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ART in motion 50 LEFT, RIGHT, AND FOLLOWING PAGES Photographs by Pierre Amrouche taken during the public preview of the Vérité sale, June 15 and 16, 2006, in the main fl oor galleries at Hôtel Drouot, Paris. © Amrouche Expertises et Services, photos: Pierre Amrouche. Happy Birthday, Mr. Vérité By Pierre Amrouche The Vérité sale took place in Paris ten years ago, in June of 2006. In a hundred years of tribal art auctions, few have rivaled the sensation this one produced. The number of pieces, their quality, and their variety will not be soon forgotten. The highlight of the sale was a Fang ngil mask that brought what was at the time the record price of 5,800,000 euros. A century before this sale, in 1906, Maurice de Vlaminck found a Fang mask in a café in Argenteuil which, legend has it, was to become the prime mover of the primitivist movement and in the still-growing interest in collecting tribal art. The mask was subsequently sold to André Derain and is now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. While it is admittedly less impressive than Vérité’s ngil mask, it nonetheless remains a landmark object. Historically important auctions are few and far between, and they mark their times. Before the Second World War, there was the Eluard/Breton sale of 1931 and the de Miré sale late that same year. There were more after the war, beginning with the Félix Fénéon sale in 1946, which included a sublime Mabé Fang, which was sold again in the 1970s for an impressive price by Jacques Kerchache, and reappeared on the market again in 2014 at Sotheby’s Paris. In the 1960s, three major sales created frenzies among collectors. Two of them took place in Paris under the direction of Jean Roudillon: the Paul Guillaume sale of November 9, 1965, and the André Lefèvre sale of December 13, 1965. The third and arguably most important was the Helena Rubinstein sale held at Parke-Bernet in New York in 1966, which featured the Fang head with a downsweeping braided coiffure and the famed Bangwa fi gure from her collection. These major masterpieces, Rubinstein’s personality, and the large number of objects in the collection (261) that were of uniformly excellent quality, all combined to make this a major event and one that would not be surpassed for some forty years—until the Vérité sale in 2006. In the decade that followed the Rubinstein sale, tribal art auctions began to be more regularly held, and they began to outline the contours of what would become a structured market for it. Two auctions in Paris stand out from this period—those of the Rasmussen Collection in 1979 and 1980, which included a number of Bambara, Baule, Dan, and Tshokwe masterpieces that bidders vied for avidly. The Tshokwe fi gure brought more than 2 million francs. Subsequently, however, the highest prices of the 1980 through 2000 period would be made in the United States. Prominent among these was the Sotheby’s sale in New York of the Franklin Collection of Los Angeles, which once again featured the iconic Bangwa fi gure from Cameroon, formerly owned by Helena Rubinstein and immortalized by Man Ray. This time it was acquired by the Musée Dapper for about $3,500,000. The sale of this exceptional object also attested to an increase in the importance of provenances and cultural contexts in valuations.


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