53 that means there is a chance we will see it at auction again at some point in the future—who knows? Interestingly, the high bidder for the mask was a woman, just as was the buyer of Goldet’s Ambete fi gure. This milestone sale had another interesting attribute. It was the last of the great “French” sales resisting the arrival of the Anglo auction houses. Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which have now been established in the French market for some years, have gradually garnered market share and now appear to be making a nearly clean sweep of historical French and European collections. The number of their employees and specialists, their relentless marketing, and their worldwide client base inexorably attract the best collections and consignors. Since the Vérité sale, the market has seen records broken by the infl ux of petrodollars, like at the Sotheby’s sale in New York where the Senufo deble from the Myron Kunin Collection brought 12 million dollars, and at the Christie’s London sale of July 2015, where a Luba bowstand formerly in the collection of a Qatari prince sold for more than 6 million pounds. The Vérité record has been exceeded, but arguably not in infl ation-adjusted terms. Ten years later, the Vérité sale remains an emblem of an exceptionally successful commercial venture, produced under the supervision of a small French auction house, Enchères Rive Gauche, whose business acumen and savoir faire achieved the standards of the major Anglo-American houses—an example to be remembered and perhaps a notable challenge to today’s system. * Jean Laude, 1966, Les Arts de l'Afrique noire, Paris: Librairie Générale Française; and Eliot Elisofon and William Fagg, 1958, The Sculpture of Africa, London: Thames & Hudson.
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