At Tuesday’s night sale of African and Oceanic art at Christie’s Paris, a nearly nine-foot-tall Nkundu relic became the year’s most expensive African object at auction when it sold to an anonymous buyer for $3,526,600, vastly outstripping its $260,000-$390,000 pre-sale estimate.
The artifact came from the collection of painter Jean Willy Mestach, who bought it from Brussels’s Galerie Aux Bateliers in the 1950s and loaned it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art…
Read more: Benjamin Sutton, Art Info
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