Arman the Collector: The Artist's Collection of African Art

In its final week at the Paul Kasmin Gallery is Arman the Collector: The Artist’s Collection of African Art, a selection of twenty traditional African works from the noted artist’s private collection, now administrated by the Arman Marital Trust. This non-commercial installation can be seen until January 11 at the gallery’s 293 Tenth Avenue location in New York City.

View the exhibition's official website.

Baboon mask  -  Makonde, Tanzania

Image and information courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

The Florence Loeb Collection at Sotheby's - April 5

Daughter of the celebrated and visionary gallery-owner Pierre Loeb, the Parisian dealer of the greatest modern artists of the inter-war period, including Picasso, Miró and Giacometti, Florence Loeb inherited her father’s passion for distant cultures and his gift for forging special affinities with the most fascinating artistic personalities of his generation. Sotheby's will be offering Loeb's important collection of art and manuscripts on April 5 in Paris.

In addition to the finest ensemble of books and drawings by Antonin Artaud and a portrait of Pierre Loeb by Alberto Giacometti, the lots will include a selection of beautiful works from Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

View the online catalogue.

Tapa cloth  -  Humboldt Bay, Papua New Guinea

Byeri head  -  Fang, Gabon

Seated figure  -  Baule, Côte d'Ivoire

Kachina figure  -  Hopi, Arizona

Club  -  Solomon Islands

Bone mask  -  Eskimo, Alaska

Information and images courtesy of Sotheby's

Magic Masks, Curvy Women From Congo Bewitch in Paris: Review

Congo doesn't have the best reputation.

If the two countries sharing the name of Africa’s second- longest river, the (formerly French) Republic of the Congo and the (formerly Belgian) Democratic Republic of the Congo, pop up in the news, you can bet it’s about civil wars, refugees, abysmal poverty or shameless corruption.

“Fleuve Congo: Arts d’Afrique Centrale,” an exhibition at the Musee du Qui Branly in Paris, presents a more attractive image of that unfortunate region.

The Benedictine monk Francois Neyt, emeritus professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, and curator of the show, spent more than 20 years in Africa. He casts his net wide. Besides the two countries mentioned, he includes their neighbors -- Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and parts of Angola -- an area eight times the size of France, stretching from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes in East Africa.

The political frontiers and tribal wars notwithstanding, Neyt is convinced that the vast, outwardly fragmented region shares a common cultural heritage. As proof, he points to cross- border myths, therapeutic rituals, songs and dances.

He also emphasizes sculptures. The 170 pieces, on loan from Belgian and French museums as well as private collectors, are supposed to demonstrate the common roots of the art produced by the Fang in Gabon, the Luba in Katanga, the southernmost part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Chokwe in Angola.

‘Powerful Women’

Neyt exemplifies his theory with the help of three types of sculpture: masks in the shape of a heart, reliquaries with the bones of ancestors and “powerful women.”

The masks are used on various occasions -- initiation rites, circumcisions, necromantic ceremonies and dances. Some are white, others red or ochre. Some have a second pair of eyes, a symbol of prophetic vision. One, representing a sprite of the rain forest, has six eyes.

The guardian figures containing bones of ancestors serve more or less the same purpose as relics of Christian saints: They are believed to possess magical powers protecting against bad luck and evil forces. They come in a confusing variety of shapes; one has the face of a python.

A widespread feature is the diamond-shaped posture of the arms. The figures also are used as title deeds.
The third section is the least convincing. It’s true that the matrilineal transmission of power was the rule in the ancient kingdom of Kongo. Still, it’s hard to believe that “powerful women” with curvaceous bodies and elaborate hairstyles are specific to the Congo region.

Never mind. You can easily enjoy the exquisite beauty of the sculptures without buying into Father Francois’s theoretical edifice.

Just follow the example of Pablo Picasso, who was bowled over when he saw, in 1906, a statuette from the Congo region that his friend Henri Matisse had bought at a curiosity shop on Rue de Rennes. A display case documents the craze for “art negre,” as it was then called, and how the Paris art market responded.

“Fleuve Congo: Arts d’Afrique Centrale,” which is sponsored by Total SA, is at the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, through Oct. 3. Information: http://www.quibranly.fr or +33-1-5661-7000.

Source: Bloomberg Online, Muse
By: Jorg von Uthmann

World Record Set At Auction

In yet another sign of improving economic conditions in the art market, history was made at Christie’s last night when a Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, coming from the collection of Mrs. Sidney F. Brody, sold for $106,482,500 (₤70,278,450 €81,991,525) to an anonymous bidder, setting a new world record for any work of art sold at auction. The Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale realized a total of $335,548,000 (£221,461,680/Є258,317,960), and also achieved world records for Braque and Rafaelli.

The Evening Sale portion of the Mrs. Sidney F. Brody Collection became the highest total for a single-owner sale offered at Christie's New York. The 27 lots from the Brody Collection achieved $224,177,500/£147,957,150/€172,616,675 and were 100% sold by lot and value. Overall, 30 lots sold above the $1 million mark and 9 lots sold above the $10 million mark. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the Brody Collection will be donated the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA, where the late Mrs. Brody was a guiding patron.

The Various Owners portion of the sale yielded four more prices above the $10 million mark for works by Giacometti, Picasso, and Renoir, as well as a new world auction record for Raffaelli. The top lot of the section was a stunning 1947 sculpture of a human hand by Giacometti, La Main, which sold for $25,842,500 (₤35,166,450/€41,027,525). Two further works by Pablo Picasso also sold above expectations as Femme au chat assise dans un fauteuil, 1964, realized $18,002,500 (₤11,881,650/€13,861,925) and another work of the same year, Le peintre et son modèle, 1964, sold for $10,722,500 (₤7,076,850/€8,256,325).

Contemporary Pakistani Art at the Pacific Asia Museum

A review by Sharon Mizota from the Los Angeles Times:

'Beyond the Page: The Miniature as Attitude in Contemporary Art From Pakistan' at the Pacific Asia Museum

Artists of Pakistani descent riff on the techniques and imagery of miniatures in an illuminating exhibit at the Pacific Asia Museum.


When Picasso incorporated motifs from African art into his paintings, it was seen as a step forward for modern art. No one thought about what it might mean for African traditions. After all, they were "primitive" and therefore frozen in time.

Something similar might be said for our understanding of South Asian miniature painting. Although references to its diminutive, highly stylized depictions of aristocratic life or mythic stories have appeared in contemporary art -- Shahzia Sikander's work being the most prominent example -- there has been little discussion about how the miniature tradition itself has evolved.

"Beyond the Page: The Miniature as Attitude in Contemporary Art From Pakistan" at the Pacific Asia Museum aims to change that state of affairs. The show at first comes across as another paean to the globalization of contemporary art (and the rise of South Asian artists and markets within it), but ends up revealing how the miniature tradition resonates surprisingly well with contemporary practices.

The carefully focused exhibition features the work of 13 artists of Pakistani descent who riff on the techniques and imagery of miniature painting, in particular the delicate, courtly images of the Mughal Empire of the 16th to the mid-19th centuries.

Seven of the artists trained in the genre at the National College of Arts in Lahore, where "miniature" is a discipline alongside painting, printmaking and sculpture. All are well versed in the conceptually oriented global language of contemporary art, and they interpret the miniature tradition through a variety of media, including painting, video, sculpture and photomontage.

Several artists reexamine the initial colonial encounter between Pakistan (then part of India) and the British Empire. Hamra Abbas turns the tables with tiny, extreme close-up portraits of smiling white people she met during a residency in London. The delicately painted but brutally cropped images echo the miniature portraits that British subjects commissioned from South Asian artists during the colonial era, some of which are on view in a companion exhibition drawn from the museum's collection. In these images, colonists inserted themselves into an aesthetic tradition usually reserved for images of rulers and gods. By contrast, Abbas' present-day miniatures reflect a movement in the opposite direction: the Pakistani artist's presence in the homeland of the former colonizers.

Whereas Abbas uses the miniature aesthetic as a historical touchstone, other artists examine the genre's formal affinities with Western art.

One example is the similarity between the painting technique par dokht and late 19th century pointillism. In both cases, an image is composed, not of lines and areas of color, but of hundreds or thousands of tiny dots.

Rashid Rana updates both traditions for the electronic age by replacing paint with images from pop culture. In the mural-sized digital print "All Eyes Skywards at the Annual Parade," he reproduces a photograph of a Pakistani nationalist celebration out of thousands of Bollywood film stills. Whether par dokht or pointillism, the image suggests how the unrestricted flow of global pop culture might undermine political tensions between Pakistan and India.

Other artists explore the miniature's reliance on a grid structure, also a staple of Western art. In an untitled work, Rahana Mangi revisits a painting she began as a student in the miniature program at the National College of Arts by stitching a fine net of black hair across the central image. The diagonal grid makes palpable (and bodily) the armature that miniaturists use to structure their pictures and create patterns. It also brings the genre into dialogue with the spare, rectilinear work of Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin.

Likewise in a reductive vein, Noor Ali Chagani extrudes the grid into three dimensions, constructing his pieces out of hundreds of tiny bricks. His dollhouse-scale walls and undulating brick "carpet" are wry little minimalist sculptures.

There is a tendency to define works like these as contemporary to free them from restrictive and often exotic associations with traditional forms. But couldn't they simultaneously be a continuation of the miniature tradition? Why should the categories "contemporary art" and "South Asian miniature" be mutually exclusive?

"Beyond the Page" suggests that they aren't and provides a glimpse of what a truly global culture might look like: a place where the local textures the global and difference can be recognized without becoming a disadvantage.