Paris.- Sotheby’s France is delighted to present its summer auction on 22 June. This sale will feature outstanding works from the African Art collection of Daniel and Marian Malcolm. Over nearly fifty years, the collectors painstakingly assembled masterpieces of African statuary, building up one of the finest collections in the field.
The 22 June will also include a sale of works from various owners, including a re-discovered masterpiece of Lega art.
African art from the Daniel and Marian Malcolm collection
On a summer holiday in Paris in 1966, Doctors Daniel and Marian Malcolm took refuge from the summer heat in the Grand Palais, where African art was being celebrated in an iconic exhibition staged by Léopold Sédar Senghor and André Malraux. It was love at first sight, and an inspiration that grew into one of the world's most admirable American collections of ancient sub-Saharan African art. As a tribute to its universal beauty, Sotheby’s is presenting a selection of major works from the Malcolm Collection in two auctions: the first in New York on 7 May; the second in Paris on 22 June. The twelve works in the Paris sale represent half a century of judiciously chosen, truly remarkable works from many stylistic corpuses. The powerful and very rare portrait of a Chokwe Royal Female Figure is echoed with the same intensity by the striking modernism of the statue of a primordial Senufo ancestor, the formal inventiveness of a female Fang effigy from the Paul Guillaume Collection, and the extreme sensibility of the famous double Baule statue from the former Carlo Monzino Collection.
Arts of Africa and Oceania
The highlight of a sale of African and Oceanic arts from various owners will be the rediscovery of one of African art masterpieces. Unveiled in 1934 by Nancy Cunard in her revolutionary Negro: Anthology made by Nancy Cunard 1931-1933, the Lega Mask from the Adolphe and Suzanne Stoclet collection (estimate: €1-1.5 million) was one of the jewels in the iconic 1930s exhibition that fostered a new attitude to so-called "distant arts". It comes from an extremely rare corpus of large ivory masks symbolising unity, and embodying the concepts of aesthetics and beauty in the Lega region. Unique for the modernity of its streamlined volumes and known only through black and white pictures for over half a century, it will be seen anew in all the dazzling pictorial beauty of its patina.
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