AUCTION OF AFRICAN ART

From Gross Collection

Collecting African art can be a risky business; fakes are everywhere. Even Picasso was fooled.

The market has recently become so lucrative that unscrupulous craftsmen now create copies, skillfully adding signs of wear, that can deceive even the most knowledgeable buyer. And there are no good tests to reassure collectors. (Carbon 14 testing of wood, which has an accuracy range of plus or minus 50 years, is useless in a field in which most objects are less than 100 years old.)

One collector who seemingly beat the odds was Chaim Gross (1904-1991), a Ukrainian-born New York-based sculptor. On Saturday Sotheby’s will put on view 80 pieces of African art from his vast collection. They will go on sale May 15.

Like his contemporaries Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi and Henry Moore, Gross greatly admired African art and acknowledged its influence. From the 1920s through the ’60s he avidly acquired examples at flea markets, auctions and galleries in New York, London, Brussels and Paris, which is still the center of the African art market. He helped found the National Museum of African Art in Washington, which in 1976 opened the traveling exhibition “The Sculptor’s Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross.”