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ÉCLECTIQUE 75 famous African Negro Art exhibition in 1935. At the same time, cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein began to collect African art, which she too associated with contemporary painting, both in her apartment on Île Saint-Louis in Paris and in her New York salon. Her collection was sold at auction in 1966, ten years after the Museum of Primitive Art in New York had opened, and the record prices generated by the sale put African art into a recognizable category. The value has continuously increased since then and the importance of the art repeatedly reconfi rmed. In France, the sale of Pierre Guerre’s collection in 1996 ushered in a new phase. In 2001, shortly after the opening of the Pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre in April 2000, the Hubert Goldet sale further cemented the trend, along with the René Gaffe and Bella Hein sales of 2005. The records achieved at the Pierre Vérité sale of 2006, held the same year that Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly opened, remain etched into the memories of many. It was within this context that the Ladreit de Lacharrière Collection began to be formed, starting in April of 20035 and continuing with a conviction that has only increased in the years since. It is the result of an encounter late in life with the arts of Africa and Oceania that was infl uenced by the convictions of Jacques Chirac and by contact with a variety of experts and consultants.6 It was also a natural extension of a life that had been nourished by eclectic interests springing from the foundation of a classical background.7 New collectors who come to African art in the twenty-fi rst century tend to do so more and more in a spirit of eclecticism, where tribal art is in dialog not only with modern and contemporary art (painting, sculpture, and photography) but also with design and the decorative arts. Built as it is around a nucleus of forty-one African and Oceanic objects, an essential part of the present exhibition is the idea of confrontations and convergences between artworks deriving from often distant places in space and time. It introduces Ladreit de Lacharrière’s personal encounter with African art and emphasizes some of his preferred subjects, most notably maternities and female fi gures, through the presentation of a single sculpture, a well-known FIG. 7 (above): Figurative plaque. Edo, Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria. 18th century(?). Copper alloy. Inscribed on reverse “29.102.7” or “29.1027” in white paint and reinscribed in red paint. H: 37.5 cm. Ex Sydney Burney (d. c. 1951), London; Louis Carré (1897–1977), Paris; Maurice Renou, Paris; Galerie Alain de Monbrison, Paris. © Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Photo by Claude Germain.


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