"Art of Northwest New Guinea" was not conceived as an exhibition, but only as a catalogue publication.
"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 the catalogue of this exhibition. "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 the extraordinary volume, showing 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.
Following an earlier study of art from Papua New Guinea's Sepik River (Edition Greub, 1985), this publication brings full circle Greub's treatment of New Guinea.
