PUCK

Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.

Tonight, we’re talking about the reopening of the Met’s Rockefeller Wing. When it opened 43 years ago, it was a groundbreaking achievement that brought Indigenous art into the pantheon of art history. Before the wing reopened, it was hard to envision how the Met would improve upon the original. But now that we’ve seen the new version, with its profusion of small groupings, galleries, and vitrines (still only a small fraction of the Met’s full collection)—which allows the museum to show far more of the works it owns—it’s hard to imagine that the old Rockefeller Wing was ever sufficient. 

As I walked through the Met’s new, light-filled Rockefeller Wing early Wednesday morning just before the press preview—one of several events welcoming press, donors, and the many representatives of Indigenous groups whose artworks are on display in the wing—I could not help but notice all the people, often wearing some form of ceremonial or native dress, having their pictures taken next to the wall text and vitrines. Postured up with big smiles, they looked exactly like people do in graduation photographs. And in a way, this reopening felt like a graduation of sorts, with the various representatives the Met had included as co-hosts taking justifiable pride in their inclusion in the revamped wing.

Nelson Rockefeller was a pioneering collector of African and Oceanic art, and his family was intimately connected to the founding and expansion of the Museum of Modern Art. In the 1950s and ’60s, he faced resistance in having his collection, which was greatly enhanced by his son Michael’s expeditions to Papua New Guinea, included in an art museum. Much of the African art collected and displayed in Europe is found in natural history museums.

When you visit the Rockefeller Wing, yourself—and I do hope you will, because it seems as fundamental to any understanding of art as the Greek and Roman galleries that precede it in the Met floor plan—try to remember that the wing was an achievement in recognizing the value of Indigenous art as art… rather than as objects that defined the ethnography of premodern groups.

The reopening of the Rockefeller Wing made me curious about the state of the tribal and Oceanic art markets. Not surprisingly, there were a number of different events taking place in New York to coincide with the week of events at the Met. To get my bearings, I asked Christie’s chairman Guillaume Cerutti to remind me of the tribal and Oceanic art dealer that he had once introduced me to in the auction house’s lobby. Instead, I was surprised to learn that Cerutti was deeply committed to the field. “I have always considered the African and Oceanic art department at Christie's as one of our priorities,” he wrote me in an email that included introductions to several important figures in the field. “That is a category where one finds fabulous objects, with great provenance and power, and clients who are either very sophisticated and have built great collections, or collectors of masterpieces across categories.”

The Art of Juxtaposition

After I left the Met’s press preview, I had an appointment to visit Adam Lindemann’s exhibition Urhobo & Abstraction, which was a perfect example of how collectors are pairing African art with contemporary art. With the help of Bernard de Grunne, a leading dealer in African art from Paris, Lindemann had gathered five life-size, or nearly so, Urhobo carved wooden figures and another five Igbo figures, and surrounded them with works of African American abstract artists. It all culminates in an El Anatsui piece that acts almost like a map of the Niger River that divided these two groups.

According to Lindemann and de Grunne, who have known each other for decades, the grouping of Urhobo figures is the largest to be assembled outside of their original context in the Niger River delta. Cleverly, de Grunne and Lindemann paired an image of similar carved figures lined up along a large structure in Africa with a photograph of the statues of prophets thresholding the central portal of the cathedral at Chartres. How’s that for context?

But Lindemann wanted to go a step further. He included in his show works by Sam Gilliam, Richard Mayhew, Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, and Ed Clark—all very different African American abstract painters. The juxtaposition of the two types of artworks reminds us that while the combination may be novel for galleries, collectors have been combining tribal art with other works for generations, ever since the cubists and surrealists became infatuated with African art.

Standing in front of the Ed Clark painting, Lindemann mentioned that Steve Martin—you know him as the actor and comedian, but the art world knows him as an influential and groundbreaking collector—had shown him how well Clark’s abstract work showed with premodern art. In Martin’s case, Clark’s work was shown alongside Aboriginal art. The night before, I had been to the Asia Society to see a panel of curators and collectors, including Martin, discuss Aboriginal art. Both Martin and Lindemann were lending works by Emily Kam Kngwarray to the Tate’s upcoming retrospective curated by Kelli Cole, who also appeared on the panel, as did Mayatili Marika, one of the Met’s co-hosts, and Aboriginal art collector John Wilkerson. One of the main topics discussed was how to collect Aboriginal art ethically.

As Marika pointed out, though Aboriginal art draws on cultural traditions and symbols that are tens of thousands of years old, most of the art made by Indigenous peoples of Australia and New Guinea was ephemeral—body painting and sand images. It was only 80 years ago that artists started making portable Aboriginal art, first on eucalyptus bark and then on boards, eventually on canvas. Starting in the 1970s, materials were provided as a way to record this heritage, but also to make objects that could be sold to support these Indigenous groups.

It took many years, and some serious swings in the Aboriginal art market, before the art world recognized that buying works that had passed through reputable dealers—who made sure much of the value of the artwork ended up in the hands of the producers and their communities—was the best way to go about collecting. Dealer D’lan Davidson told the audience that once he began donating 30 percent of his net profits to the communities where the art originated—in excess of the resale royalty the Australian government created for all Aboriginal art more than a decade ago—his business began to grow dramatically.

Finally, art advisor Jean Fritts reminded me that, although these works are sometimes quite old, the collecting field is still very young. Unlike Old Masters, which is similar to tribal and Oceanic art in that we often don’t know who the maker was and must attempt to identify works through connoisseurship and an eye for detail, few art museums collect in the category. That’s why the Met’s reopening is so important. It should inspire more collectors to get involved. And the good news is, there’s still a lot of very high-quality works of art left in private hands.