PARIS.- Sotheby’s presents The Shape of Beauty: Sculpture from the Collection of Howard and Saretta Barnet this May during the marquee spring sale week of Impressionist & Modern Art and Contemporary Art.
The Barnet Collection is the result of many years of thoughtful, scholarly collecting by the New York couple, who began to acquire art in the 1950s. The tightly curated group covers an astonishingly wide geographic range and long span of time, featuring African, Pre-Columbian, Oceanic, American Indian Art and Antiquities and reveals an intellectual and inquisitive approach to collecting. From an 8th century Greek Bronze Figure of a horse to an exceptional and iconic 19th century Fang reliquary sculpture, each work is of exceptionally high quality. Many have been extensively published and exhibited, and stand as icons of their respective genres. The Barnets were sophisticated and knowledgeable collectors, who synthesized art from widely disparate human cultures into a universal aesthetic of beauty, prizing humanity and artistic greatness.
The Shape of Beauty pays tribute to the unique vision of Howard and Saretta Barnet and follows the highly successful auctions The Color of Beauty, which presented the contemporary paintings from the Barnet collection at Sotheby’s last fall, including works by 20th century icons such as Agnes Martin, Kenneth Noland and Ad Reinhardt; and The Line of Beauty, which presented the Barnets’ extraordinary collection of Old Master Drawings in January 2018.
Jean Fritts, Worldwide Chairman of African & Oceanic Art, commented: “Having known Saretta Barnet for more than twenty years, I was struck by the complete elegance of her and Howard’s Collection, which gathered works of seemingly disparate cultures together in a stunning setting where each work of art be it the Kenneth Noland painting or the Sugimoto photograph lived so well with wonderful ancient sculpture, African Art, and American Indian Art.”
A selection of highlights will be on view at Sotheby’s Paris where they will be exhibited from 27 – 30 March before traveling to Sotheby’s Los Angeles from 17 – 18 April. The full collection will be on view at Sotheby’s New York from 4 – 14 May, alongside our public exhibitions of Impressionist & Modern Art and Contemporary Art.
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE COLLECTION
Fang sculpture is perhaps the most highly-esteemed genre of African Art. The Barnet’s Fang-Mvaï Ancestor Statue by the Master of Ntem (estimate $3/5 million) from the 19th century is the finest of a small group of figures which are thought to originate from a single sculptural atelier of Gabon’s Ntem Valley. Such statues of ancestors were created to accompany ancestral relics which were venerated in important ceremonies. The surface of the present figure still glistens with liquid palm oil, which remains from the original ritual use. When they arrived in Europe in the early years of the 20th century, Fang sculptures were among those which spurred the modernists’ progression into figural abstraction. The Barnet Fang is of extraordinary artistic quality and among the greatest accomplishments of world sculpture from any time or place, with its ingenious interplay between fluid, naturalistic surfaces and tightly controlled geometric forms.
The oldest sculpture in the Barnet collection is a small bronze Figure of Horse (estimate $150/250,000) from the Geometric Period of Ancient Greece, circa 8th century BC. These small bronze figures were offered to the gods as votive dedications. The animal is represented simply: the upright legs are perfectly perpendicular to the horizontal line of the back, and the mane rises in an elegant curve; a minimal design but an instantly recognizable subject. The heroic bearing of the horse is expressed with clarity of form characteristic of Greek aesthetic refinement.
The Olmec were the first great civilization of Mesoamerica, dating from 1200-300 B.C. The heartland of Olmec culture was centered in the Mexican Gulf Coast, but their influence extended throughout Mesoamerica to the Maya, the Aztec, and the other later Mesoamerican cultures. Olmec art is the most sophisticated and refined genre of PreColumbian Art and great Olmec artworks are exceptionally rare in private collections.
This Olmec Jade Mask Fragment (estimate $200/300,000) derives from one of the most iconic forms of the Olmec canon --- the human portrait mask. Once a complete mask of a human face, it was ritually broken and polished into its present shape in antiquity. Carved from varied blue-green jade --- the most highly valued material in the Olmec world, representing the life-giving forces of water and growth --- it showcases the natural beauty of its medium. The elegant profile with a strong nose and gently parted lips expresses Olmec canons of beauty. This object renders naturalistically a universally human expression, but in its eyeless state remains mysterious and surreal.
The Barnet’s Okvik Female Statue (estimate $150/250,000) is one of the finest extant examples of the art of the ancient cultures of the Bering Strait, the icy sea between Alaska and Russia. The exact purpose of this ancient sculpture remains enigmatic; it may have served as a magical object to promote fertility.
The meditative face appears to gaze upwards from under its carefully incised eyebrows. The smile is slightly asymmetrical, animating the expression. Facial tattoos run from either side of the nose to the ears, while the deeply engraved motifs on the body probably represent a garment. Western viewers recognize in these sculptures a strong affinity with the work of Amedeo Modigliani. The Barnet Okvik Statue was included in the two most important exhibitions on the subject: Ancient Eskimo Ivories of the Bering Strait, in 1986, and Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait, held at Princeton in 2009.
The finely-cast Roman bronze Figure of Herakles (estimate $70/100,000) is representative of Greco-Roman canons of idealized naturalism, which finds a place in the Barnet Collection as one among many aesthetic realms. Like much of Roman art it is based upon a Greek original, which depicted the bulky young hero in a powerful, energetic pose, with his right leg set firmly to the side, right arm bent outwards and holding his club, left lower arm covered with the lion skin, and head turned sharply to his right. Based on the style of the hair, scholars suggest attributing the original to Lysippos, the artist favored by Alexander the Great.
The Dogon live in one of earth’s most spectacular landscapes: the cliffs of central Mali, called the Bandiagara Escarpment. Since Marcel Griaule's early 1930s "Mission Dakar-Djibouti", their art has become one of the iconic traditions in African art history. The Dogon captured the imagination of European and American artists and intellectuals with the austere beauty and isolation of their environment, the power of their sculpture, and the richness of their traditions.
The Barnet’s Dogon Seated Male Figure (estimate $300/500,000) depicts a musician in mid-performance, legs lifting dynamically from the seat of a spectacular stool supported by caryatid figures. It belongs to the most elegant and refined Dogon style, which originated in the center and to the north of the Bandiagara Plateau in the region of the Ndule River, and called n'duleri (ri meaning ‘country of’). A very similar figure which, like the present figure, was acquired from the legendary dealer John J. Klejman resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Statues of human figures are exceptionally rare in Polynesian Art, outside of New Zealand. The Tahitian Fly-Whisk Handle (estimate $100/150,000) is the only known example of its type in private hands while all of the others in this small corpus are owned by museums. The creation of this sculpture undoubtedly predates the arrival of missionaries in Western Polynesia in the early 19th century. Such objects of high status were made exclusively for chiefs and aristocrats.
The figure is poised with arms raised to the torso in a tender gesture, full of pathos. With the economy of line characteristic of Polynesian art the carver has depicted the human form with exceptional purity and fluidity.
A masterpiece of Northwest Coast art, the Shaman’s Mask (estimate $300/500,000) depicts a bear, one of the spirit helpers, or yek, of the powerful shaman for whom the mask was made. Two small faces with beatific smiles are carved in the ears, increasing the power of the mask and adding to its surrealistic appearance. Carved with exquisite sensitivity and finesse, this mask dates to the early 19th century and retains much of its original mineral pigment. It is a sculpture of exceptional rarity and quality.
The mask was acquired in 1939 by Wolfgang Paalen, the Surrealist artist and influential theorist, together with another which is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The two masks are clearly the work of the same gifted artist. Paalen illustrates both masks in ‘‘Totem Art’’, his important article on the art of the Northwest Coast which appeared in the special ‘‘Amerindian Issue’’ of his journal DYN in 1943.
