This is the rating and price for Hemba Male Figure, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Description : Hemba Male Figure, Democratic Republic of the Congo singiti Wood with encrusted varied dark brown and black patina Height 25 1/4in (64cm) Provenance Simone de Monbrison, Paris, late 1960s José Lois Sert Collection, a well-known Catalan architect who was a good friend of Miro and a strong supporter of Le Corbusier theories. He was also Dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Sotheby's, London, 24 March 1986, Lot 129 Josef Herman Collection, Suffolk New York Private Collection, acquired September 1994 Published Adams, Monni, Designs for Living: Symbolic Communication in African Art, The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in cooperation with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982, cat. no. 11. Exhibited Cambridge, Massachusetts, Designs for Living: Symbolic Communication in African Art, The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in cooperation with the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Alisa LaGamma notes, 'The departed, to whom such petitions were addressed, remained present in Hemba communities through the inspired sculptural creations of regional masters. Among the corpus of the representations that survive in Western collections are works that are among the most sublime yet least familiar in the history of art. The princely subjects exalted by these visual tributes were the leaders of communities situated across the vast grass plains extending from the east bank of the Upper Congo River north and south of one of its tributaries, the Luika. These depictions are notable for their majestic stature, unequivocal intensity, and refined elegance as well as for their serenely tranquil gazes and the delicate sensitivity with which they were carved. Originally housed within darkened ancestral mausoleums, these contemplative figures express a preoccupation with concerns of transcendent significance. Among the paradoxes of this artistic genre is that, despite the lengths to which Hemba masters went to produce rarified and nuanced likenesses, their achievements were generally removed from the line of vision of ordinary mortals. Instead, the originally intended audience for their refined perfection appears to have been an otherworldly one. ( Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2011, p. 225) Despite the ancient losses to the composition, this singiti evokes the dynamism, balance and profound spirituality emblematic of classic Hemba sculpture evidenced by the artist's sensitivity to the facial features and overall harmonious proportions.
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