Christie’s will hold The Hilde & Dieter Scharf Collection: Ode to African Sculpture in Paris on 16 June, an auction of fifty works that continues the house’s recent run of landmark African art collections.
Over three decades, Hilde and Dieter Scharf assembled a personal collection devoted to figuration in African art. A grandson of the Berlin collector Otto Gerstenberg, Dieter Scharf was raised among art and collected Symbolist and Surrealist works for twenty-five years before turning to African art. With his wife Hilde, he sought out the leading dealers of his time and built a collection across a wide range of styles. It was published in full only once, in 1999, in the book Sehen lernen. Eine Sammlung afrikanischer Figuren, co-authored by Dieter Scharf and his daughter Julietta.
The collection descends from the passion of Otto Gerstenberg (1848 to 1935), a Berlin insurance executive whose legacy passed through his daughter Margarethe Scharf and later his grandsons Dieter and Walther Scharf. Today Julietta Scharf continues the work as President of the foundation behind the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg in Berlin, near Charlottenburg Palace.
As Jean Fritts, an African art specialist, notes in the sale catalogue, the Scharf collection reads as a dialogue with the invisible and a celebration of the dreamlike power of the image. Several major ensembles anchor the sale. Foremost is a Dogon group of six sculptures from Mali’s cliff regions. West Africa is further represented by a Baulé figure from Côte d’ Ivoire attributed to the Master of Essankro, formerly in the Paul Guillaume collection and exhibited in Paris as early as 1923.
Gabonese art is represented by three Fang sculptures, one an imposing figure from the former Frank Crowninshield collection shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1937, alongside a Kota reliquary figure from the Georges de Miré collection exhibited at the 1930 Galerie Pigalle show. A Yombe maternity figure attributed to the Master of Kasadi, one of only six examples given to that carver, was first presented in 1937 and featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2016 exhibition Kongo: Power and Majesty. A Luba figure of Central African art is attributed to the same hand as a standing figure now in the British Museum.
The sale is accompanied by a catalogue with scholarly contributions and a dedicated exhibition on the human form, on view from 12 to 16 June.
(Press Release)
