Prologue: The Discovery Evolution of Form: African, & Oceanic Art at the Genesis of Modernism is a curated sale that profiles eleven works of art whose type were at the heart of the modern art, and as the title indicates, continued to be a vibrant dialogue for artists throughout the 20th century and to the present day. This rich offering will be sold in New York during the major May sale series of Impressionist, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary art, and will be presented alongside paintings from those fields to stimulate an aesthetic dialogue and highlight visual affinities. The thesis of the sale is an ode to the landmark exhibition curated by William Rubin at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984 – ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art. This exhibition inspired a generation of art lovers and collectors who might otherwise never have thought to consider African and Oceanic Art, which is amongst the greatest ever created around the world and throughout the ages. In 1907, Paul Guillaume, the legendary Parisian dealer and African art maven, called the modern art movement a revolution. Today, Picasso’s greatest works from this period, as well as the African and Oceanic art that inspired him, are part of the canon. But imagining ourselves at that time, we have to remember the revelatory and supernatural feelings evinced by these sculptures that powerfully reimagined the human form in ways never seen before. In Paris at the turn of the last century, African and Oceanic art was housed at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Picasso later reflected to Françoise Gilot and Andé Malraux, a sort of living nightmare turned revelation at the Trocadéro – ‘Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation. It is a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors, as well as our desires. When I went to the Trocadéro, something felt stuck in my throat. I wanted to leave, but I stayed. I studied. Men made these masks and other objects for a sacred purpose, a magic purpose, as a kind of mediator in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving it an image. When I came to that realization there, I knew I had found my way. At that moment, I realized what painting was all about.’ When analyzing Picasso’s work of the so-called Africanist period, there is an oversimplified explanation that he was drawn to the abstraction of African art, and that his interest was almost purely formalistic. However, we know that there was the supernatural component that drove him, and it is in that spirit that those artists of the last century until today who turned to African and Oceanic art reads like a constellation of modern of art history – e.g. Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, Vlaminck, Giacometti, Modigliani, Kirchner, Brancusi, Leger, Klee, Ernst, Pollock, Moore, Epstein, Arman, Baselitz, Basquiat. — Susan Kloman Shock of the Old: Modernist Responses to African & Oceanic Art “African masks opened a new horizon to me. They made it possible for me to make contact with instinctive things, with uninhibited feeling that went against the fake tradition (late Western illusionism) which I hated.” — George Braque Around 1900, Baule sculptures like the Asie usu statuette by the artist known as the ‘Rockefeller Master’ and the Ndoma mask of the ‘Kondorobo Master’ had a sudden and completely transformatory effect on modern art in Europe. Although African sculpture had been around in Europe for a very long time, until the late 19th Century, it awakened little interest. The reasons why, after so many years of going by largely unnoticed, African sculpture suddenly became a focal point around which so much that would come to be called ‘modern art’ was to revolve, are both many and various. But, in the main, they have more to do with the socio-cultural conditions of crisis in turn-of-the-century Europe and its problems of rapid industrialization, mechanization and mass-media-imaging than they do with the innate, timeless and enduring quality of African art itself. From a Western perspective, the story of African art’s dramatic impact on Western culture is, at root, one of an entirely new way of looking at and perceiving the world suddenly opening the eyes of European and American artists to a whole new way of representing the world around them. For an aesthetic culture rooted in the classical Greco-Roman tradition of representation, African art seemed, to Europe’s ‘modernists’, to be founded upon showing not the outward appearance of things - the way they appear to the eye - but instead, what they came to see as a ‘conceptualized’, ‘expressive’ and ‘abstracted’ language of representation. African art was for them, in this respect, an entirely new plastic form of expression that spoke of an inner vision of the world, of a central reality removed from the illusion of what the West has termed ‘naturalistic appearance’. And it was this that effectively opened the route to a large number of dramatically new forms and styles that would, in turn, distinguish the many ‘isms’ of the modernist adventure in art. From an African perspective, the fact that a comparatively small number of the continent’s sacred artifacts, made mainly for private, ritualized and spiritual veneration (often in small and remote villages), were able to completely revolutionize the vast, widespread and thousands-of-years-old tradition of seeing and representing the world in the West, spoke volumes about the extraordinary power and intensity of its own little-known art and aesthetic traditions. Of course, the timing of the European artists’ encounter with African art has much to do with the extraordinary nature of its impact. Towards the end of the 19th Century, post-industrial Europe was enduring a period of cultural decadence and ideological crisis;. The young art of photography was beginning to threaten painting’s authority with regards to so-called ‘realism’ and, at the same time, European salons were filled to the brim with the frothy sentimentality and over-elaborate operatics of painters like Bouguereau and his school. Desperate to engage with something of meaning other than this apparently interminable and decadent floodtide of kitsch, it was not just to the radical and opposite extreme seemingly offered by African art that young avant-garde artists fled in revolt at this time, but to anything ‘other’ than what the stultifying taste of the European bourgeoise then advocated. ‘We must be brave and turn our backs on almost everything that until now good Europeans like ourselves have thought precious and indispensible’ the German artist Franz Marc commanded of his fellow painters. ‘Our ideas and ideals must be clad in hairshirts, they must be fed on locusts and wild honey, not on history, if we are ever to escape the exhaustion of our European bad taste.’ Seeking a new simplicity and directness of expression, young European artists embraced the arts of the East; of Japan, China and the South Seas; the Folk art of Russia and Bavarian glass painting; German medieval wood-carving; children’s art and the art of the insane, as well as the arts of Africa. ‘Much like the invasion of a barbaric race into the organism of a people in decadence’, the Futurist painter Boccioni somewhat provocatively wrote in 1913, ‘Gauguin’s journey to Tahiti, and the appearance of Central African fetishes in the ateliers of our Montmartre friends, are a historical inevitability in the destiny of the European sensibility.’ Of all these ‘outsider’ arts at this time however, it was the dramatic impact of the art of sub-Saharan Africa - in particular, Fang masks and Baule sculptures - on the ‘School of Paris’ artists in the first years of the twentieth century, that were to have the most decisive impact on the sudden shift in direction that gave rise to the modernist movement in European art. ‘Cubism was born’ of these sculptures’, the poet Max Jacob would later proudly declare. The initial response to African art of these first modernist pioneers - artists such as Henri Matisse, Maurice Vlaminck, Andre Derain, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Constantin Brancusi - was entirely stylistic. They knew little to nothing of the meaning and function of the Dan masks, Baule figures and Fang masks that caught their eye at the Trocadero or in the private collections of collectors like Paul Guillaume, nor, really did they care. What impressed them about such works was their highly sophisticated approach to the abstraction of the human figure and the fascinating avenue this seemed to open to a pictorial language beyond the so-called ‘naturalism’ of appearance that had defined Western art since the Renaissance. In accordance with this, the paintings of these artists moved immediately towards flattened forms, simplified, angular planes of bold colour, and an elegant integration of abstracted form and representational function similar, for example, to that found in the elegant forms and features of a Fang mask. While Picasso would later claim that the entire idea of an ‘art of exorcism’ and of his revolutionary painting Les demoiselles d’Avignon itself, was born in him the moment he first encountered the African sculptures on view at the Trocadero, it was not until much later, and under the influence of the Surrealists’ response to Oceanic art in the late 1920s, that he came to consider the spiritual and ritualistic function of so many of the African sculptures that had first inspired him. The influence of Baule sculptures like the Asie usu statuette or the Ndoma mask was perhaps most distinctive in the case Amedeo Modigliani who, in Paris around 1910, made a close study of specifically Baule art, producing several careful sketches of Baule faces and figures at this time. Through these he gradually worked the formal logic of Baule sculpture into the language of his own extraordinary series of large carved stone portrait heads. Subsequently too, after he was obliged to give up sculpture on account of his poor health, the elongated oval faces and pointed chins of Baule masks and figures that had inspired his sculpture, can also often be discerned distinguishing the unique style of painted portraiture that he developed during the war years. It was perhaps Modigliani’s friend and fellow sculptor Constantin Brancusi whose work came closest in spirit to the examples of African art that inspired him. (So close in fact, that late in life Brancusi would attempt to destroy any of his works which he felt owed too much to African influence) Recognising how, because they were carved directly in wood, in a raw and simple manner, similar to the folk art of his native Romania, Brancusi saw how African artists also ‘preserved the life of matter in their sculpture’. They ‘worked with the wood’ he said. ‘They did not wound it, they knew how to eliminate the unnecessary parts of it to make it become a fetish sculpture’ so that it becomes ‘a living and expressive wood under a form given by a human feeling’. Similarly, Brancusi also recognized that the so-called ‘abstraction’ or ‘abstracting’ tendency of African sculpture, so often referred to by early European avant-garde critics, wasn’t really abstraction at all. ‘They are imbeciles who call my work abstract’ Brancusi said. ‘That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things. It is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.’ This sense of true reality lying not in outward appearance but in the outer manifestation of an inner world reached through feeling and intuition rather than the cold dispassionate eye of reason or the visual measuring of outer semblance marks one of the great legacies of the influence of African art on modernism. And it also led, in Germany, in particular, to a widespread belief in the idea of the so-called ‘primitive’ charting a path to spiritual salvation. Embracing the simplicity and directness of expression they saw in the great holdings of African and Oceanic art then on show in the major ethnographic museums of Essen and Berlin, German artists of the early 20th Century, who, because they sought this ‘inner essence’, came to be known as ‘Expressionists’, turned their back on the modern world in favour of finding a ‘new innocence, a new unconsciousness’, like that which they believed the African sculptors enjoyed. Inspired by Gauguin’s example and by their own, misinterpretations of African art, the German Expressionists imitated less the stylization of African sculpture than what they believed to be the method of its making. As Herman Hesse was to write around this time, they believed that, ‘We must return to the realms of disorder, of the unconscious, of formless existence, of brute life and far beyond the brute life to the beginning of all things…in order to be able to bring about a new creation, valuation and distribution of life.’ Seeking, as Paul Klee noted, to ‘be as though new-born, knowing nothing about Europe, nothing, knowing no pictures, entirely, without impulse, almost in an original state,’ the artists of die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter even sought to establish a kind of tribal identity for their art. The Brücke group in Dresden, for example would, live and work closely together, stripping naked at any given opportunity, and sharing models and girlfriends in an affected idea of a communal primitivist idyll. Embracing primal simplicity and childlike directness, they ignored the manifest sophistication of so much African and Oceanic art and decorated their Dresden studios with faux-primitive batik textiles and simple wall-hangings adorned with hand-carved wooden fetishistic sculptures openly imitative of the Dogon, Songye and Baule figures they had seen. Attempting too, to recreate what they believed had been Gauguin’s South Sea idyll they also spent their summers attempting to live ‘like savages’ in nature on the man-made lakes of Moritzburg or islands in the Baltic. ‘Like ourselves’ Wassily Kandinsky, one of the leading exponents of Der Blaue Reiter said of the African masters, ‘these pure artists sought to express only inner and essential feelings in their works.’ Though a clear misunderstanding, it was this sentiment that prompted him, and indeed his fellow Russian Kasimir Malevich, to pursue a painterly path towards complete abstraction in which wholly non-representational forms were intended to articulate an entirely new, spiritual, language of pure, ecstatic feeling. This response to the supposed spiritual nature and language of feeling embodied by African and Oceanic art, along with the idea that these arts articulated some kind of inner but all-accessible, unconscious world of the spirit, was also one taken up with great vigour in the 1920s by the Surrealists. ‘Surrealism is only trying to rejoin the most durable traditions of mankind,’ its leader André Breton wrote in this regard. ‘Among the primitive peoples art always goes beyond what is conventionally and arbitrarily called the “real”.’ In April 1929 Christian Zervos’ magazine Cahiers d’Art devoted an entire issue to Oceanic Art which was to have an immediate effect on Picasso’s paintings of this period and a lasting one on the Surrealists who believed they saw in the sculptures of New Ireland and New Britain, in particular, the unconscious realm of the human mind, as charted by Freud and Jung, brought magically to life. ‘The marvelous, with all it implies in terms of surprise, splendour and dazzling outlook’, wrote Breton, has never enjoyed, in visual art, the triumphs it scores with some first-rate Oceanic objects.’ For him, Oceanic art, far more than the arts of Africa, in fact, expressed what he saw as, ‘the greatest effort of all time to expose the interpenetrations of the physical and the mental, to triumph over the dualism of perception and representation, to dig through the outer bark to the sap.’ This sense that the ‘primitive’ arts of Africa and Oceania in particular, reached further into the depths of the human psyche than anything in the Western tradition in art informed much of the soul-searching art of the Abstract Expressionists in America in the 1950s as well as the art informel of post-war European art during the same period. Seeking to establish an elemental language of human feeling understandable to all, artists like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb responded to the Jungian concept of primitive man’s closer connection to mankind’s supposed ‘collective unconscious’ by seeking to make work devoid of what they called the distractive ‘illusion’ of representational imagery. ‘While modern art got its first impetus through discovering the forms of primitive art,’ Gottlieb wrote, ‘we feel that its true significance lies not merely in formal arrangements, but in the spiritual meaning underlying all archaic works.’ ‘It is the ‘known myths of antiquity [that] are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express [these] basic psychological ideas’ Rothko asserted, because these myths still ‘explain something real and existing in ourselves’. Such earnest stress on the primordial and elemental nature of the human experience –Rothko’s ‘tragedy, ecstasy, doom’ and so forth - inevitably generated a backlash in the 1960s with its ‘Pop art’ generation appearing to actively revel in the apparent shallowness and profanity of modern, mass-media culture. In parallel to this however, other Western artists, who were to come to the fore around 1968, turned once again to their own idea of the primitive and the primordial, seeking also in the timeless signs and symbols of African, Native American, Oceanic and Neolithic art a primal language rooted in nature and in the land. ‘We’re living in a schizophrenic period,’ the land artist Michael Heizer wrote at this time, ‘We’re living in a period that’s technological and primordial simultaneously. I guess the idea is to make art that reflects this premise.’ A similar sense of schizophrenia infects much of today’s almost completely globalized culture. This is a culture in which artists in Africa, Oceania, Europe and America are openly and instantaneously able to interact, inspire and react to one another’s work at the very same time that borrowings from and imitations of traditional, so-called ‘primitive’ African and Oceanic art still remain a matter sensitive to political correctness, and questions about nationhood and identity. Many of the misunderstandings and prejudices about traditional African art that have coloured the history of its influence on modern art and of what precisely it is that constitutes the ‘primitive’ and the ‘primal’ remain problematic and still cause debate. One cannot use the term ‘primitive art’ in a textbook on African or Oceanic sculpture today, it seems, without a lengthy explanation charting the term’s troubling connotations. No-single artist experienced the ugly complexity of this situation more profoundly or acutely, perhaps, than Jean-Michel Basquiat. Born to a Haitian father and a Puerto-Rican mother, Basquiat became known as the first ‘African-American’ artist to attain international stature. Like his painterly heroes Picasso and Dubuffet, he too borrowed repeatedly from traditional African art - as he did from many other disciplines - only to find himself constantly questioned about the practice, and even lambasted for putting himself in the position of being a black artist emulating a white artist imitating an African artist. In Paris in 1988 Basquiat was therefore very happy to meet Outtarwa Watts, an African artist from the Ivory Coast, now living and working in the French capital. Watts’ work also borrowed extensively from European modernism and traditional African themes. It must have seemed to these two artists therefore that somehow, between them, they had managed to finally close the circle. Art, after all, unlike so much else in today’s world, has no boundaries. — Roberto Marrone

A Bioma figure, Urama culture, probably Kinomere village, Papuan Gulf region

Papua New Guinea

Details

A Bioma figure, Urama culture, probably Kinomere village, Papuan Gulf region
Papua New Guinea
Wood, original pigment
Height: 50 1/3 in. (128 cm.)

Provenance

Probably collected by Roy James Hedlund in Kinomere, circa 1961
Reportedly P. Morton, Port Moresby
Georges F. Keller (1899-1981), circa 1961
Collection Paolo Morigi, Lugano 1984, number 343, acquired from the above
Sotheby’s Paris, November 30, 2010, lot 60
Private collection

Literature

Rossi-Osmida, G., Un'arte per la bellezza: cosmesi e salute nei secoli, Padua, 1984, p.49, n.51
Hedlund, R., Visual Resource Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (PSC 1961.1.242)

Exhibited

Padua, Palazzo della Ragione, Un'arte per la bellezza: cosmesi e salute nei secoli, 2 March – 17 June 1984

Lot Essay

MARKINGS & LABELS
On the reverse, “KINOMERE” in black letters.
Small white label on the reverse, “Morigi, Lugano no.343”
Handwritten label dated Nov. 2, 1961

Notes on an Important Bioma Figure
By Virginia-Lee Webb
The sculptural traditions that have developed in the nation of Papua New Guinea are some of the most innovative and compelling works of art ever created. The majority of these forms are three-dimensional figures or objects worn in conjunction with ritual and performance then embellished with ephemeral materials. A few art forms there have been made in two-dimensions, namely decorated architectural panels, painted designs on barkcloths and fleeting drawings in the earth. However, in one region, flat wooden sculptures that are carved and painted on one side were a prolific form of expression.

The Papuan Gulf region, or Gulf District, is located in the southeast portion of the island of New Guinea. A few European visitors sighted the island, but it remained remote to the Western world until the nineteenth-century. Its coastal villages and tributaries that reach far into the island were radically changed with the incursion of missionaries and traders during that time. Extremely rapid change took place as ethnologists and commercial industries began to penetrate the region. During the dramatic and often traumatic encounters for all, the extraordinary cultural life and accompanying traditional arts were noticed and collected by outsiders. This was especially the case during the second decade of the twentieth century as various local beliefs and cultural forms were suppressed or changed. After mid century and the ravages of world wars, some of the sculptural forms were newly revived and older objects were hidden and survived. Thus visitors in the 1960s found sculptures that remained.

This figure, of a type locally called bioma is a style unique to the area. Its genesis is related to another equally unique form of art, called spirit boards or gope. Both are carved from flat or slightly curved pieces of wood, the latter wood sometimes originating from the sides of discarded canoes. Bioma are usually symmetrical, both in decoration and gesture. The gender of figures is sometimes indicated as in this example, as is its powerful and confident stance. Curvilinear forms and circular motifs dominate this example and are the basis for its broad smiling face, the Adam’s apple and navel, all shown with white pigment indicating the areas carved in low relief. Negative round spaces indicate the eyes and area between the arms and torso. The nose projects from the flat face with a circular opening representing the pierced septum. The ears are merely round voids on either side of the face. Decorations of wood, grass or fiber now vanished, would probably have been inserted in the septum and earlobes of the figure.

Bioma were found in the central and western part of the Papuan Gulf on Urama Island and in the Era river areas. Traditionally, gender segregated longhouses- called so by visitors because of their immense length in certain areas- were the locus of male activity. The gope and bioma were displayed side by side in family, clan or an individual’s designated shrine within longhouses. Bioma like the gope, were reminders to their owners of obligations to ancestors and spirits. These were traditionally an adult male’s responsibility. Bioma were placed near or on top of pig and crocodile skulls that were offered as sacrifices to clan spirits, and like the spirit boards, served as the embodiment of ancestral spirits and as reminders of their presence among the living. (Welsch 2006: 35, Webb 2016) Bioma such as this strong, classic sculpture exemplify the mastery and inventiveness of this figurative genre.

As this region was a former British colony, some of the earliest examples collected are now in England, such as the British Museum that owns the example collected by Charles Gabriel Seligman during the Cook Daniels Expedition in 1903-1904. (Oc1906,1013.11) In 1925 and 1930 ethnologists Paul B.de Rautenfeld and Paul Wirz photographed these interior shrines. (Webb 2016:176, 234, 286) American photographer and author John W. Vandercook collected bioma in 1933 that are now in the Brooklyn Museum (51.118.9) (Webb 2016:232). Also in the Brooklyn Museum is a bioma collected in 1966 by Thomas Schultze-Westrum (83.246.3) (Webb 2016:178). This bioma was photographed and probably collected by Roy James Hedlund in October 1961. Hedlund visited the area several times in the early 1960s and collected several important objects.

References
Douglas Newton. Art Styles of the Papuan Gulf. New York: The Museum of Primitive Art, 1961.
Robert Welsch, Virginia-Lee Webb and Sebastian Haraha. Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art and Society in the Papuan Gulf of New Guinea. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2006.
Webb, Virginia-Lee. Embodied Spirits: Gope Boards from the Papuan Gulf. Milan: Five Continents Editions 2016.

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