Yemen (Qataban or Saba), ca. 1st century BCE–2nd century CE.
A striking Pre-Islamic South Arabian carved alabaster (calcite) funerary head, carved in creamy translucent alabaster, the stylized male visage presents the hallmark abstraction of South Arabian sculpture: a flat-topped head, strong straight brows meeting a long ridged nose, deeply recessed eye sockets originally inlaid, and a small, softly modeled mouth. The reverse and sides are left roughly worked, indicating the head was set into a niche or the wall of a funerary monument, with the base intended for insertion.
Heads of this type functioned as funerary memorials, placed in tombs and mortuary niches to serve as an enduring likeness or "stand-in" for the deceased, sometimes inscribed with the individual's name and dedicated to the ancestral cult of the great South Arabian caravan kingdoms.
Size 9-1/4 in (23.4cm) H. 10-3/8 in (26.4 cm) on custom base.
Condition: surface weathering, mineral staining, and loss of the original eye inlays, with expected chips to the edges consistent with excavation and great age.
Cf. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the British Museum, London, for closely related South Arabian alabaster funerary stelae and heads of the Qatabanian tradition.
Provenance: Designer Mary McFadden (1938–2024) "The Archaeologist of Seventh Avenue". Mary was one of the most distinctive and intellectually adventurous American fashion designers of the late twentieth century, celebrated for collections that drew directly on the art and dress of ancient and non-Western civilizations. Her signature finely pleated "Marii" silk gowns evoked the chitons of classical Greece and the pleated linens of pharaonic Egypt, while her use of color, ornament, and motif borrowed openly from Africa, Asia, pre-Columbian America, and the ancient Mediterranean. This deep engagement with the material culture of the past earned her the memorable nickname "the Archaeologist of Seventh Avenue."
A former editor at Vogue and a tireless world traveler, McFadden was as much a collector and connoisseur as a couturier. She assembled an eclectic personal collection of antiquities and ethnographic art gathered over decades of travel, which she frequently cited as the inspiration for her designs. Her work was widely exhibited and collected, and she was inducted into the Coty American Fashion Critics' Hall of Fame, cementing her reputation as a designer whose creativity was rooted in the study of the ancient world.
