Auction of African Art From Gross Collection

Source: NY Times May 9, 2009

Collecting African art can be a risky business; fakes are everywhere. Even Picasso was fooled.

The market has recently become so lucrative that unscrupulous craftsmen now create copies, skillfully adding signs of wear, that can deceive even the most knowledgeable buyer. And there are no good tests to reassure collectors. (Carbon 14 testing of wood, which has an accuracy range of plus or minus 50 years, is useless in a field in which most objects are less than 100 years old.)

One collector who seemingly beat the odds was Chaim Gross (1904-1991), a Ukrainian-born New York-based sculptor. On Saturday Sotheby’s will put on view 80 pieces of African art from his vast collection. They will go on sale May 15.

Like his contemporaries Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi and Henry Moore, Gross greatly admired African art and acknowledged its influence. From the 1920s through the ’60s he avidly acquired examples at flea markets, auctions and galleries in New York, London, Brussels and Paris, which is still the center of the African art market. He helped found the National Museum of African Art in Washington, which in 1976 opened the traveling exhibition “The Sculptor’s Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross.”

“My father’s enthusiasm was contagious,” Mimi Gross, his daughter, said as she showed a visitor around her father’s art-crammed house and studio, now a private museum in Greenwich Village. “He would get people to fall in love with African art. He always talked about the quality of carving, and he’d get upset when he saw contemporary fakes.”

The Gross collection has been out of the public eye for decades. “Collectors and dealers who have come to see the sale thought the Gross collection was dispersed years ago,” said Heinrich Schweizer, the African art specialist at Sotheby’s. “We’ve had a good response because the material is so fresh.”

James Willis, a San Francisco tribal art dealer since 1972 who once visited Gross in his New York studio, added, “There are some strong pieces in the sale.”

One is a 19-inch-tall Ngbaka statue from Congo. The striking male figure, representing a mythical ancestor, has a proud stance, knees slightly bent, stomach protruding, its head marked with scarification lines that look like strings of pearls. Based on its encrustations and deep black patina, experts say it is from the mid-19th century or earlier. It is estimated to bring $400,000 to $600,000.

Another 19th-century piece is a Senufo kneeling female figure from Ivory Coast, with a comblike hairdo and scars on its cheeks and arms. It leans forward, as if tending a fire. “This is the only kneeling one known,” Mr. Schweizer said.

The sale will benefit the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation (rcgrossfoundation.org), which is selling its most valuable pieces of African art to create an endowment and promote scholarship on Gross’s art. The sale is expected to raise $3 million to $4 million.

“The market for African art is relatively narrow, but it’s growing,” Mr. Willis said. He said it was helped in part by two events in Paris in 2006: the opening of the Quai Branly Museum and the Vérité sale at the Drouot auction house, which brought $55.4 million. “Once pieces started selling for a million dollars, people paid attention,” he added. “The high prices gave people confidence to get into the market, and now people who never bought before are buying great pieces.”

New enthusiasts include contemporary-art collectors. Joshua Dimondstein, a dealer from California, said, “As contemporary collectors understand the affinity the two art forms share, they recognize how well they complement each other.”

The Sotheby’s sale coincides with the four-day New York tribal art show, which opens Thursday at the 69th Regiment Armory, at Lexington Avenue and 26th Street.