Sketch for Urn Head

Notes

From an initially innocuous sketch made in the Congo of the bound head of a Mangbetu child, and its likeness to a Barotse pot picked up in a market in the then Livingstone, Preller developed a series of evocative and poetic paintings featuring open-topped and disembodied heads. Often filled with serene and glistening pools of water, these so-called urn heads were used to explore the concepts of memory, personality and imagination. The earliest painting in the series, Urn Head (1939), to which the current sketch is clearly related, anticipated landmark paintings such as Mountain Pool (1946), The Grotto (1946) and Christ Head (1947 and 1952).