I’ve been posting images of unpublished Khmer antiquities from the 1989 book, Thai and Cambodian Sculpture from the 6th to 14th Centuries, written by Wolfgang Felten and Martin Lerner, both of whom were well-immersed in Khmer art at that time. One of the female sculptures included in the book is one I recognized immediately, as I’ve posted about her before, as she’s one of the top three highest-selling Khmer sculptures at public auctions of all-time – all of them were sandstone statues of the goddess Uma, and came under the gavel at the world’s top auctioneers, Christie’s in New York, at different times. An astounding USD 2,113,000 was paid in March 2008 for the top selling Uma. The third best seller went for USD 1,127,500 in September 2004 (more on her in another post). However, the spotlight today falls on the second-ranked of that top three, another Uma, that earned its private German collector a hefty sum of USD 1,142,500 in March 2012. The final sale price reached three times its provisional estimate and despite the sculpture missing her head, this 10th century Uma, in the Pre Rup art style, was the day’s top seller. It happened to be the day after the collection of the deceased Doris Wiener, an art dealer of high-standing in her time, had been sold for over USD 12 million, while the whole week of art sales had earned Christie’s a mammoth USD 69 million. It was the perfect era for selling Khmer antiquities. There was a lot of money to be made. The original temple home and how this statue with all the hallmarks of a looted artwork came to leave Cambodia were conveniently forgotten in all the hype as there was good money to be made.
The limited provenance or history of this goddess indicated that it was sold to the private German collector in the early 1980s by William H. Wolff, a Madison Avenue-New York dealer in Asian art for more than 30 years. His name regularly crops up in the provenance of major artworks. It was Wolff that sold the giant Koh Ker Bhima, stolen from Prasat Chen, to the Norton Simon Museum in 1975 (it was repatriated to Cambodia in 2014). Wolff sold to the rich and famous, including John D. Rockefeller III, Norton Simon, Avery Brundage, Christian Humann and Arthur Sackler, and to museums with major holdings in Asian art, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Guimet Museum in Paris and the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum. He died in 1991 but it was his openness regarding the illegal export of antiquities from across Asia that made him stand out from his peers. The Los Angeles Times spoke about Wolff’s collecting ethics in 1990: ‘He doesn’t talk much about how he would get his merchandise into the United States. He concedes that in many of the countries where he acquired art, its export was illegal and had to be done clandestinely. In many countries, he had his own network of scouts. “The fellows I bought from knew how to get it out of the country,” he said. “Otherwise, they would not have been able to sell it.” The smuggling put the sellers in jeopardy, one reason the objects are so expensive. Some of the artworks would have to be smuggled through mountain passes, he said. Some families had been in this business for generations. Such overseas acquisition is a costly business, and Wolff had been well rewarded. He was able to mark everything up by 100%, he said. Most of his pieces have sold for six-figure prices. “There was not much bargaining. My asking price was my selling price. If I bought a worthwhile piece, I sold it right away. The museums were lined up when I returned from a trip.”’ This declaration from one of the leading art dealers of his day should’ve raised alarm bells for museums and auction houses alike, but it fell on deaf ears as they continued to buy and sell illegally-obtained artifacts from the likes of Wolff, Douglas Latchford, Nancy Wiener and Spink and Son. For Christie’s, this peerless Khmer antiquity was a commodity to be sold. For art-lovers, it was a delicately sculpted and polished torso of a goddess, with voluptuous breasts and a single large overhanging pleat on her undecorated sampot. Despite the absence of her arms and feet, there are thin folds at the neck and fine wavy lines incised beneath her breasts and navel, displaying a superb purity of form.
So, who is Uma you might ask? The top three highest-selling sculptures all depict this Brahmanic goddess, to whom a number of names have been attributed including Parvati, Gauri, Durga, Devi, Shakti and even the demon Kali – all interchangeable, though Uma was the name which appears to have been favoured at the time of the Khmer Empire, and certainly by Christie’s in their catalogues. Her place, as wife of the god Shiva, and daughter of the mountains, gave her such powers as the deity of fertility, power, energy, devotion, marriage, motherhood, children, love, and harmony – essentially the Mother Goddess. She was also the mother of the elephant-headed Ganesha and the ever-youthful Skanda. More often than not, Uma is depicted with a voluptuous chest, left bare as was conventional in Khmer sculpture, a pinched waist and broad hips, emphasizing her graceful femininity and fertility. Often, Uma would have one arm bent at the elbow, the other extended down at the side with a lotus bud in hand – though many, if not most, of these sculptures are missing their arms. Very occasionally, she would have four arms. Uma - the most desired goddess of the Khmer Empire. 1989 was a busy year for this particular Uma. Not only did she appear in the Felten-Lerner book (as a Female Deity), she was also featured on the cover of the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, Germany in 1989, and was exhibited between April and July of that year. Twenty-three years later (March 2012) she was sold to an anonymous buyer for over 1.1 million dollars and is likely never to be seen again.Credit By :Andy Brouwer
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