African Tribal Art sale at Dorotheum Vienna May 3rd

   The 152 items on offer can lay claim to 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 Nouveau) art. What is less widely known is that since the early 1960s he had been collecting tribal art with an emphasis on objects from native African culture. 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 the Dorotheum including masks, ancestral figures, musical instruments, decorative art, and cult and ceremonial pieces.

   One of the highlights of the auction is the Ngil Fang helmet mask of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon (estimate: €20,000-40,000). Another mask originates from Guro, Ivory Coast. The finely finished headdress is bound by four amulet-purses into a characteristic tall plait (€ 6,000 - 10,000).

   From Mbala/Suku in the Democratic Republic of Congo there is a rare male figure hewn from wood dyed with powdered redwood. Such sculptures were kept by chiefs in their houses to confirm and underline their authority. 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 one such twin figure.

   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).

   The online catalogue can be found here.