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Christie's is delighted to have the opportunity to offer for sale this selection of masterpieces from the esteemed Jolika Collection at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. This groupe includes an extremely rare Biwat roof figure, a magnificent hook figure from the East Sepik Province, and an exceptional selection of Papuan Gulf works of art.
The Jolika Collection is housed since 2005 at the deYoung Museum of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in a vast museum space. It represents one of the single greatest collecting achievements in the world, brilliantly cultivated over four decades by Marcia and John Friede. Named Jolika by the letters, this exceptional collection, which comprises more than 300 works, is acknowledged to be the most important in both quality and depth.
Christie's is privileged to have been chosen to sell a selection of these masterworks. Proceeds from the sale will benefit the Fine Arts Museums acquisition fund for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. It is a rare opportunity for works of such exceptional artistic power and distinguished provenance to come to market. From my years as Deputy General Administrator at the Louvre Museum, I appreciate the care and long-lasting endeavor which the Museum has placed upon this collection. Christie's is privileged to be associated with this important effort, and we honor the Museum's unique and critical role in preserving New Guinea's artistic legacy in perpetuity.
By Aline Sylla-Walbaum
Out of the magic darkness of the galleries glorifying the New Guinea carvers genius our eyes are dazzled by these fifteen magnificent objects, including an absolute masterpiece, the tall Biwat figure. These virtuosos of stone tools who attacked dense wood, sometimes of a breathtaking age as demonstrated by scientific analysis, extracted from this large primary forest which had remained closed for centuries to European invaders; even if this vast territory was already, though superficially, discovered by Spanish navigators around 1528 and without knowing at that time if it was an island or a part of a continent. New Guinea would later be colonized by the Netherlands, England, Australia and Germany - until 1914 - then the German part was taken away by Australia, following the Versailles Treaty's decision by the League of Nations. This colonial history explains the presence of many Melanesian objects in public and private collections of their former governments.
Everything here is mostly "pre-contact", closed to influence, resistant to comparison. The art of these remote regions do not speak languages other than the one of the founding spirits. It is a language closer to psychoanalysis and its imagos dear to the Surrealists than prosaic functionalist comments. It is not a coincidence that Melanesian art has attracted Western poets of the 1930's through its intrinsic fantasy. Breton, Eluard and their circle were among the first to discern, beyond pure ethnologic aspects, the deep specificity and brilliant intuitive power. They not only collected Melanesian art, they studied it, for the primacy of the object. Meanwhile, major European dealers such as Pierre Loeb in France commissioned Jacques Viot in New Guinea to build his legendary collection, and there was the group of wealthy friends who formed a long collecting journey in Oceania aboard their Yacht, La Korrigane, between 1934-1936. Others travelled from their room, such as Stéphen Chauvet, the prolific author, who published in 1930 a book, Les arts indigènes en Nouvelle-Guinée, reproducing 430 objects and several field photographs, a well-documented study at that time. Lot 8 of this sale, the kwoi board, was part of the Chauvet collection; it is published on the cover of his book and largely used as a page icon as its design is so graphic.
In Germany, Arthur Speyer and Alfred Flechtheim, were searching for objects, buying them and exhibiting them, not as documents, but as art works. In his prestigious magazine Omnibus, published by his Berlin and Dusseldorf galleries, Flechtheim let the artists and writers speak. Thus in the 1931 issue, Tristan Tzara wrote: "Nowhere was man's pride brought to more crystalline heights than on these spots of earth, these archipelagos, inscribed with multitudes of luxury" (Omnibus, 1931, "L'art et l'Océanie", p.179). Everyting is said here through the poet words, a great collector himself.
Charles Ratton organized with André Breton in 1936, in his gallery on Rue de Marignan, in Paris, a famous Surrealist exhibition where audacious contemporary works and Melanesian and Oceanic artifacts were presented side by side. With them, poets and dealers, Melanesian art gradually found its way into major collections, not only specialized in 'Primitive' art, but also into art amateur generalist collections, whereby they were taken out of the Ethnographic Museum context that Andr Breton and his friends hated!
Few collectors, such as John Friede, constantly assisted by his wife Marcia, have marked their era in the 20th century in the United States. Maybe a man like George Gustav Heye (1874-1957), who also devoted his life to collecting North American Indian art, was of the same caliber, and could be compared. Both have dedicated their passion, almost systemic, their time, their resources and above all their methodic persistence, which is the hallmark of great passionates, those who go to the ultimate, as if they were driven by a forceful instinct. Why collecting if not to live, perpetual and ongoing research for the better, the best, the perfect, in every detail, in every object of the same culture: from the totem to the hairpin, even the fragment, all holders of a story that one seeks to know in empathy, to possess. Or does it possess us?
Collecting for over forty years, as Marcia and John Friede have, the Jolika collection, which name is composed by the initials of their three children, doesn't mean accumulating valuable and decorative objects, which would be used to make conspicuous their owner. No, it is mostly gathering scattered elements together in order to build a meaningful and significant whole, assemble forms to extract ideas, innovate in a world where everything is believed to be known, to have shown everything, to have seen everything. By brilliantly bringing together this unique collection, the Friedes has in a way re-created New Guinea, following step-by-step the progress of this very ancient culture from its origins and through Australia and the now flooded passages which trapped it on the big island lost in the ocean.
Collecting for Friede is a matter of childhood imaginings: following an early, constant collecting itinerary, his interest first in ancient natural history, fossils and shells, he then travelled through African art, then carried away by his curiosity followed the tracks before landing in Melanesia. As with the Surrealists before him, he was overwhelmed by the power of this art which, released by the lapse of his roots, has far exceeded the inspiration of his original masters in order to enter the inner world of dreams and materialize it.
From these laborious years, forever present, is the great catalogue of the Jolika collection, published in 2005 by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, to which Friede has widely contributed with his enlightened comments in the objects catalogue, a perpetual testimony of his tireless work , this magnificent publication in two volumes is a sum of knowledge where is also divulged essays by international specialists: Gregory Hodgins, Philippe Peltier, Dirk Smith and Robert L. Welsch.
After the December 2012 auction and its perfect Jolika miniatures, here we again have the opportunity to become, in our own way, possessors of part of the dream of this great collector.
By Pierre Amrouche
According to Friede (2005), this type of bull-roarer, in the form of miniature gope board, was used in the Papuan Gulf during ancestor commemorative ceremonies. "The bull-roarers were said to be the voice of supernatural beasts." Bell (in Peltier, 2006) explains that "bull-roarer were among the most powerful objects. [...] The revelation of bull-roarers [...] was part of the men's initiation process. Twirling the board above the head caused it to vibrate the air producing a strong whirring sound which, according to bull-roarer players, was the voice of spirit-beings. ' According to Schultze-Westrum (in Hamson, 2013, p.187): Only the small specimens, mostly without decorations, are actually swung to make the characteristic sound. The majority of larger specimens are the "mothers" of the small ones. They are wrapped (usually) in bundles of pandanus leaves and stored on the floor behind the row of kope boards in the skull shrine (awae. These mothers are very powerful.'
See Thomas Schultze-Westrum, 'Bullroarers, Kaiaimunu' in Michael Hamson (ed.) Collecting New Guinea Art, 2013, pp187-188
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