"On a map, the island of New Guinea looks like a roughly drawn profile of a sitting bird, with its head, called the Vogelkop (from the Dutch for 'bird's head), reaching west into Indonesia and its tail stretching eastward into Melanesia," writes the eminent ethnologist Simon Kooijman, curator emeritus of the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, in his introductory note to this book. "Almost half the island, the part to the west of the 141st meridian,... was under the sovereignty of the Netherlands until 1962 and is now a province of the republic of Indonesia under the name of Irian Jaya." So begins this extraordinary volume, which presents a dramatic overview of the art of Northwest New Guinea, or present-day Irian Jaya. Some 200 outstanding objects of ritual and daily use are illustrated to demonstrate the aesthetic sensibilities of the nonliterate peoples of this region. The objects, drawn primarily from Dutch collections, have been known to collectors and ethnologists since the nineteenth century. But it was particularly through the interest of the French Surrealists that the elegantly painted bark cloths and sculptural figures came to be viewed as part of the larger world of high art. This book brings together a compilation of essays by noted scholars in the fields of ethnology and art history, placing the works in context. Ethnologists Kooijman, Theodoor van Baaren, and Jac Hoogerbrugge, write from experience of the art in the style areas of Geelvink Bay, Humboldt Bay, and Lake Sentani, stressing its highly spiritual content. Art historian Elizabeth Cowling of the University of Edinburgh traces the influence of Oceanic art on the Surrealists, and French historian Philippe Peltier of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Orleans provides a charming biography of twentieth-century adventurer Jacques Viot, a French art dealer and film writer who, in the 1920s, traveled to Lake Sentani in search of objects to place on the Paris art market. And Christian Kaufmann of the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Basel provides an account of the Swiss explorer Paul Wirz, whose travels throughout his life (he died in New Guinea in 1955) bore fruit in some extraordinary acquisitions for the Basel collection. Finally, curators of two Dutch Museums, David van Duuren in Amsterdam and Dirk Smidt in Leiden, evoke an extraordinary sense of place as they tell how missionaries, civil servants, and explorers brought back to Holland a wide range of objects from New Guinea.
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