Musée Barbier-Mueller, a private museum in Geneva with one of the most beautiful ethnographic collections in the world, will have one hundred collection items auctioned at Christie's in Paris on March 6. The auction house announced this in a press release on Wednesday.
From the published Wednesday catalog it turns out that the museum mainly collects masks and statues from West and Central Africa and Oceania. Josef Müller, the museum's namesake, collected these pieces in the 1930s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York devoted a retrospective exhibition to the collection in 2009.
The Art Newspaper reports that the auction follows the unexpected death in January of Thierry Barbier-Mueller, the director of the family's real estate company and a major art collector. According to the art newspaper, his two brothers decided to sell it.
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Christie's does not want to say what the expected proceeds of the auction are, and the auction house also does not want to reveal the target prices of the masterpieces. But that this auction will yield many millions is evident from the documents in which the auction house has stated target prices. A more prestigious provenance than Musée Barbier-Mueller is hardly conceivable for collectors.
The auction includes nine masterpieces with a 'target price on request', all of which are likely to fetch well over a million. This includes one double-headed Baule maska spectacular one, almost one meter high nail fetish from Congo and an Uli, an ancestor statue from New Ireland, the former German colony near Papua New Guinea. (NRC)
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