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ART ON VIEW FIG. 8 (below): Male fi gure. Luba-Hemba, Niembo of Luika, DR Congo. 19th century. Wood. H: 75 cm. Ex Patricia Ann Withofs, London, before 1977; Galerie Alain de Monbrison, Paris. © Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Photo by Claude Germain. 76 Dogon fi gure of a woman pounding millet, which he acquired in 2007 (fi g. 2). This is the fi rst object in the exhibition, and it embodies the spirit of the collection. That spirit is also evidenced by a consistently high aesthetic standard, to which pedigree adds additional value. This demonstrates a desire to select essential works that are simultaneously powerful, seductive, and pertinent, and also in line with a humanist vision that looks to the world’s future. Most of the major pieces in this collection originated in distant lands, but they also represent part of the patrimony of France. Such objects are promoted abroad by an international art market that has long existed in Europe and the United States but is now developing in the Middle East and Asia as well. In the face of the reality of this market, in which museums often lack the means to participate, Ladreit de Lacharrière came to feel invested in the responsibility of helping to keep these important objects on French soil, and, in keeping with this idea, agreed to show them at the Musée du Quai Branly so that they can be exposed to and enjoyed by as many people as possible. The spirit of the collection is further characterized by affi nities of meaning that works formally and culturally distant from one another develop together—a subtle interaction counterpointed by the exhibition’s catalog, which more graphically demonstrates points of convergence in form, proportion, attitude, expression, details, and materials. This allows the archaic purity of a Cycladic idol (fi g. 3) to cohabit with a Dan mask (fi g. 4), which Paul Guillaume—arbitrarily, of course, but in a desire to give it the recognition it deserved— ascribed to the fi fth century AD. This was at a time when much less was known about African art than about the arts of other great civilizations and long before C-14 testing was available.8 Such “dialogs between works” include those between a youthful Herakles (fi g. 6) and a Fang ancestor fi gure with child-like proportions (fi g. 5); between the nobility of a naturalistic marble portrait of Hadrian and that of a “bronze” plaque from the Kingdom of Benin representing Oba Ohen (fi g. 7); between the moving sensitivity of features of a young man depicted in a Fayum portrait, which though eroded by time, still appears to question the meaning of death, and those of a male Luba-Hemba fi gure with its eyes halfshut, though it continues to watch over its ancestors (fi g. 8); and between the feminine confi dence of a FIG. 9 (right): Female fi gure. Senufo, northern Côte d’Ivoire. 19th century. Wood. H: 84.5 cm. Collected by Hélène Kamer in the early 1960s. Ex Galerie Kamer, New York; Roland de Montaigu, Paris/New York; Brian and Diane Leyden, New York; Brian and Diane Leyden Collection, Bete and Senufo Art, Sotheby’s, Paris, December 5, 2007, lot 5. © Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Photo by Claude Germain.


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