PROVENANCE: Historical Figures In Oceanic Art
PROVENANCE:
Historical Figures In Oceanic Art
Both a modest scholar and a prolific writer, Hans Nevermann authored three remarkable monographs devoted to the arts of the Admiralty, Saint Matthias, and Marshall Islands, which remain unique and invaluable reference works to this day. Hans Paul Friedrich Wilhelm Nevermann was born on March 25, 1902 in Schwerin, Mecklenburg, to his Protestant parents Willy Nevermann (1870-1954), a postal worker, and Ella, née Kentzler (1872-1947). Due to his father’s frequent work-related moves, first to Oppeln (Upper Silesia), then to Chemnitz and finally to Hamburg, he had to...read more.
Above and beyond the reputation it has in the realm of cosmetics, the name Helena Rubinstein (1872–1965) remains an extremely important one in the world of Oceanic art as well. She was one of the few women to assemble her own major collection in the 20th century in a field almost completely dominated by men. Rubinstein was born in Krakow, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into an Orthodox Jewish family of modest means. In 1896, she left Europe for Australia, where she opened...read more.
Julius August Konietzko (1886-1952) was born on August 6, 1886, in Insterburg, East Prussia, which is now Tcherniakovsk, Kaliningrad. The penultimate child in a large family, his father was a master tanner, and his mother was the daughter of a master baker. Due to financial difficulties his father was facing, Julius Konietzko was entrusted to the care of his childless uncle in Stolp (now Slupsk, Pomerania, in Poland). He went to school there, as well as in Steglitz (Berlin), and later in...read more.
Ferdinand Krokisius (1843-1908) was an Imperial German Naval Captain who commanded the corvette SMS Marie during a lengthy trip to the recently annexed portions of the Bismarck Archipelago. Near New Ireland, the Marie hit a reef and needed extensive repairs. During this period, Krokisius acquired several artifacts, at least one of them through the intervention of Otto Finsch (1839-1917), a German naturalist, ethnographer and colonial explorer who travelled extensively...read more.
René Gaffé
Tamara Schild and Marion Bertin
René Gaffé (1887-1968) stands out as a fascinating figure in 20th-century collecting, at the crossroads of the European avant-garde and the so-called “non-Western” arts. An industrialist, journalist, bibliophile, art critic, collector, and patron of the arts, he was acquainted with the major figures of the Dada and Surrealist movements, most notably...read more.
Fritz Lang (1890-1976) is best remembered for directing movies for nearly fifty years. His best remembered films are Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). On occasion, he also collected Indigenous art, in particular artifacts from Oceania. While much has been written on Lang’s illustrious movie career, this essay will focus primarily on...read more.
Accompanied by the two prospectors and eight native carriers, I took off for what proved to be a tough one…. The airline distance was forty-five miles. We travelled on foot and averaging ten hours daily, we consumed twenty-nine days to reach our destination, which was the joining of the west branch and the north-east branch of the Mai [May] River….It rained about 80 percent of the time…..On the twenty-fourth day, we were on top of...read more.
A colleague of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Edward Bradford Titchener was an experimental psychologist best known for bringing the structuralism school of thought in psychology to America. After becoming a professor at Cornell University in 1892, he created the largest doctoral program at that time in the United States. One of his earliest graduate students, Margaret Floy Washburn, became the first...read more.
Herbert Tischner (1906-1984) was a long-time curator of the Oceanic Division at the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum. He oversaw the division during the crucial years following the loss of valuable artifacts during World War II. Although Tischner never traveled to Oceania, he initiated essential collaborations with Lutheran missionaries operating in the highlands of...read more.
Leo and Lillian Fortess were passionate collectors of Pacific artifacts who enriched the lives of all those who visited them at their home in Kanohe Bay, Hawaii. The adventure begins in 1939, with a group of like-minded young people, Leo and Lillian Fortess, then students at the University of Chicago, decided to travel the universe in search of a better world. These will be the...read more.
Although the name Carel Van Lier and his “Kunstzaal” appear in numerous works about Dutch art between the wars, it took more than half a century for an exhibition and a book to be dedicated to him. Born in The Hague, he, his parents and his three sisters moved to Amsterdam, then subsequently to the suburb of Bussum, where his parents, Samuel (1868-1908) and Francisca (1869-1920), opened an antiques store and auction house in...read more.
As passionate about the creations of his contemporaries as he was about modern French goldsmithing, Louis Carré also made a name for himself in the field of Oceanic art through his work together with Charles Ratton (1895–1986) organizing auctions and appraising collections that have since become legendary. Above and beyond this collaboration, Louis Carré’s career was varied, worldly, international and noteworthy for the care and creativity he displayed in...read more.
Shortly before the First World War (1914–1918), many artists from Eastern Europe, like painter, photographer and writer Walter Bondy (1880–1940), author and art critic Adolphe Basler (1876–1951), writer Carl Einstein (1885–1940), artist and publisher Alfred Flechtheim (1878–1937), painter Ernest Ascher, sculptor Joseph Brummer (1883–1947) and painter, writer and journalist Béla Hein (1883–1931), began to emigrate to Paris, where they were known to...read more.
The contact between Europe and the South Seas evolved at a relatively late date. The first period of discoveries began with Spanish and Portuguese explorers in search of spices and gold in the 16th/17th centuries. English and French voyages followed them from the early 18th century. From the scientific point of view, James Cook’s expeditions (between 1768 and 1780) can be regarded as the greatest achievements of this period, which ended in the...read more.
Roger Boulay was born in Parigné le Polin, in the Sarthe region of central France. In the 1960s, during the first period of his professional life, he worked as an instructor for various organizations. He was also an active member of several associations, including the Centre d'entraînement aux techniques d'expressions (Center for Training in Forms of Expression) and Animation Jeunesse (Youth Movement), a French Catholic scout network. It was in this context that he began studying...read more.
Alfred C. Haddon, a major figure in the history of British anthropology, is well-known for the two expeditions he organized to the Torres Strait in 1888 and 1898. These important undertakings, the results of which had a major influence on nascent ethnographic research, led to one of the first studies of the arts of this region and to the publication of a remarkable monograph. Haddon grew up in a non-conformist family with a passion for art, humanitarian activism and radical...read more.
Over a period of about forty years, this now famous collector put together an impressive collection of African, Oceanic and Asian art. In an article titled Cornelis Pieter Meulendijks primitieve kindren (Cornelis Pieter Meulendijks’ Primitive Children), published in Het Rotterdamsch Parool on March 2, 1968, its author Bert van Polen describes Meulendjik as “the greatest collector of primitive art in the Netherlands”. The Meulendijk villa, located in the Rotterdam-Hillegersberg district, was overflowing with...read more.
Few individuals can live life to the fullest with various professions and accomplishments. Nelson A. Rockefeller achieved numerous political and cultural goals that remain important to this day. As a collector of the arts of Oceania, he gave prominence to and promoted the appreciation of these art forms. He was born on July 8, 1908, in Bar Harbor, Maine, into a family of great wealth founded by its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller Sr. Nelson’s mother was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who married John D. Rockefeller Jr. While most of the family members were well-known names in business and banking, their interests in...read more.
Before I met him in 1973, I only knew about Peter Kohler through the mention of his name in the encyclopedic book titled Oceanic Art that had been published in New York in 1969. Its author, renowned ethnologist Carl A. Schmitz, selected nine pieces for publication in that book which Peter Kohler had collected in 1960 during his trip to the north coast of New Guinea and Manam Island. There were unique items among these objects, like the “fetish dog” from the Keram River and the limestone “Telum figure” from Astrolabe Bay. I assumed at the time that I could...read more.
The name Paul Wirz is familiar to those who appreciate and study the traditional art of Oceania. An ethnologist, photographer, collector and world traveler, he was especially interested in New Guinea. In conjunction with his research about art, religion and cultural practices on the island, he collected sculptures, published books, articles, made motion picture films, sound recordings, and took several thousand photographs. Through his publications and the works of art he collected, which have found their way into international museums and private collections, he made important...read more.
A photograph, taken in 1935 on the banks of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea by Charles van den Broek d'Obrenan, one of the members of the French expedition of La Korrigane, has made many collectors of Oceanic objects dream. In this photograph is a man dressed in white next to four Sepik men on the river bank in front of an impressive collection of statuettes from the Yuat River region. We were able to identify the man in white by comparing this...read more.
Edgar Walden (1876-1914) was an assistant at the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Berlin. Between 1907 and 1909, he participated in the German Naval Expedition to New Ireland. Based in Fissoa village, Walden collected many artifacts and took extensive notes on the malagan funerary festivities in the northern part of this island. According to the latest research, Edgar Walden initially hailed from Hanover. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, he learned geography, geology, and history at...read more.
Along with Alfred Flechtheim (1878-1937) in Germany and Paul Guillaume (1891-1934) in France, Pierre Loeb was one of those dealers who played a fundamental role in the promotion and championing of certain trends in the visual arts who was also interested in tribal art. Pierre and his twin brother Édouard (1897-1984) were born into a bourgeois Jewish Alsatian family, which had moved to Paris following the German annexation of 1871. Their father ran a lace and tulle wholesale business. During the First World War...read more.
Poet, writer and art critic Tristan Tzara’s name remains immutably associated with the Dada movement, of which he was the founder and leader. But his immense body of work goes far beyond those boisterous Zurich years, and Tzara was not just a witness to his own time but a major force in it. Born Samuel Rosenstock into a relatively well to do family in Moineşti, Romania, the young man chose writing to express opposition to...read more.
Carl (sometimes Karl) Haug was captain of the steamer Siar for the Neu Guinea Compagnie. His mission was to recruit Indigenous people for plantation work, mainly along the coastal regions of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, the part of New Guinea under German colonial control. During his wide-ranging journeys, Carl Haug collected nearly 1,000 artifacts, more than half of which were from the German colony, currently housed in...read more.
Richard Neuhauss (1855-1915) was a German physician, anthropologist, and photographer. He spent nineteen months in the colony “German New Guinea” from 1908 to 1910. During this time, he collected a considerable number of ethnographic objects from regions such as the Huon Golf, the Markham and the Sepik River. Neuhauss also took photographs for the purpose of somatological research. He was one of the first explorers to...read more.
Emil Stephan (1872-1908) was a naval surgeon who, while stationed on a German naval survey vessel, developed an interest in the ethnography of the Bismarck Archipelago. Collecting artifacts for the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, Stephan would ultimately lead the German Naval Expedition (1907-1909) to New Ireland. It is estimated that he acquired close to 1,000 artifacts, primarily for...read more.
Augustin Krämer (1865-1941) and Elisabeth Krämer-Bannow (1874-1945) were a husband-and-wife team who ethnographically explored the German colonies in the Pacific before the First World War. As participants in several expeditions—notably the German Naval Expedition (1908-1909) and the Hamburg South Sea Expedition (1908-1910)—they published prominently on New Ireland, Samoa, and Palau. Their assembled ethnographic collection...read more.
I grew up surrounded by and interacting with the artifacts my anthropologist parents, Cherry Lowman and Andrew “Pete” Vayda, collected on their two trips to New Guinea in the 1960s. An early playmate was a two-and-a-half-foot wooden woman I recently learned is from the Sepik River area, and her shell eyes fixate on me now as I write these words. Most striking in my family’s collection, based on the reaction of others, were the five-feet-tall shields in...read more.
Wilhelm Eduard Coenraad Veen passed his colonial civil-servant exam in 1911 after which, between 1912 and 1935, he had several postings in the former Dutch East Indies, currently Indonesia. While he has objects from New Guinea in his collection, none of the newspaper articles and official documents make mention of Veen spending time in New Guinea; instead, they refer to different placements, mainly as a controller in...read more.
Eudald Serra, an avant-garde Catalan sculptor, was a key figure in Oceanic art-collecting in Spain in the second half of the twentieth century. His multiple stays and expeditions in the Pacific, together with his artistic eye, made him an indispensable figure in the building of the main collections of New Guinea art existing in Catalonia: his own personal collection, Albert Folchs’ private collection (Folch Foundation), and the public collection of the...read more.
Walter Behrmann (1882-1955) was a German Geographer specializing in the field of cartography and geomorphology. He was a member of the Kaiserin-Augusta-River-Expedition, an expedition to the Sepik River (German name at that time: Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss), in the German colony German-New-Guinea, between 1912-13. As geographer of this expedition, Behrmann conducted scientific research, drew maps of the river and...read more.
Close to the Surrealists, Jacques Viot was alternately an adventurer, poet, broker, writer, photographer, mystery writer (under the pseudonym Benoît Vince) and talented screenwriter. Nothing had predestined this son of an upper middle class Nantes family for such a tumultuous life. In 1916, during the First World War, he was drafted into an artillery regiment in Vannes as a gunner second class. After the war, he enrolled at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Paris (HEC) and worked for an insurance firm in Nantes. When he returned to Paris in 1920, he joined the Surrealist group. During this difficult period, he worked...read more.
Allan Henrey Skiller was an Australian Army medic who travelled extensively within New Guinea during World War II, and who stayed on after the war until 1956 operating a copra plantation in Milne Bay Province. During his stay in New Guinea, Skiller collected tribal artifacts from the Papuan Gulf and Massim region. As a member of Australia’s 39th Battalion, Skiller saw combat in 1942 in the defense of Port Moresby against Japanese forces—mostly along the infamous Kakoda Track, that treacherous mountain path cutting across the Owen Stanly Range from New Guinea’s north coast to Port Moresby in the south. Once Skiller’s superior officer found out...read more.
Always interested in art and with a natural curiosity, Harry Franklin dared, as the scholar Tamara Northern observed, to step over the shadow of his own culture and appreciate the art of a range of cultures—from the Chiefdoms of the Grasslands of Cameroon to the remote villages along the Sepik River.Franklin was first introduced to African sculpture in the late 1930s by the artist and collector Chaim Gross, whose work he collected. After a successful career as an...read more.
Wilhelm Joest (1852-1897), German anthropologist and collector, had wanted to see Oceania all his life. Heir to his family's sugar trading fortune, Joest had travelled since his youth and dreamed of doing so for the rest of his life. In 1880 he met Adolf Bastian, the founding father of German anthropology, while both were on Java. Bastian implored Joest to become a collector, and Joest happily accepted. From that moment on, he knew he could fulfil his dream by becoming an anthropologist himself. He continued his extensive travels through Asia, but it was clear to him that his career would eventually take him to...read more.
Louis Pierre Ledoux was born in 1912 in New York. In 1935 he graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Anthropology and immediately started searching for opportunities to travel the world. One day in late October 1935, after having wandered the halls of the American Museum of Natural History, Ledoux writes in the Introduction of his unfinished manuscript...read more.
A text appeared in 1924 that would go down in art history as a milestone. It was the Surrealist Manifesto. A brilliant future as an intellectual and a committed writer lay before its young author, André Breton, who was twenty-eight years old when it was published. At that time, he was deeply in love with Simone Kahn, whom he had married in 1921. Thanks to the generosity of fashion designer Jacques Doucet, the young couple lived in Paris in a...read more.
An excursion to the Museum of Victoria inspired a young Stanley (Stan) Gordon Moriarty’s passion for “tribal art,” whilst a 16-year-old student at the prestigious National Gallery School in Melbourne, Australia. As an artist, Moriarty appreciated the aesthetics of the material he encountered, and it led him to begin acquiring works from antique shops, commercial galleries, and auction houses to form...read more.
William Gray entered into the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, first at a rural posting in 1878, after which he took a divinity course and studied ‘sacred languages’ at Union College in Adelaide. He also studied Chemistry, Logic and Classics at the University of Adelaide, completing his degree in 1880. Meantime, the Presbyterian Church of Australia was being urged to support missionary work in the New Hebrides and in 1869 resolved to support...read more.
Harry Geoffrey Beasley was born in East Plumstead, Kent, on 18 December 1881 (registered 8 January 1882) and bought two Solomon Islands clubs, when he was just thirteen years old, in 1895. Thus began an obsession which was to last his entire life. He was able to indulge his passion because he had inherited the North Kent Brewery. In 1914 he married his cousin, Irene Marguerite Beasley, who shared his interests and with whom he...read more.
Clément Germain Marie Maurice Reygasse was born in Lacapelle-Marival in the Lot department of France on January 7th 1881. He pursued his secondary studies in Toulouse and then in Paris, at the École des langues orientales and at the École pratique des hautes études, in the department of historical and philological studies. After obtaining his diplomas, he entered the colonial administration in Algeria, annexed by France at the time, and was stationed at...read more.
F. E. Hellwig (1854-1929) was a Renaissance man who, among many other professions, brought together three prominent ethnographic collections from German New Guinea before the First World War. He is best known for initiating stationary ethnographic research in the western isles of the Bismarck Archipelago and for serving as the official ethnographic collector on the Hamburg South Sea Expedition...read more.
Kenneth Thomas arrived in Rabaul in May 1927 as a Cadet Patrol Officer of the Territory of New Guinea administration and was posted to Aitape in November. In April the following year he was sent to “hold the fort” at Wutung, on the border with then Dutch New Guinea, while the resident officer went on leave. ‘This job of sitting down and “holding the fort” is tiring. It’s hard to find anything to do.’ Noting the presence of ‘Jim Crow�� in the trees, he asked himself: ‘I wonder, at times, if he’s just a stranger in'...read more.
Abstract painter Jacques Duthoo was born on February 19th 1910, in Tours, into a family of businessmen. His father, Arthur Duthoo, was the founder of the Grand Bazar, on the Rue Nationale, in 1888, which later became Les Nouvelles Galeries. A lifelong art enthusiast, Jacques was initially an avid collector and corresponded with many contemporary artists. He began painting in 1943, inspired by the great masters like Mondrian, Klee and Kandinsky. The explosion of abstract art led him to become involved with the young generation of...read more.
Tobias’ early years are a classic New York story. His observant Jewish parents’ families emigrated separately from eastern Poland and settled on the Lower East Side of New York. An arranged marriage brought forth Tobias and an older brother. His family then moved to Brooklyn with groups of extended family members who came and went. The family ran a grocery store and another brother was born. Tobias described his early years as “agonizing,” after losing his mother and suffering unpleasant and sometimes cruel treatment from his father. Tobias attended City College, studying math and art, and a few weeks before Pearl Harbor he...read more.
Born in Paris in 1899 to a father of Swiss and Brazilian descent and a mother from the Swiss canton of Thurgau, Keller began his career as a modern art dealer in the 1920s. From 1929 to 1933, he directed the famous Georges Petit Gallery. In 1936, Keller joined forces with dealer Etienne Bignou and ran the gallery’s New York branch until 1953. When it closed, he joined forces with Roland Balaÿ to open the Carstairs Gallery, which he ran from 1949 to 1963. In Philadelphia, he was the advisor to famous and secretive collector Albert C. Barnes and to the Mellon family. Concurrently with his activities as a dealer, Keller built up his own collection...read more.
Jac Hoogerbrugge (1923-2014) was a soft spoken, witty, erudite man and an astute collector-cum-connoisseur of tribal art. Serving as a transport agent and, subsequently, as a UNESCO official in Indonesia and New Guinea allowed him to probe deeply into the ritual art of the Batak (north Sumatra), Lake Sentani, the Humboldt Bay, the Asmat (New Guinea), and the Dayak (Borneo). Later in life, having returned to the Netherlands, he continued to hunt out items of ethnographic interest - in flea markets, at auctions, but also by...read more.
Born in Rouen in 1942, Jacques Kerchache was eighteen when he opened his first gallery on the rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris, followed by another on the rue de Seine where, until he closed it in 1981, he exhibited the work of contemporary artists such as Robert Malaval, Pol Bury, and Sam Szafran, as well as tribal art. His exhibitions were often put together from material collected during his travels he made to Africa, Asia, America and Oceania such as Tabar Islands in 1971 and Le M’Boueti des Mahongoue in 1967. He was a passionate collector with a keen eye, always eager...read more.
The name of the Divine Word missionary (SVD) and anthropologist Georg Höltker is closely connected with numerous ethnographic artefacts from New Guinea, which can be found in museums and private collections in Europe and the USA. At the same time, it should be noted that numerous legends have been formed around this person. For example, rumors and written publications say that he was a missionary in the Philippines or in the highlands of New Guinea, but also that he never explored...read more.
Early in 1886, Theodore Bevan, a 25-year-old Londoner of Welsh descent lay in his Port Moresby bed racked with the ‘fever-and ague fiend’ (most likely malaria). He had been busy trading for bech-de mer and incidentally collecting ‘curios’ along the Papuan coast, west and east of Port Moresby, for some six months in his cutter Electra, this being his third visit to British New Guinea. He had just sent 1440 of these ‘curios’ to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. Lack of fresh food and...read more.
In the so-called “primitive art” world, Émile Bouchard was a completely out of the ordinary figure and was in no way predestined to become a collector. He received his training far from the world of the initiates so no prejudices could interfere with the revelations that each new find could bring him. It was in this way that, as fortuitous opportunities arose, he acquired an exceptional ensemble of works from the Marquesas Islands and Papua New Guinea as well as a superb collection of clubs, and important Indonesian pieces and Tibetan bronzes. Émile Bouchard, a candy...read more.
Patrick O’Reilly was a native of the town Saint-Mihiel in northeastern France. As his name suggests, he was of Irish descent (Farell O'Reilly of Cork had emigrated to Le Havre in 1771). He arrived in Paris in 1918 to study at the Sorbonne and entered the Marist novitiate at La Neylière, near Lyon, in 1922. After being ordained to the priesthood in 1928, he became chaplain to the students of Paris (1930-1975). Concurrently with the fulfillment of his religious mission, O'Reilly received training in the field of ethnology and, as a student of the anthropologist...read more.
Ferdinand Hefele (1876-1953) served as the First Officer on the Peiho, the steamer that took the Hamburg South Sea Expedition (1908-1910) to the colony of German New Guinea. During the first year of this famous journey, Hefele clandestinely collected close to 500 artifacts. Ultimately, the ship officer donated the objects to...read more.
Morris Pinto was a man with a profound sense of curiosity and a desire to discover and learn as much as he could about whatever interested him. He did not grow up with parents who collected, but as a young man he found himself drawn to art and discovered that certain sculptures and paintings could produce an instinctual and emotional reaction. His path as a collector began with paintings; his first acquisition of note was a...read more.
Anyone with an interest in the history of “Art Nègre” (to use the term that was in vogue between the wars) has likely heard the name of Charles Ratton. And yet, while it frequently appears mentioned as that of the consultant and expert in sale catalogs, or cited as the author of multiple publications, and often listed as part of an object’s provenance, the man himself remains little-known. He was extremely discreet, or even downright secretive, about his life and activities. He was associated with...read more.
Self-taught ornithologist, ethnologist, writer, collector, curator and then museum director and pioneer of German colonial expansion, Otto Finsch was born in the spa town of Bad Warmbrunn, then part of the Prussian province of Silesia (now Cieplice Śląskie-Zdrój in southwest Poland). Finsch began to sketch the local flora and fauna and the landscapes around him at an early age, showing precocious signs of his talent as a draftsman and of what would become his...read more.
The name Roy James Hedlund (1939–2020) has become synonymous with collections of sculpture from Papua New Guinea assembled in the mid-twentieth century. New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, and Tabar are among the places we know he visited in the early 1960s.Hedlund attended Punahou School, the University of Hawai’i, Honolulu and the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California. As a young man, he met L. R. Webb who managed a theater in Honolulu and who also...read more.
Madeleine Rousseau was an influential figure on the Parisian art scene from the 1940s through the end of the 1960s. Born into a petit bourgeois family in Troyes, she grew up in an environment that was open to art. In 1913, she went to Paris for her higher education, but she soon abandoned this pursuit to devote herself to painting, which she had practiced since childhood. She enrolled at the École du Louvre in 1931. After graduating from there, she...read more.
Franz Kirschbaum (1882-1939) was a missionary of the Catholic Order from the Society of the Divine Word (Societas Verbi Divini, SVD) who arrived in German New Guinea in 1907. He would stay in the region until his death due to a plane crash in 1939. Trained in anthropology and linguistics, Kirschbaum was an avid collector of ethnographic objects. For instance, the Vatican Ethnographic Museum (Anima Mundi) holds approximately...read more.
Gaston de Havenon was both a dealer and collector that, while specializing in African art, also collected some masterpieces of Oceanic art—such as the world-record-setting Solomon Islands nguzu nguzu canoe prow that sold at Sotheby’s Paris on 15 June 2011 for 1,520,750 Euros. Born in Tunis, de Havenon emigrated to the United States at the age of 25 and soon went into the perfume business, ultimately founding the Anne Haviland Company, importers of...read more.
During an active career that lasted over six decades, French created in many mediums with work, usually series, that was nearly always about the perilous nature of the human condition. As a symbolist painter, French established an iconography of circles, hands, fish serpents, vines, Romanesque arches, oblongs, darts, waves and many others. He became a master at...read more.
Augustus Henry Lane Fox was born in 1827. As the second son of a country gentleman who enjoyed racing and hunting, and who was himself a second son, he was not rich, and his prospects were not promising. His father died when Augustus (or Fox as he was generally called) was only five, leaving the estate to his elder brother. His mother later moved to London, taking the thirteen-year-old Fox with her. In 1841 he...read more.
Mörner would collect 1,400 artifacts, mainly from the Bismarck Archipelago and the Ramu Sepik rivers, for Swedish museums. It would become the last great ethnographic collection to leave the German colony before the outbreak of hostilities. Mörner studied at the universites in Uppsala and Lund. In 1893, he graduated with a law degree. He opted for a career as a civil servant, and by 1899 he joined the Swedish-Norwegian Consulate General in Helsinki, then still part of Russia. A year later, he transferred to...read more.
Martin Voigt (1878–1952) decided at the age of 24 to accept the well-paid position of chief postmaster for the colony of Deutsch-Neuguinea. Before that, he had completed his compulsory service in the army. At the beginning of August 1902, he set out from Berlin on the long journey to...read more.
Of all the celebrities and personalities Andy Warhol chose to memorialize in his iconic silkscreen portraits, it would be hard to find one as discreet and reclusive as the collector Carlo Monzino. He is perhaps best known in the tribal art world for his coup as a 32-year-old for buying the bulk of the Jacob Epstein African and Oceanic Art Collection out from under the British Museum in 1965. With this auspicious start, Monzino continued to...read more.
Heinrich Rudolph (also Rudolf) Wahlen (1873-1970) became a prominent businessman in German New Guinea. Shortly before the First World War, he purchased “Queen” Emma Kolbe���s E. E. Forsayth Company. He also collected several thousand artifacts, which he supplied to German but primarily Swedish museums in return for consular titles and medals. Born in 1873 near Hamburg, Wahlen decided early on in his life to become a businessman in the newly acquired German colonies. In 1895, he arrived in German New Guinea to take on...read more.
Bruno Mencke (1876/77-1901) was a somewhat tragicomic figure associated with the First German South Sea Expedition to German New Guinea. His death on Mussau Island in the St. Matthias group cut the elaborate venture short and presented a significant challenge for the new German colonial administration. Nevertheless, a sizable ethnographic estate of well over 1,000 ethnographic artifacts supported the collections located in...read more.
Born in Béthune in the north of France in 1885, Stephen Chauvet was an outstanding student before becoming a doctor of medicine. He took part in the First World War and was wounded. Shortly after, through a present of an African statuette, he discovered the extra-European arts of which he quickly became one of the principal exponents in France and he thus began collecting objects pertaining to “l’Art Negre” (indigenous art). About 1920 in Nice, he was lucky to...read more.
The J. F. G Umlauff Company spanned over a century and supplied museums worldwide with ethnographic objects. It exploited colonial connections to obtain and trade artifacts from German New Guinea and Samoa. Ethnographers generally looked down upon what they considered a commercial endeavor, but they frequently enlisted Umlauff's assistance to obtain expensive collections and secure artifacts from ethnographic hotspots. The company's founder Johann Friedrich Gustav Umlauff (1833-1889) spent...read more.
Arthur Baessler (1857-1907) was a German traveler and ethnographic collector who chiefly supported the ethnographic museums in Berlin, Dresden, and Stuttgart in return for numerous decorations and titles. His collection activity mainly focused on the Pacific and South America. He published two popular travelogues about his Pacific voyages. Towards the end of his life, Baessler endowed a foundation to support ethnographic studies in the Pacific. By 1910...read more.
Otto Schlaginhaufen (1879-1973) was a Swiss physical anthropologist and ethnographer, who became a well-known eugenicist. He traveled to German New Guinea as a member of the German Naval Expedition (1907-1909). At the conclusion of the venture, he remained in the colony collecting ethnographica and human remains for...read more.
Otto Carl Reche (1879-1966) was a controversial German physical anthropologist whose racist outlooks and close support of the Nazi regime often clouded his contributions to Pacific anthropology. Nevertheless, as a participant in the first year of the Hamburg South Sea Expedition (1908-1909), Reche would author two monographs related to the venture. His 1913 volume on the Sepik River suggested a division of the region into four stylistic provinces that, while questioned, still finds...read more.
Max Thiel
Rainer F. Buschmann
Maximilian (Max) Franz Thiel was born in Munich on January 12th 1865. His mother Rosette Albertine Thiel was a sister of Eduard and Franz Hernsheim, who established the Hernsheim Company in 1875. The Hernsheim Company initially sought to benefit from the copra trade in the Islands of Micronesia, but soon expanded into the Bismarck Archipelago. By the late 1870s, Eduard established a station on the Island of Matupit located in...read more.
For the past decade I have been lucky enough to have the privilege of friendship with George Craig. Craig’s name is associated with excellent pieces of Oceanic art found in museums across Europe and America, private collections the world over and, of course, in this present exhibition. But what does any collector or institution really know about the field collector George Craig? Craig is a living piece of the Australian cultural landscape: a world-renowned crocodile hunter and...read more.
Motivated by a desire to study other cultures before they were irretrievably changed, in her mid-20s Lynda Cunningham decided to take a job with American Airlines – which enabled her to travel cheaply – and set out for Papua New Guinea. The first trip in 1966 crystalized Lynda’s passion for the art and people of New Guinea and Oceania, and many other trips followed over the next 25 years. For Lynda it was crucial to try to relate to and understand the cultures of the people from whom she...read more.
A surprisingly strong collection of Markham Valley and Huon Gulf art was collected Frederick Edward Pietz (1896–1975), the first American missionary to work in New Guinea. The majority of this collection is held at the Papua New Guinea Mission Museum in Fritschel Hall of the Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. The origin of this collection lies in the colonial history of New Guinea. The German Lutheran Neuendettelsau Mission established itself in Deutsch-Neuguinea (German New Guinea) in 1886 and operated until the outbreak of the First World War, when the German protectorate was taken over and controlled by...read more.
Adolf Ferdinand Roesicke (1881-1919) is best remembered for his participation in the extensive Sepik River Expedition that explored this critical cultural area a few years before the outbreak of the First World War. Unfortunately, this conflict and Roesicke’s early death prevented a detailed examination of the ethnographic results from this venture until recently. Roesicke hailed from Berlin, where his father, Richard Roesicke, was a prominent politician and brewery director. He studied widely and at many prominent German universities until settling on the natural sciences. In early 1909, Roesicke obtained...read more.
Richard Thurnwald (1869-1954) was a celebrated anthropologist and sociologist. He gathered significant field experiences in German New Guinea, where he went on his own (1906-1909) and as part of the Sepik Expedition (1913-1915). Given the sizeable biographical body of literature available in English and German, this Provenance entry will emphasize his two journeys to the Pacific colony...read more.
In the 1950–1960s, Ernest Thomas Gilliard (1912–1965) and his wife, Margaret, an artist, made several expeditions to different regions of Papua New Guinea and also New Britain. “Tom” Gilliard was a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. His extensive scientific work was published by the museum, and his legacy continues posthumously through...read more.
Karl Nauer (1874-1962) was a prominent member of the colonial community in German New Guinea. He exported well over 3,000 artifacts from the Pacific while serving at the helm of the coastal steamer Sumatra. Nauer is probably the only German whose Pacific collection served as the foundation of a new museum, opened in 2009, dedicated to Oceania in his native Oberg��nzburg. Nauer, a Bavarian native, developed a passion for oceanic...read more.
Richard Parkinson (1844–1909) and his wife Phebe (aka. Phoebe 1863–1944) were among the most prolific ethnographic collectors in German New Guinea. The Parkinson family collected well over 10,000 artifacts and Richard Parkinson would pen important ethnographic books, the most prominent of them, Thirty Years in the South Seas, was...read more.
Hermann Voogdt was a prominent ship captain and ethnographica collector in German New Guinea who stood at the helm of the Senta and Siar, two vital recruiting vessels for the New Guinea Company. Voogdt was a native of Papenburg, a northern German city located along the river Ems with a rich shipbuilding tradition. It is not clear when...read more.
Franz Boluminski (1863-1913) was a colonial district official stationed in Kavieng, northern New Ireland. Born near Grudziadz (Graudenz) in today's Poland, then Prussia, Boluminski joined the colonial army in German East Africa at a young age. In the 1890s, he signed up with the New Guinea Company and worked for its subsidiary venture, the Astrolabe Bay Company, while stationed at Erima Harbor near Madang. When the German state took over...read more.
Frank Burnett was a wealthy gentleman from Vancouver, British Columbia, who made numerous collecting trips to the South Pacific from 1901 until his death in 1930. He amassed an enormous collection of artifacts, with over 1,200 being donated in 1927 to the University of British Columbia, which later became the founding collection for...read more.
Axel Bojsen-Møller was born on August 30.1888 in Gødvad vicarage near Silkeborg. From an early age he was attracted to nature and not interested in following the family tradition of studying theology. Initially he worked as a farmer and later on he graduated with a degree in agriculture and in 1921 he bought a failing agricultural college, Vejlby Landbrugsskole, near Aarhus. Axel Bojsen-Møller was a man of ideas – dynamic and innovative – and after studing...read more.
Albert Hahl (1868-1945) was a German colonial officer and the second governor of German New Guinea (1902-1914) who originally hailed from Bavaria. After a studying economics and law, he joined the German colonial service in 1895. Between 1896 and 1898, Hahl was stationed in the Bismarck Archipelago as Imperial Judge and served in several other functions throughout the colony. In 1899, he became...read more.
Wilhelm Carl Friedrich Wostrack (1870-1919) was a German colonial officer stationed in central New Ireland. He collected artifacts mostly for the Linden Museum in Stuttgart, donating close to 200 pieces to that institution. Wostrack was a Saxon native who had arrived in German New Guinea in the 1890s to work for the New Guinea Company. His training as a medic was very much in demand and in April of 1904, he was called upon by...read more.
High up the stony slopes of the Greek island of Thassos off the coast of Eastern Macedonia is the small village of Kazaviti. There, inside a mid-19th-century stone house, locked in a small suitcase, carefully wrapped in cloth, are the relics of the Papuan Gulf village of Tovei on Urama Island. Among the dark chunks of wood is part of an extinct type of solid drum, a fragment from the first...read more.
The great collections of New Guinea art were made mostly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, acquisitions of traditional art in New Guinea by museums, dealers and private collectors continued throughout the twentieth century. From 1969 to 2005, while living in Sydney, I collected art from the Massim region, which coincides roughly with...read more.
Marie Ange Saulnier-Ciolkowska was an inspiration to those who met her and her apartment on 26 rue Jacob a treasure house. Born in 1898 she married in 1924 the painter and art critic Henri Saulnier Ciolkowska who was an enthusiastic browser of antique shops. In one he met a missionary and through him acquired objects from...read more.
Richard Vahsel (1868-1912) was a German ship captain hailing from the city of Hannover. After prolonged service with the Hamburg America Line (HAL), Vahsel joined the First German Antarctic Expedition (1901-1903) as second officer. Returning to HAL service following the expedition, Vahsel agreed to captain the steamer Peiho, named after...read more.
Rudolf von Bennigsen (1859-1912) was the first official governor of German New Guinea (1899-1901) following the German state takeover of the colony from the New Guinea Company. He hailed from lower Saxonian nobility and studied law in Strasbourg. Following his studies, he worked in...read more.
For most in the Oceanic art world the name Peter Hallinan is most recognized from the single owner sale of his collection by Sotheby’s London on December 7th, 1992. But the Peter I knew was a self-effacing, modest bloke, who pursued both solitude and privacy with passion throughout his 77 years. John (Peter) Hallinan, the scholarly, eccentric American-who came to Australia...read more.
A number of superb Sepik and New Britain art objects were collected by the Swedish Consul to New Guinea Ragnar Lindahl in the 1920s when he owned and operated a copra plantation on the northwest coast of the Gazelle Peninsula aptly named Stockholm. Lindahl’s quest for adventure started early...read more.
Lyle Scholz (1933–2013) was a pioneering American linguist and missionary who took a ship across the Pacific in 1962 to spend his career living with and studying the Kalam people of the Simbai area deep in Papua New Guinea’s Schrader Mountain Range. Born on a farm in Nebraska, Scholz attended Columbia University before...read more.
Australian Bruce Lawes (1926���2011) was one of earliest field collectors in Papua New Guinea and was dedicated to collecting artifacts for their aesthetics. Lawes arrived in New Guinea in 1947 and worked as a patrol officer in New Ireland. Less than a decade later he left administrative life, moved to the Abelam area and lived as a trader based in...read more.
Siobhan Campbell
Anthony Forge is well regarded for his pioneering work in visual anthropology and his outstanding collector’s eye. When Forge initially set off to study the Abelam of New Guinea as a young anthropologist, it was almost unheard of to make art the central focus of a fieldwork study...read more
Rainer F. Buschmann
In February of 1907 a letter from the German Colonial Division within the Foreign Office arrived in Ober-Langenbielau, a town now called Bielawa in Poland, then part of the Prussian state. Its recipient was a Paul Barschdorff, a locally respected teacher, who had applied for service in the German colonies. Since he was deemed suitable to work in a tropical climate, the Colonial Office ordered Barschdorff to German New Guinea to take on the headmaster position at the new indigenous school located at Namanula near Rabaul...read more.
Philip Goldman was a well-known London-based collector and later dealer in tribal art. Between 1957 and 1969 Goldman made several trips to New Guinea collecting some great objects from the Karawari, Hunstein and Telefomin regions. In 1960 he opened Gallery 43 in London...read more.
For anyone with more than a passing interest in New Guinea art, it does not take long to come across the name of Dr. George Kennedy. Normally it is in an exhibition catalog listing the provenance for some old and significant figurative sculpture from the Abelam or Karawari River areas. Kennedy was a prominent geophysicist from the University of California at Los Angeles who made a number of collecting trips to New Guinea...read more.