PROVENANCE:

Historical Figures In Oceanic Art

Alfred Cort Haddon

Philippe Bourgoin

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.

Cornelis Pieter Meulendijk

Philippe Bourgoin

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.

Nelson A. Rockefeller

Virginia-Lee Webb Ph.D.

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.

Peter Kohler

Klaus Maaz

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.

Paul Wirz

Virginia-Lee Webb

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.

Ernest Wauchope

Christian Coiffier

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

Rainer F. Buschmann

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.

Pierre Loeb

Philippe Bourgoin

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.

Tristan Tzara

Philippe Bourgoin

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 Haug

Rainer Buschmann

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

Sara Müller

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

Rainer F. Buschmann

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 and Elisabeth Kr��mer-Bannow

Rainer Buschmann

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.

Cherry Lowman

Andi Vaida

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

Dr. Fanny Wonu Veys

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

Ricard Bru

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 Behrman

Sara Müller

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.

Jacques Viot

Philippe Bourgoin

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

Michael Hamson

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.

Harry A. Franklin

Paul Lewis

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 on Nendö

Carl Deussen

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.