Art Market Monitor

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Sotheby’s Modern & Cont African Art = £2.77m

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Chéri Samba, A Successful Life

Sotheby’s first sale of Modern and Contemporary African Art was held today in London. The £2.77m total wasn’t quite what the auction house was hoping for. But there was one clear winner, Chéri Samba, the Congolese painter whose work is being featured at the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s current show of African art from the collection of Jean Pigozzi.

Of the top 15 lots in Sotheby’s sale, Samba had four works. And the work that sold the best was once owned by Pigozzi and acquired by the consignor from a sale of Pigozzi’s works in 1999.

Pigozzi’s Challenge: Where’s Your Contemporary African Art?

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The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s show of African art featuring works from Jean Pigozzi’s massive 10,000-work collection built over 30 years has generated a great deal of interest in art from the continent. In the press surrounding the event, Pigozzi has begun to muse on the fate of his life’s work and lamented that few have followed his example:

In an interview with the French website Le Quotidien de l’Art, Pigozzi outlines his vision for a foundation, saying: “It would be sad if 30 years of work disappeared, and the 10,000-strong collection was dispersed, if I were to fall under a taxi one day in London. It is still incredible that neither the Museum of Modern Art, nor Beaubourg [the Centre Pompidou in Paris], nor the Metropolitan Museum of Art have a department of contemporary African art. In five years’ time, I want to create an [operational] space in Europe.”

Venture capitalist Jean Pigozzi plans foundation to house huge contemporary African art collection (The Art Newspaper)

Africa's Extraordinary Civilization

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The Financial Times’s Mark Hudson looks at the British Museum’s show of Nigerian bronze heads.

The controversial bronze head called ‘Olokun’, now considered to be an early 20th-century copy of a lost 14th-century original

Now 12 of these heads and one half-length figure are to be displayed at the British Museum, along with a wealth of terracotta sculpture, pottery and other objects, almost all of it lent by Nigeria’s Commission for Museums and Monuments. While much of the terracotta work is extraordinarily refined, it is the bronze heads that tug most at the imagination. Does their realism and technical sophistication provide evidence of links between tropical Africa and the ancient Mediterranean? Or was medieval Africa far more advanced than was previously imagined? As our views on Africa have developed over the past century, the political dimensions of such questions have been magnified.

A web of intrigue and controversy surrounds these extraordinary objects. It centres on the most famous of them, the Ori Olokun – the so-called Head of the Sea God – unearthed by Frobenius in 1910. A freebooting Indiana Jones figure, part visionary, part charlatan, Frobenius arrived in Ife, the spiritual capital of the Yoruba people, with the aim of finding evidence of a lost “white” African civilization. Continue Reading

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