The Michel Périnet Collection: A Landmark Sale at Christie’s Paris

On 23 June, 2021, Christie’s held the highly anticipated sale of the Michel Périnet Collection. The 61 African and Oceanic artworks (along with a small selection of pieces from the Americas and Indonesia) all found buyers, setting several auction records and achieving a total of €66 million, far exceeding the pre-sale estimate of €19–23 million.

A jeweller and antiques dealer, Michel Périnet (1930–2020) was widely recognized as a leading specialist in Art Nouveau, with particular expertise in the works of René Lalique, Georges Fouquet and Henri Vever, as well as in Art Deco. For twenty-five years, from 1980 to 2005, he ran his gallery on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. His passion for African and Oceanic art began almost by chance in 1967, when he fell in love with a Kota mask from Gabon at a London auction and decided to acquire it¹.

During the pre-sale exhibition, the collection was displayed alongside twentieth-century masterpieces that were due to be auctioned the following week, on 30 June, including works by Pablo Picasso, Pierre Soulages, Lucio Fontana and Kazuo Shiraga.

Three exceptional lots defined the sale, achieving unprecedented prices for works of their kind:

• A Luba mask (Democratic Republic of the Congo), sold for €7.2 million: formerly part of the renowned collection of Odette (1925–2012) and René Delenne (1901–1998), this so-called “man-beast” mask of the Luba people is believed to have been used in initiation ceremonies, although little is known about its precise function².
• A Fang ancestor head (Gabon), sold for €7.7 million: among Fang reliquary figures, the best known is undoubtedly the example once owned by cosmetics entrepreneur and collector Helena Rubinstein, exhibited in the landmark African Negro Art exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1935, and more recently at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in 2019–20. The previous year, Sotheby’s New York sold a Fang-Betsi head from the Sydney and Bernice Clyman Collection for $3.5 million³. What made Michel Périnet’s sculpture particularly remarkable was its provenance: it had previously belonged to the painter Maurice de Vlaminck and appears alongside two other Fang sculptures (owned respectively by André Derain and Jacob Epstein) in a photograph taken by Germaine Van Parys at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1930.
• A Mortlock Islands mask (Caroline Islands), sold for €9.2 million: masks are virtually unknown in both Polynesia and Micronesia, with the notable exception of the Mortlock Islands in the Central Carolines. These rare masks were used during seasonal ceremonies in which ritual dances were performed to ward off typhoons and ensure abundant harvests⁴. This example was collected in situ in 1877 by the German ethnographer Johan Kubary (1846–1896), who lived in Micronesia, before entering museum collections in Hamburg and later Dresden⁵.

Michel Périnet’s collection featured an outstanding ensemble of masterpieces from African art. From a Baga Nimba shoulder mask (Guinea)(similar to the example on display at the Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre) to an elegant Bamana Ci Wara crest mask (Mali) and a spectacular 1.66-metre Senufo bird sculpture (Côte d’Ivoire), the exhibition offered remarkable examples of the diverse artistic traditions of West and Equatorial Africa.

Oceanic art also occupied a prominent place in the jeweller and antiques dealer’s collection. In addition to the Mortlock Islands mask already mentioned, the sale featured four exceptional works from Easter Island:

• An enigmatic Tangata Moko (lizard-man) figure, estimated at €200,000–300,000, it ultimately sold for €1.8 million.
• A Rapa dance paddle, which sold for €1.8 million, notably, a comparable example had been auctioned by Sotheby’s Paris in 2019 for a very similar price⁶.
• A Moai Kavakava figure, sold for €1.7 million, comparable to the example from the James T. Hooper (1897–1971) Collection, which fetched €850,000 at Christie’s Paris in 2019⁷.
• And a Rei Miro pectoral ornament, which sold for €812,000, more than double its high estimate.

Also worthy of note were two Ulis figures from Papua New Guinea: one of the Lembankakat Lavatlas type and the other of the Evorok-Moanu type. Often referred to as “black Ulis” because of the thick layer of black soot covering their surface, both originated from the northern Mandak region⁸.

Finally, the sale also included a small selection of Indonesian and Native American works, among them this magnificent Yup’ik mask from Alaska, whose central motif depicts an animal spirit.

Sources:

¹ “Michel Périnet et les choses de la Vie“, article in La Gazette Drouot, 28 January 2020.

^{2 5 8} ‘Collection Michel Périnet‘, sale catalogue, 23 June 2021 sale, Christie’s Paris.

³ “African Art from the Collection of Sidney and Bernice Clyman“, sale catalogue, 30 June 2020, Sotheby’s New York.

⁴ ‘Vision d’Océanie‘, Vincent Bounoure, Dapper editions.

⁶ ‘Oceania‘ sale, 4 december 2019, Sotheby’s, Paris.

⁷ ‘Arts of Africa, Oceania and North America‘ sale, 10 april 2019, Christie’s, Paris.

Photos credits : @elegantinparis, unless otherwise stated.

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