It was a world record: in the summer of last year, an anonymous bidder was accepted at Christie's in Paris for 9.17 million euros.
During the auction of a private collection, a two-foot-tall wooden mask from Micronesia changed hands for the highest price ever paid for an oceanic artifact.
The estimated value of 500,000 to 700,000 euros for the object of controlled, austere, only slightly convex shape with spartan painting was exceeded almost fifteen times.
Discretion is a matter of honor at auctions.
In Paris, bidders from eighteen countries competed for the best exhibits.
Most remained invisible to the public;
they were connected by phone or online.
It was not made public in which country, in whose collection, bank safe deposit box or duty-free warehouse the wooden mask came.
As a result of the anonymized art trade, a unique non-European cultural document that has the quality of a world cultural heritage has once again been withdrawn from the public.
The mask was in the possession of the Dresden Museum of Ethnology for a hundred years before it was put on the art market in 1975.
With the exorbitant price increases that take place there, no museum is in a position to purchase such an object at auction.
Giving away was a point of no return.
For the communities of origin, making money with a formerly sacred cultural asset of their ancestors must appear like mockery.
Letting them participate in at least half of the profits would be the order of the day.
The "Mask of the Winds" comes from the Mortlock Islands (now Nomoi) of the Caroline Archipelago (now the state of Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia) and is one of the oldest and rarest artifacts in the region.
The Pole Johann Stanislaus Kubary, who was married to a Micronesian woman and lives in Pohnpei (Ponape), acquired it in 1877, before the German colonial era, on behalf of the Godeffroy Museum in Hamburg, from which it came to Dresden.
The high auction price achieved by the Tapuanu mask, as it is called in Nomoi, is largely due to the fact that its age and authenticity are guaranteed: through its origin from a public museum famous for its high-quality collection.
In the Dresden collection, the mask was unique, not a duplicate.
It is difficult to understand why a museum could give this away, namely – as in Leipzig – in an “exchange” for objects that are usually larger in number but less important.
All attempts to shed light on the exchange affairs that took place between 1974 and 1992, in which Eastern European museums such as the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest were involved, came to nothing.
The dimensions of the exchange and relationship networks anchored both horizontally (geographically) and vertically (up to the higher level of administration), in which many actors obviously participated but only a few appeared, can only be guessed at.
However, albeit at a lower level, they