Description
*An ancient hooked spirit figure, a "pre-contact" sculpture, with beautiful and ancient polychromy. This sculpture, collected by Georges Kennedy, is part of a corpus of objects of worship given to the spirit of an ancestor. This archaic style of hooked spirit figure, and in particular inverted or opposite hooks like this one, would have been abandoned around 1900 and replaced according to Anthony Forge by more anthropomorphic representations coming from influences further west. See for the record of another inverted hook sculpture in the Jolika Collection: New Guinea Art Masterpieces from the Jolika Collection, 5 Continents, 2005, p. 327, fig. 292, and vol. 2, p. 130. Abelam people, Maprik Mountains, Roma (and so-called Roma-style) region, Eastern Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea Wood, old pigments, restorations of a hook and a piece of the headdress (broken and glued), original pieces, visible lack of a hook (old breakage), old oxidation, very nice and old patina. H. Height : 153 cm Provenance : - Dr. George Clayton Kennedy Collection (1919- 1980), collected by him in Abelam country between 1962 and 1964. - Christie's sale, Los Angeles, 1981, lot 78. - Milton Arno Leof Collection. - Collection Nadine Vinot-Postry, Cuernavaca. *This lot is sold as a temporary import.
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*An ancient hooked spirit figure, a "pre-contact" sculpture, with beautiful and ancient polychromy. This sculpture, collected by Georges Kennedy, is part of a corpus of objects of worship given to the spirit of an ancestor. This archaic style of hooked spirit figure, and in particular inverted or opposite hooks like this one, would have been abandoned around 1900 and replaced according to Anthony Forge by more anthropomorphic representations coming from influences further west. See for the record of another inverted hook sculpture in the Jolika Collection: New Guinea Art Masterpieces from the Jolika Collection, 5 Continents, 2005, p. 327, fig. 292, and vol. 2, p. 130. Abelam people, Maprik Mountains, Roma (and so-called Roma-style) region, Eastern Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea Wood, old pigments, restorations of a hook and a piece of the headdress (broken and glued), original pieces, visible lack of a hook (old breakage), old oxidation, very nice and old patina. H. Height : 153 cm Provenance : - Dr. George Clayton Kennedy Collection (1919- 1980), collected by him in Abelam country between 1962 and 1964. - Christie's sale, Los Angeles, 1981, lot 78. - Milton Arno Leof Collection. - Collection Nadine Vinot-Postry, Cuernavaca. *This lot is sold as a temporary import.
