Who Authenticates a $10 Million African Painting?

Julie Mehretu's "Walkers With the Dawn and Morning" sold for $10.7 million at Sotheby's New York in November 2023. It stands as the auction record for an African-born artist, set a month after Mehretu broke her own prior mark of $9.3 million. A buyer paying that much for a disputed Rothko or Basquiat can lean on decades of institutional scaffolding: a published catalogue raisonné, a foundation willing to issue a ruling, a body of case law. For most of the artists driving this market's rise, that scaffolding is still being built, badly, or not at all.

The foundations say the quiet part out loud

Start with the artist whose name alone can move a South African sale room. The Gerard Sekoto Foundation, custodian of one of the country's most canonical modern painters, states on its own site that it cannot authenticate Sekoto works. Not won't. Cannot, for legal-liability reasons, and it sends every inquiry to an outside art historian, an auction house, or a conservator instead. The closest thing to a catalogue raisonné for Sekoto is Barbara Lindop's 1988 book on the artist, a serious piece of scholarship written decades before the current boom in his prices. It was never built, or intended, as a legal authentication instrument.

Ben Enwonwu's estate took the opposite path, and it tells you how late this infrastructure tends to arrive. The Ben Enwonwu Foundation now runs an authentication committee and keeps a public register of forgeries, stolen works, and pieces with inconclusive provenance. It built that apparatus because fake Enwonwus kept clearing respectable auction houses, in Nigeria and abroad, at real money. The Foundation describes its own catalogue raisonné, the multi-volume record that should settle most of these disputes on sight, as a project it is "presently undertaking." Enwonwu died in 1994. The definitive record of his output is still being written three decades later, with the market already pricing his best work in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Zoom out and the pattern holds globally, not just here. The International Catalogue Raisonné Association launched in 2024 at the Royal Academy in London, chaired by the art-market lawyer Pierre Valentin, specifically to professionalize how catalogues raisonnés get built and to slow the flow of fakes onto the market. It exists to formalize exactly the kind of project the Sekoto Foundation says it legally cannot touch and the Enwonwu Foundation is still finishing. No reporting on ICRA's launch or membership turned up an African-market name. That is an absence worth noting, not a verdict. The association is young, and its roster may simply not have reached this market yet.

A thinner trust layer gets tested. In March 2026, a fraud scheme impersonated Lagos's Iwalewa Art Gallery, fabricating a fictitious multi-year "Art Acquisition & Exhibition Program" with Caterpillar Inc. to lure artists and collectors into handing over money and information. That is not object forgery. Nobody faked a painting. But it is the same underlying weakness from a different angle: a market where institutional names carry enough unverified weight that inventing an affiliation to one is worth the effort. Industry-wide, Deloitte's Art & Finance research has flagged authenticity, provenance, and attribution as among the biggest threats to market credibility for years running, most recently in its 2025 report. That finding describes the whole art market, not just African art. This market inherits the problem with less of the machinery built anywhere to manage it.