Ethnographica & Tribal Art

There was some good old fashioned saleroom drama at Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions in Newbury yesterday when a moai kavakava style figure, estimated to bring just £400-600, sold at £95,000. The buyer in Berkshire was from Australia.

A private treaty sale of a Benin bronze head helped Woolley & Wallis retain its status as the UK’s leading regional saleroom in 2016.

Some good old-fashioned saleroom drama ensued at Ewbank’s of Send in Surrey on December 1 when a tribal art necklace estimated at £60-100 sold to a buyer from Continental Europe at £99,000 (plus 22.5% premium).

African artefacts, jewellery and fossils from a family collection linked to the celebrated palaeoanthropologists, the late Louis and Mary Leakey, are to be sold later this month at The Cotswold Auction Company.

A Fijian cannibal fork was sold at Duke’s in Dorchester for £7500 on September 16.

The Parcours des Mondes, Paris' annual tribal trail and one of the biggest commercial gatherings in this collecting area, opened on September 6.

Pablo Picasso is revered as a key pioneer of Cubism, the radical approach to representing reality that he spearheaded with Georges Braque in the early 1900s. As with so many art movements, its roots extend further back, however.

Tribal art will be making a splash in Brussels around the city’s Sablon area, as it is does every summer, but this year it will be as part of a new cross-cultural promotion.

The Musée du Quai Branly, the dedicated museum for tribal art which opened in Paris in 2006, has been a key factor in boosting the French capital as a world centre for ethnography in both scholarly and commercial terms.

The countryside of southern Burgundy, with its vineyards and Romanesque churches, might not be the first location that comes to mind for a tribal art fair.

South Pacific war clubs continue to strike high prices at auctions, as this Tongan example sold in Stafford this month shows.

Bonhams throw down the gauntlet at Irma Stern Museum after Strauss & Co's China Girl TV stunt

Lady Jane Franklin (1791-1875) gained worldwide admiration for her efforts to trace her husband’s disappearance on his fatal 1845 voyage seeking the North West Passage.

This 17in (43cm) Fang bieri guardian palmwood figure from Gabon in West Africa set a house record at Netherhampton Salerooms in Salisbury when it sold for £88,000.

ALL 49 lots from the Murray Frum collection of Oceanic art found a buyer on September 16 at Sotheby’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) in Paris. The hammer total was €6.24m (£5.2m).

As the summer break ends, next month sees a rush of activity in the art world with a flurry of events not least in the Tribal Art category.

Maori boat-shaped feather boxes – or ‘waka huia’ – are infrequent visitors to UK salerooms so it was unusual to see two examples sold in close proximity this summer.

The first stand-alone tribal art sale held by Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury was topped at £44,000 by this 19th or early 20th century Yombe seated figure from the Democratic Republic of Congo.