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NEWS: tribal art fair New York 2012 preview

3 May: Dorotheum-Auction Tribal Art from Africa
including items from the "unknown" Leopold collection

Dear $email,

On May 3, 2011 the first auction of the new Tribal Art department takes place at Dorotheum Vienna. The 152 items on offer can claim a famous provenance, namely the private collection of Austria's most prominent collector Prof. Rudolf Leopold (1925 - 2010). Leopold was primarily known as a collector of Schiele and Jugendstil art (Art Nouveau) . What is less widely known is that since the early 1960's he had been collecting tribal art with an emphasis on objects from native African cultures. The collector's legendary keen eye for exceptional quality manifests itself in this section of the Leopold collection, which is largely unknown to the general public. Following the collector's death the family has decided to reduce the extensive and significant estate to its essential core of 19th and 20th century Austrian paintings. Consequently, the "unknown" Leopold collection is now coming up for auction at Dorotheum including masks, ancestral figures, musical instruments, decorative art, and magic and ceremonial pieces.

One of the highlights of the auction is the Ngil Fang helmet mask of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon (estimated value € 20,000 – 40,000). Another mask originates from the Guro tribe, Ivory Coast. The finely finished headdress is bound by four amulet-purses into a characteristic tall plait (€ 6,000 – 10,000). A shiny, dark brown patina adorns the 84cm high, Janus-faced half-length figure from Bambara, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso (€ 15,000 – 20,000).

The Nigerian Yoruba people exhibit the anthropological anomaly of having an unusually high incidence of twins. If one of the twins died, sculptors would create a surrogate figure from wood, which was treated exactly like a living child and would be swaddled, fed, washed and so on. This auction includes several such twin figures.

The Janus-faced ancestral pair from Luba/Hemba in the Democratic Republic of Congo consists of a male and a female head: a magical substance was stored in the space between the heads (€ 4,000 – 7,000).

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Mail David Norden Sint-katelijnevest 27 B2000 ANTWERPEN-Belgium (map) Tel +32 3 227 35 40