An art dealer bought an African mask for 150 euros. And the same mask fetched 4.2 million euros at auction.
It happened in Francewhere the first owners of the object – the Fournier couple, aged over eighty – learned of its true value and went to court to claim part of the huge sum that an anonymous buyer had paid at the auction at the Hotel des ventes de Montpellier.
However, the judge rejected the request, highlighting the “carelessness and carelessness” of the two elderly people in disposing of the item.
As far as we know, the mask in question is a rare example (there are about ten in total) of a 19th-century artifact from the Fang people of Gabon, which appears to have been purchased by an ancestor of Fournier's reported by Die Zeit was a colonial governor in Africa.
The mask remained “forgotten” along with other family trash for decades until the couple decided to get rid of it. The amount received was small, and the amount that the experts estimated that the auction house in Montpellier received was exorbitant.
Then the Fourniers' lawsuit before the court in Alès, with the judge's decision, which, however, left the two older spouses in the lurch.
(Uniononline/lf)
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