Editorial If you’re a reader of this journal, there’s a good chance you may have already heard that last November the auction record for a work of African art was broken. During the sale of the Myron Kunin Collection at Sotheby’s in New York, a well-known and extensively published and exhibited Senufo deble sold for $10.6 million by hammer, which means $12,037,000 with premiums added. Given that the previous record stood for nearly ten years at just over seven million dollars, this is an advance in the market that is both notable and long overdue. The sculpture in question is a standing female figure of a type commonly, though somewhat misleadingly, known as a rhythm pounder. It was carved by an artist whose name we do not know but who was identified in 2002 by German author Burkhard Gottschalk as ein Meister von Sikasso (a Master of Sikasso). He probably worked in the late nineteenth and/or early twentieth century in West Africa’s Sikasso region, which is located at the modern border of Mali and Burkina Faso, just north of Côte d’Ivoire. Another of his pieces, also a deble and formerly in the Helena Rubinstein Collection, is known to have been acquired in Africa in 1935. Exactly when the Kunin deble came to the West is not precisely known, but the fact that this sculpture is a masterpiece has long been recognized. It has passed through the hands of some of the field’s most refined collectors, has been widely exhibited, and images of it have been featured in a remarkable number of publications—museum catalogs, generalist surveys, and academic treatises. Twelve million dollars is a lot of money by most people’s standards, but as a price for a recognized top example of an art genre, it’s actually quite a modest amount. Modern and contemporary paintings, especially those by van Gogh, Picasso, and Warhol, sell with some frequency in excess of $100 million. The record for the top price paid for a work of art at public auction is currently held by Francis Bacon’s 1969 oil-on-canvas triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold at Christie’s in 2013 for $142.4 million. However, judging markets by auction prices can be deceptive, since the amounts involved in private sales—being just that, private—are rarely disclosed but can be much higher than those realized at auction. As was widely reported in the media a couple of years ago, one of the five oilon canvas iterations of Paul Cézanne’s Les joueurs de cartes (The Card Players) was acquired from the estate of shipping magnate George Embiricos by the royal family of Qatar for a princely (in this case, literally) sum said to be in excess of $250 million. The highest-disclosed insurance value for a work of art was for the Mona Lisa in 1962 when it was included in a traveling exhibition. Given adjustment for inflation, the $100 million it was assessed for at that time has been estimated to be nearly $800 million in today’s currency. After Leonardo da Vinci’s death in 1519, King Francis I paid 4,000 gold écus for the painting, which by troy weight amounts to a mere $800,000 today. He probably didn’t realize what a bargain he was getting. If we start looking at real estate for comparative value, forget it. Twelve million will certainly get you a nice house in a good neighborhood within an acceptable school district, but it’s hardly going to be the envy of the 90210. Though it’s still a relative bargain, does the sale of this piece herald a general uptick in the market? Possibly. Does it mean we’ll be seeing more and more top-end pieces selling in the millions? Absolutely. Art isn’t about money, of course, although all too often that’s the unfortunate yardstick we use to gauge it. Art is about expression, refinement, and the realization of ideals. The Master of Sikasso didn’t set out to create an artwork in order to break records in a New York auction a century later. He intended to capture the essence of a mythic cultural ancestress in a form that was appropriate for the specific needs of a branch of the initiatory Poro association. In the process, he also created a masterpiece of balance and minimalist abstraction, an embodiment of female form and strength so striking that it transcends the boundaries of the Senufo culture that necessitated its production and even the greater West African cultural context within which this existed. His sculpture turned out to be something both recognizable and relevant on a global level. In theory at least, wherever the artwork may be from, those are the qualities that the top of the art market should be embracing. How long with this record hold? No one can say, of course, but there are two other debles attributed to the Master of Sikasso known to be out there. Both are well provenanced and, sculpturally speaking, strikingly similar to the Kunin example. One of these is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, so it’s probably not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. The other is the previously mentioned Rubinstein example. It last sold publicly in a Christie’s auction in 1995, where it made seven figures, actually slightly more than the Kunin one did when it went to auction at Sotheby’s in 1991. It now lives in a private collection, though only time will tell if this new record will inspire it to find a new home and, if so, at what price. Jonathan Fogel Our cover shows an Inuit dance mask collected by Danish Arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen in 1924 at Point Hope, northern Alaska. Wood, pigment, glass bead, wolf snout. H: 25 cm. The National Museum of Denmark, Ethnographic collection, inv. P32257. The flanking photos are from the same expedition and show Rasmussen (taken by Leo Hansen in 1924) and Rasmussen with Kaj Birket-Smith (taken by Peter Freuchen in 1921). The National Museum of Denmark, Ethnographic collection. All images © The National Museum of Denmark.
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