Bamileke Lintel, possibly the work of a Babanki artist working for the court of Baham, Grassfields Region, Cameroon

Allan Stone, New York, acquired in the 1970s

The art of Cameroon, best known for its expressive "savage" style, was the key inspirational source for German Expressionism. Part of the German colonial empire until World War I, Cameroon and its art featured prominently in Berlin's museum of anthropology, today's Ethnologisches Museum, where it was studied by such young artists as Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel of the Brückemovement.

In the Bamileke kingdoms of the Cameroon Grassfields, all political and spiritual power was centralized in the person of the fon (king) who resided in a lavish palace situated in the center of his kingdom. The palace was a raffia palmrib construction with an open veranda facing the main market which was the focal point of trade transaction and symbolic of the kingdom's economic welfare. The palace's broad exposure to this public place was deliberate and all architectural elements meant to demonstrate royal authority. Doorways were framed by two vertical pilars and one horizontal lintel and a key element of Bamileke representational acrhitecture. According to Harter (1986: 92), the design of human heads symbolizes killed enemies, reference to the king's warfaring and judicial powers.

The lintel from the Allan Stone Collection is distinguished by the highly expressive style of the five spherical heads which share bulbous eyes, open mouths and an overall animated expression but are each individually distinctive. In style and appearance the Allan Stone lintel relates closely to the lintel of a complete doorframe in the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin (inv. no. "III C 21052 a-c"), which was collecetd by Captain Hans Glauning in Baham Kingdom in 1906 and given to the museum in 1907. According to Chris Geary (GVR archive, Yale Univeristy, no. "100360": Comments) field collecting information provided by Hans Glauning suggests that "this door frame comes from a large military house in Baham. But formally the work is very different from other carved artefacts from this region. Contrary to the representation of figures in Baham, which commonly show movement, this door frame recalls workshops of the Babanki region. Probably a workshop from Bali in the northern Grassfields delivered the door frame as a commission or as a gift to Baham – the two kingdoms had close trade relations."