OBJECT history From Fontem to Berlin The Long Journey of a Bangwa Lefem Staff By Bettina von Lintig 130 On September 24, 2003, the collection of the Potter Museum, a nineteenth-century private museum in the UK devoted to taxidermy and curiosities, was put up for auction by Bonhams in a tiny village in Cornwall. Formally opened in 1880 as the Bramber Museum, it had moved briefl y to the Palace Pier in Brighton in 1973, then to the town of Arundel in Sussex, and fi nally to Bolventor in Cornwall, before permanently closing in the 1990s. It featured numerous dioramas of mounted animals engaged in human activities created by Walter Potter (1835– 1918), which were well-known and popular examples of “Victorian whimsy.” These were supplemented with natural history and ethnographic specimens. Much information about the museum and the sale can be gleaned from Internet sources, including the story that contemporary artist Damien Hirst offered to acquire all of Potter’s dioramas for one million pounds, but the auctioneers refused his offer. The ethnographic items in the sale were mostly Oceanic clubs, boomerangs, and a few masks; however, a carved fi gure on a post was offered as lot 489 in this sale (fi g. 2). It was described in the auction catalog simply as “A Cameroons Wood Staff, the fi nial carved as a fi gure holding a mask, approx 45 ins high.” Collector and dealer Kevin Conru acquired the object without further provenance, since there were no longer any records pertaining to it in the museum. With its silky and inscrutable eyes, it has a powerful facial expression augmented by wild-looking protrusions in the coiffure, and it holds a mask or a head in front of its body. If this fi gure could talk, it would tell an epic story. It has survived all those who have been responsible for the history of its trajectory over the course of well more than a century, but it has left traces in some of the places it has passed through, so much of its history can be reconstructed and examined. FIG. 1: Commemorative fi gure of a chief, attributed to Ateu Atsa. Bangwa, Fontem region, Cameroon. 19th century. Wood. H: 92.1 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, inv. 1987.62. FIG. 2: Lefem emblem, attributed to Ateu Atsa or his workshop. Bangwa, Cameroon. 19th century. Ex Gustav Conrau, Fontem (1898 or ‘99); Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin (1899); Alfred Speyer, Berlin (acquired 1929); the Potter Museum, Brumber/Brighton/ Arundel; Kevin Conru, UK. Wood. H: 121 cm. Collection of Javier Peres, Berlin. Photo: Frédéric Dehaen, courtesy of Kevin Conru. Once in knowledgeable hands, when this unusual sculpture was compared to Bamileke objects, the exciting possibility that the piece might be from the workshop of a famous Bangwa carver known in the literature as Ateu Atsa (c. 1840–1910) came to mind (fi g. 1). It has many hallmarks of this hand: the treatment of the feet, which in this case cling to the end of the post (others attach similarly to a ring or a pedestal); a body composed of symmetrical segments; bared teeth; a pronounced chin; and horizontally rendered zoomorphic ears. Adze facets are visible on the surface of the wood, a feature typical of pieces from this and other Grasslands workshops. A feature specifi c to works associated with Ateu Atsa is the use of structural struts, and one (now damaged) connects the mask/head held in front of the body with the main fi gure’s chin, while another connects the chin of this mask/head with the post below. All stylistic evidence points to this sculpture being attributable to Ateu Atsa or to his workshop, and—as will be discussed below—its close association with Assunganyi of Fontem, one of this sculptor’s major patrons, only strengthens this attribution.1 Tentatively identifying the sculptor was interesting, but nothing more was known about this object’s history until 2011 when Kevin noticed a group of drawings from a hundred-year-old letter penned by Gustav Conrau (1865–1899 and no relation to Kevin Conru) reproduced in “Art in Cameroon: Sculptural Dialogues”2 (fi g. 3). The drawing noted as #4 in this letter caught his eye because of its similarity to his piece from the Potter Museum, although his object lacked the protuberances near the neck that are clearly rendered in the drawing. The letter and its drawings were sent from the Bangwa region by Conrau to Felix von Luschan, curator of the African department at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin from 1885 to 1910. It is dated June 11, 1899, and reached its intended recipient on July 26, 1899.3
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