Heroic Africans at the Met

This fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled a stunning exhibition highlighting eight major sculptural traditions from West and Central Africa. Focusing on canonized portraiture of storied, nigh-mythical chieftans, kings, and other larger-than-life elite, Heroic Africans. Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures traces the histories of these cultures through the chronology of the individuals they enshrined, sculpted images of whom were often the only tangible historical record left to posterity. 

The masterpieces on display represent the Akan, Bangwa, Kom, Chokwe, Luluwa, Kuba, and Hemba cultures, as well as the civilizations of Ife and Benin. Equally impressive on aesthetic, conceptual, and curatorial levels, the installation offers audiences unprecedented experiences on every side. The in-depth examination of specific identities and personal histories to which visitors are treated here is already uncommon in African exhibitions, let alone one that encompasses such a wide variety of exceedingly beautiful and disparate works. 

Beginning from this rare and challenging theme, Heroic Africans leads viewers through a great hall of champions, from culture-founders to queen mothers, concluding with an amazing assemblage of twenty-two Hemba commemoration figures, such an overwhelming gathering of which has never been seen before.

Visit the official website here.

Images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Native American Art Advocate Ralph T. Coe Dies

Ralph T. Coe, 1929-2010
Photo: NY Times

Ralph T. Coe, a former art museum director and a private collector who played a central role in the revival of interest in Native American art, died September 14th at his home in Sante Fe, New Mexico. He was 81. 

Ted Coe, as he was known, was director of the The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, from 1977 until 1982. But as an art student in 1955 he was transfixed by a small Northwest coast totem pole that he spotted in a shop on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. It was the start of a 55-year fascination that Mr. Coe would share through major exhibitions he curated, his writings and eventually his donations.

“He was kind of the beginning player, enormously significant in the growth of appreciation of Native American art in the 20th century,” Julie Jones, the curator in charge of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, said on Thursday.

After seeing that totem pole, Mr. Coe began collecting and studying Native American art, ultimately assembling a collection of more than 1,100 objects, some of which dated from prehistoric times. It included ceremonial and utilitarian pieces, among them kachina dolls, decorated blankets, war bonnets, baskets, masks, pipes, ceramic jars, weapons and lavishly beaded garments.

To gather the objects, Mr. Coe roamed from reservation to reservation in the United States and Canada, learning about their symbolism and the techniques of their artisans. He lived with the Passamaquoddy of Maine, the Winnebago of Wisconsin, the Osage of Oklahoma, the Shoshone of Wyoming and other tribes.

Mr. Coe’s research culminated in two landmark exhibitions. The first, “Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Indian Art,” opened at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1976 and traveled to the Nelson-Atkins a year later. The second, “Lost and Found Traditions: Native American Art, 1965-1985,” was the first major exhibition dedicated to the work of contemporary Native American artists. It was shown at the American Museum of Natural History and nine other museums beginning in 1986.

By then, Mr. Coe had resigned as director of the Nelson-Atkins to immerse himself in collecting and spending time on reservations.

“It was a beguiling world of color and visual excitement, of pungent and humorous people,” he said in 1986. “To me, the Indian world became the real world. I changed a pinstripe suit for a pair of jeans. I said, ‘I’m just not good anymore at 12 cocktail parties in 14 days. I want to take off.’ ”

Ralph Tracy Coe was born in Cleveland on Aug. 27, 1929, one of three children of Ralph and Dorothy Coe. His father, who owned an iron factory, was a collector of Impressionist paintings and a trustee of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Mr. Coe, who is survived by a sister, received his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College in 1953 and his master’s from Yale in 1958, both in art history. A year later he was working at what was then called the Nelson Gallery of Art.

In 2003 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition, "The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art,"which placed on view a promised gift of nearly 200 works from Mr. Coe’s collection. They included works by 20th-century artists, an indication of his determination to show that Indian art is a living tradition.

“There is an idea of the dying American Indian, and we keep counting them out,” Mr. Coe said of the modern works. “But I keep wondering, if we have counted them out, why is all of this here?”

Source: NY Times

 The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art
Photo: Amazon

Masterpieces of African and Oceanic Art from Barbier-Mueller Museum at Metropolitan Museum

An exhibition featuring exceptional works of African and Oceanic sculpture selected from the extensive holdings of the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva, one of Europe's preeminent private collections of non-Western art, will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 2. Presenting more than 35 works—most never before seen in the United States—African and Oceanic Art from The Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting will explore the wide spectrum of artistic creativity from two distinct regional traditions that have profoundly influenced world art.

It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva.

The Barbier-Mueller collection of African and Oceanic art was founded in the 1920s by Josef Mueller, a pioneering collector of modern and non-Western art, and is continued by his son-in-law and daughter Jean Paul and Monique Barbier-Mueller. Their desire to share the collections with a wider audience culminated in the opening of the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva in 1977. Representing more than eight decades of their collecting, the exhibition will reflect the legacies of their connoisseurship.

African Art
Twenty-one works from western, central, and eastern Africa have been selected to illustrate both the range of the continent's artistic creativity and the discerning eye of the collectors. Among these, an idealized female head in fired clay is a tribute to the art of portraiture developed by sculptors between the 11th and the 15th century in the ancient city of Ife, in present-day southwestern Nigeria. A series of iconic masks includes an exceptional work created by a Teke master (Republic of Congo), whose brilliant use of color, geometry, and symmetry ignited the imagination of artist André Derain, one of the previous owners of the work. The technical virtuosity and inventiveness of West African metalsmiths are epitomized by a magnificent Malian ornament of the 13th-15th century in the form of a male torso; this unique piece synthesizes miniaturized detail with bold abstraction.

Oceanic Art
The Oceanic works in the exhibition exemplify the breadth of creative achievement by artists from across the Pacific. They include figures, masks, and decorative art from Polynesia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, and other regions, in media ranging from wood and stone to more fragile materials such as bark cloth and delicately carved turtle shell. Among the works on view is a boldly carved portrait of a chief from the Batak people of Sumatra, mounted on a fantastic creature, which served as a supernatural guardian. Other highlights include a rare wood sculpture from Easter Island that once belonged to the pioneering modern sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein and a stunning female figure from the Micronesian island of Nukuoro remarkable for its elegant lines and strikingly minimalist conception of the human form.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue.

Upcoming Exhibitions and Auctions

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's long-awaited show Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary opens October 2, 2007 and runs through March 2, 2008. Curated by Alisa LaGamma, the shows features over 150 works from European and American collections. The works are from Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo.

Interestingly, the show also features sacred relics from other world cultures, drawn from the Met's vast collections. This show is not to be missed. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

San Francisco Tribal, comprised of 18 dealers from the San Francisco Bay area, are holding their 3rd annual tribal show from October 12 -14, 2007.

On the auction front, Lauritz.com is auctioning pieces from the Hernsheim collection on September 30, 2007, including an important Uli figure (estimate 532,000 EUR) - see illustration above.

Zemanek is holding an auction on September 22, 2007 and Skinner is holding an American Indian and Ethnographic Auction on September 23, 2007.

Daniel
JacarandaTribal.com