A retired French couple who sold an African mask to a secondhand goods dealer for €150 (£130) have gone to court for a share of the proceeds after the mask fetched €4.2m (£3.7m) at auction.
But campaigners insist that the rare artefact instead should be returned to Gabon, in a case that has raised questions over Africa’s cultural heritage looted by colonial France.
The unnamed couple, 88 and 81, who live in Eure-et-Loir, south-west of Paris, had decided to sell their holiday home in Gard, southern France, but needed to clear out bric-a-brac from the attic. They contacted a secondhand goods trader who bought several objects including the wooden sculpted mask, which had been gathering dust in the loft. The mask had belonged to the man’s grandfather, who had been a colonial governor in Africa.
Six months later, the couple were reported to have “almost fallen off their chairs” when they read a newspaper report about the sale at auction in Montpellier of a rare and valuable 19th-century mask made by the Fang people of Gabon. They recognised the mask in the photo; its distinctive style was described as having been inspirational for the artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and it was said to be one of only about a dozen in the world.
The auction catalogue explained how the mask had been obtained by the man’s relative, “collected around 1917, in unknown circumstances by the French colonial governor René-Victor Edward Maurice Fournier (1873-1931), probably during a tour in Gabon”.
The sale had prompted excitement from art experts with one auction house official telling French TV: “This type of mask is even rarer than a Leonardo da Vinci painting – we know of 22 paintings by the great master, but we only know of 10 to 12 masks created by the different Fang masters in Gabon.”
At auction, in March 2022, the mask was initially valued at about €300,000 but was bought for €4.2m by an unnamed seller bidding by telephone.
Members of the Gabon community in southern France attended the auction in protest, saying the mask should never have been put up for sale and must be returned to Gabon.
A court in Alès on Tuesday heard the case of the retired couple, whose lawyers argued that they should rightfully receive the profits from the auction after handing over the mask to the bric-a-brac dealer for the unfair price of €150. “One has to be in good faith and honest; my clients would never have given up this mask at that price if they knew it was an extremely rare object,” their lawyer, Frédéric Mansat Jaffré, told French media this month.
Solange Bizeau, of the Collectif Gabon Occitanie, who had protested at the auction with other members of the Gabon community, was in court on Tuesday.
She said: “That mask was stolen at the time of colonisation … All these works of art – and so many that we see in museums – were taken, and the people who made them were told they were the devil’s work and they should instead believe in the Bible. And from that point on, these artefacts have appeared in Europe, enriching people who have made money from them for decades …
“Today this court case is about the grandchildren of the governor versus a secondhand dealer. But neither of them is legitimate in terms of this mask. What we want is the restitution of this mask to Gabon. This mask has a soul, it was used to establish justice in our villages. The discussion in court has been about morality, but what about the morality of the spoliation of works of art and our dignity? Where is the morality in that?”
A court decision on whether the proceeds should go to the couple is expected in December.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, after his first election in 2017, called for the restitution of works of art from French museum collections, saying: “I cannot accept that a large part of the cultural heritage of several African countries is in France.”