In 100 carefully curated lots, Christie’s presents an exceptionally rich offering featuring major works of art and many unique opportunities for works of art never seen on the market. From Africa, the André Fourquet Fang Masterpiece leads the sale and is complemented by another work from the lexicon of major African sculpture, the Coray-Kerchache Kota figure. An archaic, proto-Yombe figure, formerly in the Wielgus Collection, whose closest relative is the Yombe figure in the Wellcome Collection at the Fowler Museum, UCLA, is a hidden treasure from an American collection featured. From Oceania, one of the great masterpieces of art across time and cultures is the Saibai Island, Torres Strait Islands, mask from the Jolika Collection. Less than 25 masks are known to exist with all but two, including the Jolika mask, in Museum collections. A rare ‘black tulip’ of Oceanic art history is the Captain Cook ledger of tapa cloth samples collected on his voyages of the 18th and early 19th centuries. While other books that exist are often missing samples, this one is not only complete, but has 17 additional samples included. Bridging the arts of Asia and ancient Polynesia, is a rare Païwan figure, from the village of Laï in Taïwan. It was featured as early as 1973 in the ground-breaking exhibition in Paris at Galerie Helene Kamer, Arts de Taïwan.

A FANG MASTERPIECE FROM THE ANDRÉ FOURQUET COLLECTION

1907. This is the year that Paul Guillaume, former owner of this sculpture and the legendary Parisian dealer for Modigliani and other Modern masters, writing in 1926, called a revolutionary one. African art eclipsed other forms of inspiration amongst the Modern artists. By the time of the first World War, the most avant-garde art critics and sophisticated collectors were quick to assert the artistic merits of Fang statuary. It soon became the central theme on the topic of African art as art, as opposed to ethnography. The result today is that the greatest works by these Master Artists are still regarded as the ultimate form of African sculpture.

It was referred to then as art of the ‘Pahouin’. The sculptures featured prominently in modern art critic Carl Einstein’s early publications. In New York, Alfred Stieglitz featured a Fang figure in his exhibition ‘Picasso-Braque’ at 291 Gallery in 1915, as well. The voice of Paul Guillaume in Paris became the strongest siren, and most enduring over the course of the 20th century, in extolling the virtues of this magnificent art.

Later, this sculpture would belong to one of the greatest collectors of the second half of the 20th century, André Fourquet. The André Fourquet Fang Masterpiece, is a testament to his prescient eye for major sculpture of Gabon. Enamored in 1965 by this figure, as a young man, Fourquet borrowed the money to buy this treasure at the auction of Paul Guillaume’s (d. 1934) long-held personal African art treasures.

Conceived by a Master Sculptor of the 19th century in a style that marries the one of the most potent groups artistically, the Okak Fang of Equatorial Guinea to the more central Ntumu group. The Fourquet Fang, represented with bent legs and arms tensely along the side of the body with a jutting face of sharply defined features with the addition of large, circular, glowing eyes. That time has erased, or in a sense recarved, one of the eyes and the front of the arms lends a feeling of antiquity and vitality at the same moment. The aspect of the Ntumu Fang is also seen in the soignée containment of the body and the smooth, heavily oiled surface, which continues to glisten and drip oil, as if the sculpture were alive.

AN OCEANIC MASTERPIECE FROM THE TORRES STRAIT ISLANDS FROM THE JOLIKA COLLECTION

Amongst the most rare and spectacular works of art known across time and cultures are the masks created by the artists of the Torres Strait Islanders. The Jolika Mask is the most powerful and fully realized of this extremely exclusive corpus. It is a tour de force with its monumental size- more than 3 times the actual size of the human face, hauntingly pale eyes cast against a somber patina, which carry the viewer to a liminal space between terra firma and the mystical realm. In the remote islands which dot the strait bridging Australia and New Guinea, masks were the primary art form. Monumental and heroic, they are the core visual language of the Torres Islanders. The masks function was related to many aspects of Torres Strait life, from fertility and agrarian ceremonies to initiation and funerary rites. A mythological hero or a clan spirit, the mask fulfilled several roles all in an effort to create equilibrium of the group through visual connections to the supernatural. The searing impression of this mask is unforgettable, and for this reason it was one of only three masks from Oceania selected by William Rubin in his landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for his ‘Primitivism’ exhibition of 1984.

Masks such as this rare and spectacular example from Saibai Island are believed to represent mythical heroes whose appearances signal important events and rites of passage. Although the Torres Strait Islands are recognized for their proliferation of artistic production, works are extremely rare due to the dispersal and small population of these islands, which had fewer than 4,000 inhabitants before sustained European contact in the 19th century. The earliest written record of a mask from these Islands, and therefore a masking tradition, was the mention of a turtle-shell example, over 400 years ago, in 1606, by the Spanish explorer Don Diego de Prado y Tovar on the voyage commanded by Luís Vaz de Torres, from whom the region derives its name.

THE CORAY-KERCHACHE KOTA-NDASSA AS ‘SUPERMAN’

The Coray-Kerchache Kota is one of the major works of the genre and a jewel in the most celebrated Kota-Ndassa style. This figure was realized by a sculptor fully in control and at the apogee of his powers. The sophisticated interplay of metals and layered tonality is the mark of a master. Copper. Brass. Iron. The presence together of all three metals, and in large quantities demonstrates the wealth, prestige and power of this ancestor.

The Kota people of Gabon created these extraordinary abstract figures, covered with copper, brass and sometimes, iron, as an element of a reliquary dedicated to ancestral veneration. According to Frederic Cloth, the scholar of Kota art and co-curator (together with Kristina van Dyke) of the present exhibition KOTA at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, the character represented in this type of sculpture is male, as are all of these figures conceived with a convex, or bombé, face.

The artist of the Coray-Kerchache Kota insisted on another measure of masculinity by adding a second mark of male gender: the ridge on the forefront, making it kind of a "supermale" figure. This "super masculinity" would not have translated into specific rituals or use. Rather, they represented spirits whose purpose was to guard the relics, and as the same spirit could not guard two different sites, they, therefore, needed to be individualized. Giving this figure a super virile aspect satisfies the need for a unique character – only 25% of similar figures are "supermales". Another commonly used mechanism of individualization was the decor of the crescent, and here the artist used a rare motif in the form of a straight vertical line.

‘Super’ Provenance

Han Coray (1880-1974) was one of the greatest turn-of-the-century collectors of African art. A collector and dealer in Modern art, in 1917 his Zurich gallery organized the very first exhibition by the Dada movement, in which he also showed African art. Like his fellow Modernists at that moment, such as Paul Guillaume in Paris, for instance, he understood first the aesthetic power and range of African art, and celebrated it as art rather than ethnography (see lot for more on Guillaume). His 1917 exhibition caught the interest of the artistic avant-garde in Europe, in particular Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Hans Richter.

Jacques Kerchache (1942-2001) was one of the great 20th century lights in the field of African art. Like many great amateurs, the urge to collect was probably formed in his DNA rather than acquired. He bought his first work of African art in a flea market when he was only twelve, and that was the start of a lifetime of collecting including his important discoveries of our modern times amongst the Fon and Mumuye, for instance. His indelible mark would have been felt if nothing else in the important survey of 1988, which is still a bible. It was his work and publishing and his manifesto, carrying on the proclamations of critics like Felix Feneon in questioning why African art was not in the Louvre. Thanks to the patronage of Jacques Chirac, in 2000, this major act was finally realized when he was selected to organize the scenography and selection of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas for the Pavillon des Sessions in the Louvre.