ought to be.”22 What is probably Kwayep’s best surviving rendering of a female figure is a caryatid support for the concave bottom of a calabash container (figs. 12–14). Housed in the collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, the sculpture was collected by Pierre Harter in the Bamileke area sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. The female body has been carved to conform to the requirements of its function as a support, but every stroke of the sculptor’s tools was carefully considered and executed, again with an unusual quality of naturalism. The mask-like quality of the face adds another level of meaning to the object, which Bamileke observers would have understood as a reference to invisible powers given tangible form. As a stand for a calabash bowl used to hold grain, this was clearly intended to be a functional object yet it was simultaneously an important insignia of rank. On ceremonial occasions, the fon (chief, king) would display artworks of this type next to his throne. Like others of its kind, Kwayep’s carving was primarily a work of ritual art—an icon, a symbol, and an abstract representation of a political and invisible spiritual world order, where gods and ancestors exist. As an emblem of status and prestige, it communicated the rank of its owner, and, in the context of the hierarchically structured Bamileke society, it can be likened to a pyramid representing the king as the apex. The edge is decorated with the same kinds of engraved FIGS. 12, 13, and 14: Kwayep of Bamana, Figurative calabash stand. Bamileke, Grassfields, Cameroon. C. 1930s. Wood, camwood powder. H: 36 cm. Collected by Pierre Harter, 1950s–60s. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, museum purchase made possible by the Phyllis Wattis Program Fund, 2000.76.
CoverT70 FR corr_Layout 1
To see the actual publication please follow the link above