Mickey Donates African Art

In a move that will expand a strapped museum's resources, the Walt Disney Company donated a 525-piece collection of mainly West African traditional art on Thursday to the Smithsonian Institution, with the works to go to its National Museum of African Art.

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African art specialists praised the collection, noting that it would be difficult to duplicate today given the rising prices for African art and the proliferation of fakes.

"It's the breadth of the collection and the choice pieces from around Africa that make this a historically important collection," said Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, a California-based art scholar who was the curator of an exhibition of works from the collection last year at the Disney American Heritage Gallery at Epcot in Orlando, Fla. - the first time Disney displayed any of these pieces.

Among the collection's other highlights are an 18th-century copper alloy mask from the Edo tribe in Nigeria, a soapstone carving of a beetle-back man from Zimbabwe, and from Cameroon, a life-size 19th-century statue of a seated king holding a weapon and the head of an enemy.

"There are some key pieces in the collection," including the one from Cameroon, which has been displayed at the Louvre for three years, said Susan Vogel, an art historian at Columbia University and founder of the Museum for African Art in New York. Ms. Vogel was a curator for an exhibition of works from the collection for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1981.

Ms. Vogel said the collection could be worth $50 million "and probably more."

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