Great head of the Nok culture. Nigeria. H with... Lot 464

Great head of the Nok culture. Nigeria. H with stand 32cm, H without stand 25cm, made of beige-brownish mottled terracotta with elaborate piled-up coiffure with side braids, pierced eyes and nostrils. The head was apparently recovered broken and has not been restored. This head probably comes from the same archaeological site as the previous number. For a long time it was controversial to speak of Nok as a culture due to a lack of knowledge about the economic and settlement methods of the prehistoric population, as there is no documentation on the circumstances under which most Nok figurines were found. As a rule, the place of discovery is also unknown. Settlement remains have also not been researched or published. In contrast to Europe, archaeological work in Africa is therefore particularly difficult and almost exclusively limited to chance finds. One such chance discovery in the 1940s brought to light the earliest evidence of black African sculpture outside Egypt. After the discovery of the first clay head in the Jaba village of the same name in the Zaria Province of Nigeria, which had already been discovered in 1944 as a scarecrow (!) and which had been shown to archaeologist Bernard Fagg, he became aware of a second head that was brought to him. He called this culture Nok. However, it was William Buller Fagg, his older brother, who arranged for the heads to be shown in the exhibition of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain Traditional Art from the British Colonies in London in 1949. A characteristic feature of the Nok sculptures are the elliptical to triangular eyes, whose pupils, like the nostrils, are usually pierced. A great wealth of imagination is evident in the design of the extravagant hairstyles, as well as in other individual features such as jewelry or other accessories. In terms of cultural history, the creations of the Nok culture are remarkable because on the one hand they combine a great diversity of conceptual form with a relatively continuous unity of style, but on the other hand they show a tendency to emphasize the head, as is so widespread in more recent African art. As in almost all parts of the world, however, it is precisely terracotta and metal finds that can shed light on the artistic statements of past cultures. Fragmentary. Provenance: Ex Coll. Mareidi and Gert Stoll, Munich, in Germany since the mid to late 1960s.