Mark Newell

West African caryatid stools are prestige items designed as the “seat” of the soul of a new King of the Luba tribe in the Buli region of the Congo.

In the early 1970s a battered copper alms dish turned up in a bundle of clothes donated to an Oxfam shop in Gillingham, Kent, England.

Viennese artist Hans Makart was the rock star of his day. Then he went insane, and died. Did this portrait have to do with his demise?

Africans in the potteries used the materials at hand to create containers, face jugs, designed to serve the same purpose as magical containers used for ritual purposes in the Kongo.