A 66cm-tall wooden sculpture has become the most expensive work of African art sold at Christie's France, fetching €5.5m in Paris today, 23 June. This price tag makes it the third most valuable work of African art ever auctioned; the record stands at $12m for a rare Senufo female statue, which sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2014.
The finely carved Kota figure comes from the collection of William Rubin, the former director of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). But even the sculpture’s exceptional, and somewhat glamorous, provenance—previous owners include the US cosmetics tycoon Helen Rubenstein and the US collector of Modernism and Impressionism David Lloyd Kreeger—could not help the work tip its lower estimate of €6m.
The result may come as a surprise to some in the trade who expected the William Rubin Kota to break the record for the most expensive work of African art sold at auction, particularly given Christie's overseas promotion of the work. Following a two-week stint at Christie’s in New York in May, where it was displayed next to a Mark Rothko painting from 1958, the sculpture was sent to the auction house’s Hong Kong venue.
Meanwhile, a lecture at the Musée Picasso in Paris on 20 June highlighted the links between the art from the Kota and Western Modern art. Indeed, artists such as Picasso and Giacometti were directly inspired by Kota sculptural ideals—a point emphasised in Rubin’s groundbreaking 1984 exhibition at MoMA, ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, which included his Kota.
