Preserve the Jolika Collection – it’s ours

WHILE the cry for development funds is heard rising from every community in the country, war is being waged in the courtrooms and big money is changing hands at the auction blocks of the United States over priceless PNG natural art treasures.
Unique New Guinea art worth millions of kina are the centre of attraction, unbeknownst to many Papua New Guineans.
Most of the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum’s renowned compilation of Oceanic art will remain in place now that a deal has been signed ending an inheritance dispute that had threatened to dismantle the collection and force the sale of parts of it.
But some pieces that had been on display at the museum – including a striking shock-haired figurine used to top a sacred flute estimated to be worth more than US$1 million – are currently on the auction block.
That piece and others will be sold to help settle a cross-country legal drama that involved sweeping philanthropy, a bitter internecine spat over money, and a US$25 million loan from Sotheby’s that helped amass what is considered the world’s most important private collection of tribal objects from New Guinea.
Twenty-nine pieces that had been among the 398 on display at the city-owned de Young museum, after being donated by New York philanthropists John and Marcia Friede, have been removed for sale.
John Friede, 70, is reportedly an affable figure who talks animatedly about his children and grandchildren, some of whom live in Berkeley, then flows into the colonial history of New Guinea, the sense of motion conveyed in its tribal art and the works’ impact on the Surrealist movement.
“Why the hell should I be interested in this stuff? Well, because it is wonderful,” he was reported as saying.
What would be more wonderful would be if he admits to buying stolen cultural property of New Guinea and for the de Young Museum to acknowledge this in its display of the items it has left after the family and Sotheby finished dividing up the loot.
There are at least nine pieces within the Jolika Collection which are actually declared or proclaimed cultural property of PNG which have been gazetted under the terms of the National Cultural Property and Preservation Act enforced by the PNG National Museum. These pieces could only have been stolen from Papua New Guinea and, then, sold to Friede for some considerable sums of money. They have now become part of the Jolika Collection.
In all ways than one, the Jolika Collection is not just about New Guinea – it is Papua New Guinea.
These pieces, and perhaps others in the collection not yet identified, make it very important that the Government and the National Museum and Arts Gallery move with all possible haste to ensure the collection in the US did not disappear into private hands again.
With the head of the trust, in the late Bernard Narokobi, done and nobody yet appointed in his place, the place is leaderless. It is imperative that, at the very least, an assurance is secured that the pieces will not be sold off or an admission that they are indeed the property of PNG and that they are held on display at the museum.
In the absence of that, it is fair game.
The Jolika Collection is a collection of more than 400 masterpieces of PNG art that is the centrepiece of the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
This large and encyclopedic collection of rare objects with tremendous provenance is currently one of the finest collections anywhere in the world, rivaling the great museums of Europe and Australia, and was donated by Marcia and John Friede of New York.
The 401 works currently on display at the de Young alone have been insured for US$90 million (K230 million).
The threat of the Jolika Collection being broken up prompted Evan Paki, PNG Ambassador to the United States, to write to the director of the De Young Museum almost pleading for the collection to be kept intact.
The director, the board of trustees of the PNG National Museum and the Culture and Tourism Minister have not done anything to address the legal issues surrounding the acquisition of these proclaimed cultural property since the issue was first brought up in 2006.