Despite attracting fewer Americans, this year’s Parcours des Mondes gallery trail, held September 10 through 14 in Paris, saw attendance rise. This was the first edition staged under new owner Pierre Moos, who also presides over Tribal Art magazine. Moos launched the event with a call for droit de suite to be applied to tribal art to help alleviate African poverty. Among his other innovations were lengthening the trail’s run by a day, improving signage and including both a noncommercial exhibition of 150 tribal works amassed by contemporary dealers Michel and Liliane Durand- Dessert and a show at the Galerie Jeanne-Bucher, where paintings by Jean Dubuffet and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva provided a backdrop for tribal works.

Setting up shop at the contemporary-art dealer Pascal Lansberg Gallery was a first-time participant, Patrick Mestdagh, who sold an early 20th-century shaman root statuette, pictured, from the Philippines for around $25,000. The president of the older BRUNEAF gallery trail, held in Brussels every June, Mestdagh used to deem Parcours an unwelcome rival. No longer. “We’re complementary,” he says, explaining that the presence of 15 galleries from the Belgian capital “heralds a new mutual confidence and respect.”

Lance Entwistle, who came to Parcours despite taking part in the Paris Biennale from September 11 through 21, sold a 16-inch Easter Island legend figure for around €90,000 ($133,000). Though successful at both venues, he met some resistance at the Biennale when it came to his top prices. Parcours, he feels, “preaches to the converted,” while the Biennale draws more nonspecialists.

Some of the highest-stakes trading at Parcours was done by Madrid gallery Arte y Ritual, whose 19th-century Ramu figure, from the Sepik River area of Papua New Guinea, brought €350,000 ($516,000). Montreal’s Jacques Germain, who parted with a nearly three-foot-tall Songye Nkisi figure for six figures, terms Parcours “the crossroads of European connoisseurship.” "Parcours on Course" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2008 Table of Contents.