Art African Fetish Iron Tsogho 2343

Tsogho iron fetish from Gabon. Old piece over 50 years old.

The Mitsogho are located approximately in the center of the southern zone of Gabon, delimited by the course of the Ogooué, famous for the plastic productions linked to the art of white masks. By this name we designate anthropomorphic figures painted with kaolin, whose stylistic varieties must be considered as so many “avatars” of a common representation interpreted by each tribe according to its own genius. The theme, one of the constants of African art, since it is also found among the Guro and Bazdé of Ivory Coast and the Bayaka of Zaire and Angola, is that of "the dead young girl", facing pale and ghostly of a spirit or a ghost, whose cold beauty is sometimes associated with that of the moon.
Without going into detail about the history of research, it should be remembered that the first specimens of this type, collected at the beginning of the century, were attributed for a long time to the Mpongwé - either through confusion with the coastal ethnic group traditionally serving as transit agents. commercial (which does not exclude the possibility that the Mpongwé may have previously possessed such masks), or by abusive assimilation to linguistically or culturally related ethnic groups (Carl KJESMEIER 1935-38). Recent research has shown that these masks with a humanist model, with eyes stretched and closed by heavy eyelids, with an enigmatically tense smile in the pouting protrusion of the lips, which are reminiscent of certain Japanese masks, are essentially due to the Bapunu and Balumbo of Nyanga, where this art is still alive, but a multitude of very differentiated types coexist in the neighboring tribes. It would perhaps not be useless to open a parenthesis here by proposing an explanation for the fortuitous similarity in appearance which brings together
certain Bapzmu masks from Japanese No” masks. It comes, in our opinion, from a coincidence of stylistic features associating the white color of the face and the stylization of traditional crest hairstyles sometimes evoking a large bun, and above all the interpretation of an ethnic particularity specific to certain individuals of the populations from central Gabon, which we observe mainly among the Mitsogho: the eye at the edge of the head, very stretched and almond-shaped, a criterion of beauty attested by the term rnighèrnbè. The Bapzmu sculptors were able to draw inspiration from this physical trait specific to the Mitsogho, whether they had adopted it as an aesthetic canon
(Paul du CHAILLU noticed in 1854 similarities in fashion among Tsogho and Pum women and he described hairstyles; and in particular a frontal motif formed of nine red dots which we still find on most Punu masks ), or because they wanted to plastically materialize a cultural borrowing from their beliefs. Whatever the case, however, we observe a fundamental difference (taking into account the decadence of recent pieces) between the Punu style, the culmination of a tendency towards humanist sophistication of facial features, and the Tsogho style which is extremely disparate, asserts a tendency towards expressionism and schematization through a certain rusticity of means and a proliferation of forms.