Vente Christie's - 27 juin 2018

ENGLISH TRANSLATION
The Liliane and Michel Durand-Dessert Collection
By Pierre Amrouche
Today, June 27th 2018, Christie’s has the honor and
the pleasure of ofering for sale a collection which
is unique in its genre. This is a major event in the
history of African art collections in France and
internationally not only because of the intrinsic
quality of the objects that are part of it, but because
of the uncommon personalities of the couple that
put it together with an unrelentingly critical,
analytical and original approach, in which the
protagonists’ predilections and high standards are
clearly discernible. Both are brilliant literary and
scientifc academics, and audacious cutting-edge
gallery owners who have been pioneers in their
feld, and have shown the most radical 20th
century avant-garde art.
We do not know any other example of enlightened
collectionism, exercised as a couple, open without
exception to all areas of African art.
We remember the exhibition featuring this
collection that was presented at the Monnaie de
Paris in 2008, and the fne book Fragments du
Vivant (Fragments of the Living) that accompanied
it, published under the supervision of Jean-Louis
Paudrat, an art historian with a specialty in tribal art
collections. This remarkable work, with the
beautiful illustrations it owes to photographer
Hughes Dubois, begins with a highly pertinent
introduction and is followed by an interview
Paudrat conducted with Liliane and Michel
Durand-Dessert, in which not even the smallest
detail of their thinking escapes his meticulous
scrutiny. Everything is said in this lengthy 35-page
introduction, and it makes a captivating and
instructive read, which invites and enables us to
see African art in its truth and its entirety, and for all
of what it is.
Instead of paraphrasing what they said, it has
seemed preferable to us, with their assent, to use
this introduction to this sale catalog. It also seemed
judicious to us to use excerpts from the interview in
the object descriptions, inasmuch as the eyes and
appreciation that these collectors have had for their
pieces have contributed so much to making them
the marvels that they are.
Chronicle of
an emerging passion
by Jean-Louis Paudrat
The collection of so-called "primitive" art built over
nearly two decades by Liliane and Michel
Durand-Dessert began with around ffteen pieces
from New Guinea purchased in September 1982 on
a business trip by Michel to Australia. With the
exception of two Sepik canoe prows, they were
later to divest themselves of these pieces when
their Africanist conversion became more pressing.
Before making their frst acquisitions in this new
feld, their visits to travelling exhibitions and
specialist museums intensifed. So on 1 July 1984,
having viewed the Ménil collections at the Grand
Palais, Liliane makes mention in her almanac of a
life-size Mboye sculpture from the 15th century,
which had particularly interested them both. Their
visit to the Museum of Mankind in 1985, and in the
following year to the Michael C. Rockefeller wing of
the Metropolitan Art Museum and the “African
Aesthetics : The Carlo Monzino Collection”
exhibition at the Center for African Art, crystallised
this nascent passion. In December 1986, the
Durand-Desserts took the plunge and purchased, a
couple of days apart, “a small Djenné serpent coiled
in on itself” and “a Lobi terracotta mother and child
fgure” from the Adonis (sic) stall in the
Clignancourt fea market. Leafng later through
recent issues of the magazine Arts d’Afrique noire,
the advertising pages introduced them to the
profusion of opportunities, which included a large
number of pieces unearthed in Mali and Nigeria,
masks, crests and statuary from the region
enclosed by the loop of the Niger, its vast estuary,
the Bénoué River valleys and the western borders
of Cameroon. This entire world of forms and
materials, many of them totally new and
unexpected, intensifed their interest to the point
where the major contours of their collection were
already clear, at least in outline.
So, among the works they acquired in 1987 [ten of
which are reproduced here], mention must be
made of an incised and rather stately Bamana
mother and child, an Ejagham crested mask
combining a human skull, warthog tusks and
leopard skin and claws, an Ingambe Mambila
statue of a man apparently frozen in the midst of a
dance movement, and a female terracotta fgure
discovered to the north of the delta in Niger, which
is not without family resemblance to the male
counterpart statue owned by Baudouin de Grunne.
This fgure was shown at the Utotombo exhibition
Future or archaic objects,
but never contemporary.
of 1988 in Brussels, which revealed to them the
extent and high quality of “L’art d’Afrique noire dans
les collections privées belges” (Black African art in
private Belgian collections).
Soon after, Philippe Guimiot was able to efect an
introduction that enabled the Durand-Desserts to
meet Baudouin de Grunne at his home in
Wezembeek. We may well imagine that this great
collector reiterated for them something along the
lines of the words he had spoken to a journalist in
1974 : “I prefer [objects] that have sufered the
ravages of time, which are lightly or deeply incised,
and have acquired venerable character and great
beauty as a result of the beginnings of the erosion
process that reveals their petrifed, striated and
cracked wood. [...] The only thing that matters is the
formal beauty of the object, and simultaneously the
feeling it creates ; something that is profoundly
true, essential and vital”.
Not only do these two phrases characterise the
taste that the Durand-Desserts would immediately
develop for pieces that, altered by time, had
retained the energy of the original creative act, but
also the very meaning of their quest : to use an
aesthetic as a route to exploring the fundamental
values of the relationship between humanity and
the world.
This book illustrates a collection of masks and
crests from Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Tanzania, as
well as a small number of less commonly seen Nok,
Mende, Lobi, Waja and Mambila statuary acquired
in 1988. The process of bringing together around
thirty quadrangular panels emblematic of the
Ejagham secret society known as the Ekpe also
began in this year, and would not be complete for
another two years. This is also the moment when
the collection was joined by a powerful female
fgure curiously surmounted by antelope horns and
a lavish tangle of entwined metal, attributed by
Arnold Rubin to the Idoma people, and which he
not insignifcantly indicated had been the property
of the Arman collection. Shown at the “African
Accumulative Sculpture” exhibition at the Pace
Gallery in 1974, it reappeared in 1989 in Paris
between a Morellet, a Charlton and the Portrait of
Birgit Polke by Gerhard Richter on the Durand-
Dessert gallery stand at the frst Salon de Mars
exhibition.
The pace of acquisitions accelerated in 1989 and
1990, with the majority of purchases being
negotiated with gallery owners in Paris or Brussels,
but occasionally at public auction, as was to be the
case in February 1989 with an Idoma Anjenu statue
sculpted by an identifed master : Onu Agbo. The
most striking works by virtue of their surprising
strangeness, and collected in 1942 on the borders of
Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea and Liberia, included a large
mask to which a high-relief reliquary statuette is
applied, and a monumental Ibo statuette that retains
vestiges of its original polychromatic coloration and
- unusually - depicts a masked fgure.
Although the process of collecting Ejagham
emblems continued over these two years, this
was also the period that marked the beginning
of what the Durand-Desserts refer to as “the
Moba adventure”, following their appearance in
the Jean-Michel Huguenin Gallery in summer
1990. Their taste for variants would lead them to
amass around twenty of these sculptures from
Northern Ghana and Togo. Ten have been
selected for this book.
As signatories to the March 1990 manifesto that
lobbied the cultural authorities of the French State
to open the Louvre to the "primitive" arts, they knew
its prime mover, Jacques Kerchache, not only as the
originator of the body of iconography he had
devoted to African Art, but also, and more
indirectly, for the attention he had paid in their
gallery to works by Giuseppe Penone.
It was none other than the “African Sculpture - The
Invention of the Figure” exhibition held in Cologne’s
Ludwick Museum in 1990 at the instigation of
Baselitz with the support of Kerchache's most
ardent activists that would draw the most
enthusiastic comments from the Durand-Desserts.
In responding to the diversity of representation
accorded the human body and illustrated by some
140 sculptures, they were unstinting in their praise :
not just the “exemplary” and “innovative” character
of an art event that broke with the accepted format
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