An elderly French couple who sold an apparently ‘worthless’ African Mask for $157 (R3,000) are now suing the buyer who turned around and auctioned it off for $4.4 million (R83 million).
The miffed couple has accused a local antique dealer of cheating them out of a fair price for what turned out to be an extremely rare object.
The legal case is now making its way through the French court system and raising serious questions about whether a person who has sold an artwork or artefact, which is determined to have a much higher value later on, can seek further compensation from the buyer.
While organising their second house, the unnamed 81-year-old woman and her 88-year-old husband discovered an African mask stashed away, so when the majority of the household’s belongings were put up for sale in a garage sale, they chose to sell the mask to a nearby antiquities dealer, who agreed to purchase it in $157 (R3,000).
The dealer obviously couldn’t believe his luck, but when the couple read in a newspaper a few months later that the ‘worthless’ mask had been auctioned off for $4.4 million at a specialised auction in Montpellier, they naturally said “WTF”.
As it turned out, it was a rare Fang mask used in rituals in an African secret society. The object was brought back from Gabon by the husband’s grandfather, who had been a colonial governor in Africa in the early 20th century.
The couple filed a lawsuit against the antique merchant because they felt they were taken advantage of, and an appeals court in France agreed, saying that their case against the dealer “appears to be well-founded in principle.” After a series of legal actions and counteractions, the court has now frozen the sale proceeds while the case is ongoing.
According to the report in Artnet, the couple’s argument hinges on their suspicion that the dealer knew very well how rare the mask was as he called Drouot Estimation and Fauve Paris immediately, without even displaying the mask in his antique shop.
The initial valuations weren’t that high, but then the shyster contacted went on to seek a third opinion from a specialised sale of African objects in Montpellier. It was then that carbon-14 dating and mass spectrometry revealed the mask was dated to the 19th century, and an expert later revealed it was used for purification rites by the Ngil society, a secret society that operated within the Fang ethnic group in Gabon until the 1920s.
“This piece of kaolin-coated cheesewood is therefore exceptional in terms of its rarity, as only a dozen or so other reference specimens are known to exist worldwide, in Western museums and collections.”
[image:flickr]
Seeing dollar signs in his future, the guy immediately set the mask up for auction, eventually getting way more than the starting price of $ 316,000 (R6 million).
The dealer initially offered to settle out of court by paying the couple about $315,000 (R6 million) for the mask, but because the couple’s children had by this time also smelt the money, the couple declined the offer.
The couple also claims that the antiquities dealer conspired with their gardener, with whom he shared the sale’s proceeds. The dealer however claims “he is a second-hand dealer and not an antique dealer and cannot be considered a valuation professional. He has no knowledge of African art.”
The case is still ongoing, but dodgy antique dealers in Europe are probably keeping a close eye on this one.
