O n 13 November, Sotheby’s will begin the marquee New York auction week with a sale of Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas from one of the great American collections: The Collection of Edwin and Cherie Silver.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Silvers assembled an exceptional collection of sculpture in their modernist Los Angeles home. During the golden age of American post-war collecting in these categories, they were able to acquire sculptures of a caliber which are rarely available on the market today. The sale of these works now represents a rare opportunity for today’s collectors.
Highlights include one of the most important groups of Kota Reliquary Figures ever assembled; an astonishingly powerful Seven-Headed Ijo Statue from Nigeria over seven feet tall; an exceptional group of Pre-Columbian art, including important Nayarit ceramic figures; exquisite Kongo miniature sculptures; and a fine group of West African masks.
The Silvers’ collection of African and Pre-Columbian sculpture was complimented by a major mobile by Alexander Calder and a Sam Francis painting which the Silvers acquired directly from the artist in 1980, to be offered in the Contemporary Art Evening sale and Day sale, respectively.
Ed and Cherie Silver’s collection is well-known to lovers of African and Pre-Columbian Art through their generous loans to many of the most important museum exhibitions of the past several decades. Works from the Silver Collection have been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Museum for African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Center for African Art, New York.
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