Geneva row over African cultural heritage

Source: swissinfo, Frédéric Burnand in Geneva:

Art experts have attacked the looting of African archaeological heritage on behalf of rich western collectors.

A group of specialists has pointed an accusing finger at a new exhibition of ancient African ceramics held at the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva. But those responsible for the exhibition reject the criticism.

In a signed opinion column, entitled "Le pillage de l'histoire africaine" (The pillaging of African history) in the French-language newspaper Le Temps on Monday, Eric Huysecom, an archaeology professor at Geneva and Bamako universities, condemned the looting of African cultural heritage.

His criticism is particularly directed at the "African Terra Cotta: a Millenary Heritage" exhibition, organised by well-known Geneva collector, Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, who specialises in ancient art from Africa, Asia and Oceania.

The article was signed by a dozen cultural heritage experts, including Hamady Bocoun, director of Senegal's Cultural Heritage Department, his colleague from Niger, Oumarou Ide, and Marie-Claude Morand, president of the Swiss branch of the International Council of Museums.

According to Huysecom, the ceramics and other artefacts in the new exhibition must have been exported illegally from Mali, where they were discovered.

"They come from sites discovered after 1977 and appeared on the market in 1979. The first decree in Mali relating to this dates from 1973," said the professor, who teaches archaeology to over 50 students in the capital, Bamako.

"These pieces clearly were taken illegally from Mali after being looted, as it's very rare to come across these kind of works accidentally," he said.

Reject claims

But the museum curator Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller rejected the claim: "I am linked with this kind of trafficking as if I was a vile criminal, whereas for the past 32 years I have held exhibitions throughout the world and helped build Geneva's cultural reputation, without any kind of public financial support."

According to the collector, Huysecom's accusations only concern a small number of archaeological pieces out of over 200 that are on display.

"All the others were acquired recently and could be purchased from the local potter," he said, adding that the suspect ceramics were acquired between 1970 and 1988.

"These pieces were displayed in 1983 in an exhibition of ancient art from Mali at our museum and there were no criticisms or complaints," said Barbier-Mueller, who claims he ceased purchasing archaeological pieces as soon as he heard it was problematic.

Deficient law

Huysecom says he is not accusing the curator of breaking the law: "Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller respects the legislation to the letter. But Swiss law is deficient in this regard."

The federal law on the transfer of cultural property, which entered into force in 2005, is not retroactive. Artefacts acquired before this date do not apply.

"Switzerland adopted a relatively convoluted law following its ratification of the 1970 Unesco convention," explained Barbier-Mueller.

The Swiss law is essentially based on bilateral agreements with states, he added.

"All countries throughout the world have been contacted and no sub-Saharan African country reacted," said the collector.

Scientific backing

In the Le Temps article, the group of art experts also criticise Boris Wastiau, director of Geneva's Ethnography Museum, for having contributed to and helped put together the exhibition catalogue.

"The new director gives his scientific backing to this collection. From an ethical viewpoint this is not acceptable. It's a whitewash," he declared.

According to the archaeologist, this kind of exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue with scientific texts, allows archaeological works like these to be sold without any risks. But Barbier-Mueller claims this is not something the museum is considering.

Wastiau also clarifies his position: "I have worked for the past ten years on the issue of illegal trafficking of cultural property in Africa, in particular the looting of national museums."

This is a commitment shared by the 23 other scientific contributors involved in the exhibition catalogue, he adds.

Temporary holders

Wastiau believes the catalogue is completely transparent.

"Whether is was done by the Barbier-Mueller museum or by someone else, I think it's a positive step to publish the collections. Most private collections are not visible and are not subject to any kind of publication. To show and publish allows for this kind of debate and any subsequent complaints," he said.

For Wastiau, there is general agreement over the whole issue of cultural property rights: "Over the next few years the issue of cultural property will come increasingly to the fore.

"Sooner or later representatives of American Indian cultures will start asking us to return certain objects from the collections at Geneva's Ethnography Museum and we will collaborate openly with them. In this respect I see museums as temporary holders of their collections," he noted.

Daniel Rootenberg
JacarandaTribal.com

Auction of African Art From Gross Collection

Source: NY Times May 9, 2009

Collecting African art can be a risky business; fakes are everywhere. Even Picasso was fooled.

The market has recently become so lucrative that unscrupulous craftsmen now create copies, skillfully adding signs of wear, that can deceive even the most knowledgeable buyer. And there are no good tests to reassure collectors. (Carbon 14 testing of wood, which has an accuracy range of plus or minus 50 years, is useless in a field in which most objects are less than 100 years old.)

One collector who seemingly beat the odds was Chaim Gross (1904-1991), a Ukrainian-born New York-based sculptor. On Saturday Sotheby’s will put on view 80 pieces of African art from his vast collection. They will go on sale May 15.

Like his contemporaries Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi and Henry Moore, Gross greatly admired African art and acknowledged its influence. From the 1920s through the ’60s he avidly acquired examples at flea markets, auctions and galleries in New York, London, Brussels and Paris, which is still the center of the African art market. He helped found the National Museum of African Art in Washington, which in 1976 opened the traveling exhibition “The Sculptor’s Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross.”

“My father’s enthusiasm was contagious,” Mimi Gross, his daughter, said as she showed a visitor around her father’s art-crammed house and studio, now a private museum in Greenwich Village. “He would get people to fall in love with African art. He always talked about the quality of carving, and he’d get upset when he saw contemporary fakes.”

The Gross collection has been out of the public eye for decades. “Collectors and dealers who have come to see the sale thought the Gross collection was dispersed years ago,” said Heinrich Schweizer, the African art specialist at Sotheby’s. “We’ve had a good response because the material is so fresh.”

James Willis, a San Francisco tribal art dealer since 1972 who once visited Gross in his New York studio, added, “There are some strong pieces in the sale.”

One is a 19-inch-tall Ngbaka statue from Congo. The striking male figure, representing a mythical ancestor, has a proud stance, knees slightly bent, stomach protruding, its head marked with scarification lines that look like strings of pearls. Based on its encrustations and deep black patina, experts say it is from the mid-19th century or earlier. It is estimated to bring $400,000 to $600,000.

Another 19th-century piece is a Senufo kneeling female figure from Ivory Coast, with a comblike hairdo and scars on its cheeks and arms. It leans forward, as if tending a fire. “This is the only kneeling one known,” Mr. Schweizer said.

The sale will benefit the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation (rcgrossfoundation.org), which is selling its most valuable pieces of African art to create an endowment and promote scholarship on Gross’s art. The sale is expected to raise $3 million to $4 million.

“The market for African art is relatively narrow, but it’s growing,” Mr. Willis said. He said it was helped in part by two events in Paris in 2006: the opening of the Quai Branly Museum and the Vérité sale at the Drouot auction house, which brought $55.4 million. “Once pieces started selling for a million dollars, people paid attention,” he added. “The high prices gave people confidence to get into the market, and now people who never bought before are buying great pieces.”

New enthusiasts include contemporary-art collectors. Joshua Dimondstein, a dealer from California, said, “As contemporary collectors understand the affinity the two art forms share, they recognize how well they complement each other.”

The Sotheby’s sale coincides with the four-day New York tribal art show, which opens Thursday at the 69th Regiment Armory, at Lexington Avenue and 26th Street.

Sotheby's Tribal Art Auction Preview

Sotheby’s is offering a second tribal arts auction in addition to the Chaim Gross auction on 15 May. This sale will focus on African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art – though a majority of the best pieces are Oceanic. The sale is slated to fetch more than $3 million if all lots meet their low estimate.

The sale consists of 94 objects including two very fine African pieces:

Lot 158: a Dogon, Wakara style figure from Mali. Within the broad corpus of Dogon statuary, examples of the Wakara sub-style are exceedingly rare. This work is estimated to bring between $200,000 and $300,000.

Lot 170: a Fang-Betsi reliquary head from Gabon, Africa. The work is estimated to fetch between $200,000 and $300,000. Sotheby’s catalog describes it as follows: “this magnificent head was identified by Perrois (1972: 333) as a typical example of the "school of Mitzic" a regional substyle of the Fang-Betsi. The offered lot is distinguished by the relatively small size of the face, the bulbous forehead, and a compressed profile, all combining to a maximum effect when seen from the front.”

This, as with the Chaim Gross auction, will be an interesting marker for the Tribal Art world. We shall see how the economy will bear on this latest American auction. We hope that with several fine pieces in the sale, that this sale will do better than previous auctions this spring. 

Dori Rootenberg

www.JacarandaTribal.com

Sotheby's Chaim Gross Tribal Art Auction Preview

Sotheby’s is offering a sale of tribal art from the collection of the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation. Chaim Gross, well known Modernist sculptor, and his wife Renee collected African and Oceanic tribal art during the 1940s and 1950s. They were some of the earliest and most enthusiastic collectors of tribal art in the United States. In the 1940s, Gross acquired the Crowninshield collection, formerly of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield. Many of these works had been exhibited in the 1937 Brooklyn Museum exhibition “African Negro Art from the Collection of Frank Crowninshield."

Highlights of the sale include:

Lot 9: The Soninke Hermaphrodite Figure from Mali, possibly 12th to 15th Century, estimated at $400,000 to $600,000

Lot 25: A Senufo Kneeling Female Figure from the Ivory Coast purchased in the 1950s from Merton D. Simpson, estimated between $250,000 to $350,000

Lot 67: Ngbaka Male Ancestor Figure from the Ubangi region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the Crowninshield collection, estimated at $400,000 to $600,000

This should be an extraordinary sale with several exceptionally rare and high quality pieces. Because of the unexpectedly good results of the Sotheby’s Rosenthal sale in November 2008, the consignors must have very high expectations from this auction.

Works from the sale will be on exhibition at Sotheby’s New York from May 9-14, 2009 and the sale will take place on May 15 at 10.00am in New York.

More information is available in Sotheby’s press release. 

Dori Rootenberg

www.JacarandaTribal.com

The Tomkins Collection Website

For a great example of using the internet to display your personal collection, I highly recommend that you check out the Tomkins Collection, the private collection of a noted tribal art collector.

As the collector describes his site "The Tomkins Collection is a website of the arts of pre-modern cultures. The Collection focuses on objects that represent ancestors, guardians and idols. Information about the objects in this private collection has been made available to encourage others to share their collections online in an accessible format."

What I particularly like about the site, aside from the high quality of the material and the beautifully produced website is the detailed provenance listed for each acquisition.

Daniel Rootenberg
www.jacarandatribal.com

Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Created

The US is taking steps to protect and promote its native cultural heritage with the formation of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. With $10 million start-up capital from the Ford Foundation, the foundation will provide grants to artists and arts organizations, support native arts leadership and team up with other organizations to increase financial supports for indigenous arts and cultures. In addition to the grant from the Ford Foundation, the Rumsey Bank of Wintun Indians have given $1.5 million with the initiation of a matching campaign, at which point they will donate another $1.5 million. This is the first fund of its kind in the US and represents a real victory to the native arts community.

The organization will be based in Portland, Oregon and has selected Tara Lulani Arquette, a native Hawaiian as its president and CEO. Prior to joining the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Arquette spent four years as CEO of the Native Hawaiian Hospitality Association, a private, nonprofit organization committed to supporting Hawaiian culture and arts in tourism.

W. Richard West Jr., the founding director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s American Indian Museum and a Ford trustee, said: “There need to be agencies and institutions that support native contemporary art and artists. For the most part, those agencies and institutions don’t exist.”

Most major media outlets have picked up this story in the last week and the New York Times has a great write up on the organization. There is so much need for the support of the native arts, we are just happy that the United States and several private organizations have recognized this need and helping to provide for their protection and support.

If you want to sign up to receive more information about the iniative, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation has a newsletter that you can sign up for.

 

Dori Rootenberg

www.JacarandaTribal.com

DE YOUNG AGREES TO SELL WORKS FROM FRIEDE COLLECTION

By John Cote - San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco has agreed to sell 76 pieces of tribal art pledged to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in a bid to resolve an inheritance dispute that threatens the city-owned museum's cornerstone collection of Oceanic art.

But as the city is trying to help settle part of that inheritance fight among Annenberg family heirs, it also is battling one of the family members in court over a promised $3.7 million donation - money that is supposed to help sustain and promote a collection considered to be one of the world's finest compilations of Papua New Guinea art.

That nation's ambassador to the United States has hailed the compilation of items as an "unparalleled and extensive collection of masterpieces," one that the de Young Museum specifically designed an 8,000-square-foot wing for when it rebuilt its Golden Gate Park home.

The 4,000 or more pieces were compiled by New York philanthropists John and Marcia Friede over four decades and promised to the de Young Museum for public showcase in a series of agreements dating back to 2003. But the art has since been at the center of legal battles in California, New York and Florida, involving the estate of John Friede's mother, Evelyn A.J. Hall. Hall, who died in 2005, was the sister of publishing tycoon Walter Annenberg.

The latest legal twist came Tuesday when City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed a court challenge that accuses John Friede's half brother of "malice and a desire to destroy the relationship between the Friedes and the museum" by opposing a $3.7 million payment to the de Young from Hall's estate. Herrera contends the half brother, Thomas Jaffe, has intentionally harmed the museum and public by trying to block the payment, which was promised by the Friede family for the upkeep, promotion and study of the collection.

The artwork, named the Jolika Collection after the first letters in the Friedes' three children's names, was to be transferred over a period of years. While more than 400 pieces are on display at the museum, the vast majority of it remains at the Friedes' home overlooking Long Island Sound in Rye, N.Y.

None of the 76 items to be sold is on display at the museum, and they are pieces that are either redundant or less significant than others in the collection, museum and city officials said.

"It's a bitter pill to swallow, but we're wiling to swallow it," Deputy City Attorney Don Margolis said. "The city's overarching goal is to make sure (the collection) is available to the public."

Debt to brothers

John Friede's two brothers contend they have the right to seize the collection and sell up to $20 million worth of its art after a Florida judge ruled that Friede had violated the terms of a legal settlement involving their mother's estate.

In that case, Friede agreed to pay his brothers $30 million and put the Jolika Collection up as collateral, despite having pledged it to the de Young in a deal finalized a week earlier. Friede values the entire collection at about $300 million.

He so far has paid his brothers more than $22 million of the $30 million, but legal fees and interest make the shortfall around $10 million, court documents show.

In order to preserve the art collection for the city, museum officials and Friede agreed in March to auction off 76 items like masks, headrests and mortars. They expect to raise about $3.5 million, according to court documents.

John Buchanan, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young, said the sale of those 76 items would have "minimum impact" on the overall collection.

Friede's half brother opposes the sale. In a letter to Margolis, Jaffe's attorney, Jonathan Bell, said the auction proposal contained unrealistic estimates, didn't include valuable enough items and didn't give Jaffe input into what should be sold. Jaffe is also a collector of Oceanic art, albeit a less prolific one, and John Friede has blamed the dispute in part on sibling rivalry.

"The basic interests of Tom - in having a few, high-quality, high-value pieces sold off to cover the shortfall - and of the museum - in keeping the 'good stuff' and seeing the less desirable pieces sold off - have always been in some conflict," Bell wrote.

Jaffe has also opposed the sale of a painting the brothers jointly own to cover the debt, even though "Le Dejeuner" by Pierre Bonnard has been valued at up to $10 million, court records show.

Family laundry

Even brother Robert Friede, who has regularly sided with Jaffe in the dispute, questioned Jaffe's opposition to those sales. In Florida court documents filed last week to compel the sale of the Bonnard painting, Robert Friede's attorney wrote that "Tom is, in essence, objecting to the very relief he previously sought and successfully obtained from this court."

Margolis called Jaffe's position "kind of perverse."

"Why are you frustrating efforts to get your debt paid?" Margolis said.

Bell refused to comment on specifics about the proposed sales, saying to do so could compromise settlement talks.

"Tom's interest is in getting all of the money he is owed paid to him on time," Bell said. "This is purely a business matter, purely a business matter. Any suggestions to the contrary are completely inaccurate."

Jaffe also opposes the disbursement of a separate $3.7 million payment from their mother's charitable foundation to the de Young to sustain and promote the collection, saying John Friede hasn't lived up to his obligations. The funds are being held by the trustee, JPMorgan.

The city maintains the payment of those funds is not tied to John Friede at this point, and is seeking court permission to sue over them.

"This just happens to be one of the most unique collections in the world," Herrera said. "We're lucky to have it, and we'll do everything we need to protect its integrity."

The players

John Friede: The eldest of three sons of Evelyn A.J. Hall. He and wife Marcia pledged the Jolika Collection to the de Young Museum over a period of years, then put it up as collateral on a $30 million payment to his brothers to settle an inheritance dispute.

Robert Friede: John Friede's brother. He initially sided with their half brother, Thomas Jaffe, in the inheritance dispute. Was owed $10 million by John Friede, now partially paid.

Thomas Jaffe: Half brother to John and Robert Friede. Was owed $20 million by John Friede in inheritance case, now partially paid. Has aggressively sought payment through legal action. A less renowned Oceanic art collector than John Friede.

Daniel Rootenberg

www.JacarandaTribal.com