[BACKGROUND NOISE]
CECILE FROMONT: Good
evening, everybody.
Nice to see everyone
here this afternoon.
I'm Cecile Fromont from
the Art History department,
and I am very happy
to welcome all of you
to the winter quarter
Distinguished Africanist
lecture.
The Distinguished
Africanist lecture series
brings senior and up and
coming scholars of Africa
to campus to speak
on issues of interest
to specialists studying Africa,
faculty and students mostly,
but also the general public.
The lecture series
is made possible
through the generous
funding and supports
of the Center for
International Studies,
and is organized by the
university's steering committee
on African Studies
with the help this year
of graduate coordinator,
Erin McCullugh.
Thank you, Erin,
and thank you CIS.
It is my great pleasure
tonight to introduce to you
today's speaker,
Christopher Steiner, who
is an award winning
anthropologist, art historian,
and documentary filmmaker whose
multimedia scholarship focus
on non-western, and in
particular, African art,
as well as on the representation
of non-western societies
in art and film.
He is currently their
Lucy C. McDannel
class of '22 professor of
art history and anthropology,
acting chair of art history
and architectural studies,
and director of museum studies
at Connecticut College.
He is the author of African Art
in Transit, published in 1994
at Cambridge University
Press, and the co-editor
of Perspectives on Africa, a
Reader in Culture, History,
and Representation,
Blackwell '97 and 2010,
Unpacking Culture,
Art and Commodity
in Colonial and
Postcolonial Worlds,
University of California Press
'99, and the just off the press
Africa in the Market, 20th
Century Art from the Amrad
African Art Collection, who
he edited with Silvia Forni.
He's also edited two special
issues of the Journal of Museum
Anthropology, and as you can
gather from the number of books
he wrote and co-edited,
is also the author
of numerous articles, sorry.
In 1991 he produced the 60
minutes also award winning
documentary, In
and Out of Africa,
and served in 2005 as
a research consultant
and principal supporting
subject for the documentary,
In a Nutshell, a Portrait
of Elizabeth Tashjian.
Professor Steiner is also
an active curator and museum
professional.
He received his BA and MA
from Johns Hopkins University,
and I guess for the sake
of symmetry, his AM and PhD
from Harvard University,
and has conducted field work
in Cote d'Ivoire,
Ivory Coast, as well
as among African communities
in North America and Europe.
Introducing our guest, I must
confess, is a little daunting.
Not only because it challenges
one's, or at least my ability
to find synonyms for
award winning and numerous
and distinguished, but also
because these concrete markers
of productivity and
recognition only
begin to convey the importance
of professor Steiner's work
for scholars and
students of art history,
of anthropology
and museum studies.
Since its publication
22 years ago,
his book African
Art in Transit has
been a landmark in the
study of African Art,
of the anthropology of art,
of the African art market,
and more broadly of the
transnational economic and
cultural relations between the
African continent and Europe,
as well as North America
in the postcolonial era.
Along with his co-edited
Unpacking Culture,
it has been singularly important
in framing scholarly debates
about non-western art
with crucial contributions
on the concept of authenticity,
ethnicity, primitivism,
cultural brokerage, and value.
So regrettably, I will cut
this introduction short
before I finish losing
my voice entirely.
But to bring professor
Steiner's work
up to date, I must mention
that he's now finishing
a new monograph titled,
Facing Africa, the Nigerian
Collections of
Dr. George Harley,
which will be published with
Harvard University Press,
and from which his talk
today, Masks, Markets,
and Missionaries in Liberia,
1925, 1960, I believe derives.
So without further
introduction, join me
in excitedly welcoming
professor Steiner.
[APPLAUSE]
CHRISTOPHER STEINER:
Well thank you, Cecile,
for that wonderful introduction.
I hope I can live up to it.
I will raise my voice.
And thank you for the
invitation to speak,
and thank you for the Center
for International Studies
for supporting the talk as well.
As Cecile said,
the lecture today
is based on my
ongoing book project
about Dr. George W. Harley,
medical missionary in Liberia.
And I'm sort of at the
phase of the research
now where everything
is exciting to me,
so when I tried to
put this talk together
I didn't know what to leave out.
So I will, hopefully,
not wander too much.
The other thing I want
to mention before I start
is that, unlike my previous
work which was really
based on field work in working
directly with African traders,
this is really an
archival project that
is seen through the
lens of George Harley.
So in reviewing
the talk, it seems
spots are kind of Euro-centric
or maybe Harley-centric.
And it would be nice to get
more of the African side
of the equation, but
unfortunately there's
a lot of silences in
that part of the record,
but I think it comes
through in some spots.
Let's begin by meeting the two
main characters of the talk
today, George Harley, on the
right, and Alfred James Tulk.
Harley spent 35 years in
Liberia as a missionary.
Tulk visited him for
one year in 1932.
My talk is mostly about
Harley, but I bring up Tulk
at the beginning because I want
to end with Tulk, who actually
leaves us some of the
most interesting record
of the exchange
between collectors
and Liberians in 1932.
Harley was the son of
a Methodist minister.
He was born in Nashville,
North Carolina,
along the Blue Ridge Mountains,
and he studied biology
at Trinity College, which
is today Duke University.
At the age of 10,
he remembers being
in a presentation by
missionaries that was organized
by his father and mother.
And at that point, he decided
he wanted to be a missionary
and to follow in the footsteps
of David Livingstone, who
was a medical missionary.
Interestingly, while he's
at Trinity College studying
biology in 1914,
tremendous changes
are occurring in Liberia.
And primarily, the
Liberian government
is extending its range
inland from Monrovia,
and sending government
representatives and soldiers
particularly to the
border region with Guinea.
So in 1914, the
Liberian government
sets up an outpost
in Sanniquellie,
which is to sort of protect
that contested border
region with the French.
And then in 1920 they
establish an outpost
in Ganta, which is ultimately
where George Harley ends up
spending 35 years of his life.
As Ganta is being settled by
the Liberian government in 1920,
Harley is attending
Yale Medical School.
And it's while he's
at medical school
that he actually meets Alfred
Tulk, who was studying--
he was an artist, graduate
student in art at Yale,
and the two formed
a lifelong bond.
And again, I mention
Tulk because I
want to come back to him
at the end of the talk.
It also turns out, from
having read everything
George Harley ever wrote I
think, he had very few friends.
In fact, he probably only had
one friend, which was Tulk.
He was supposed to be
a very difficult man,
and that's sort of
comes out in the record.
And Tulk, for some reason
which is not clear to me,
he hit it off really
well with Tulk.
In 1924 Harley is assigned
by the Methodist Episcopal
Board of Missions to work
in Northeast Liberia,
so he's received his
marching orders, as it were.
And he says in this
article, "our place
will be one of the few remaining
frontiers of the world.
We will not consider
our work complete
until there is a church,
a hospital, and a school
substantiated by the
essentials of civilization,
of which the Christian home
is the most important."
Now he does end up leaving
a church, a hospital,
and a school.
Fortunately, while this
article was going to press,
he attended the Kennedy
School of Missions
in Hartford,
Connecticut, which is now
the Hartford Seminary, which
had a very progressive attitude
towards mission work.
And he basically was
told that conversion
was secondary to his other
work, and that he really
should focus on his
medical work, as well
as the practical skills that
he brought with him to Ganta.
He was a blacksmith.
He was a carpenter.
He made all of
his own furniture.
He built his own houses.
He made the roads in Ganta.
He made bricks.
He sort of was a
jack of all trades,
but he wasn't interested
in mass conversion.
And in fact, the record shows
that he was really not involved
in the Christian part
of the missionary work,
in proselytizing, other
than attending a Bible
study on Sundays.
You can see him in the
background of that photograph.
He was never in the foreground.
In early 1925, he
and his wife Winifred
traveled by freight
boat to London, first.
And while in London, he received
a degree in Tropical Medicine,
six months training
in Tropical Medicine.
And then he went to
Monrovia in 1925.
In early 1926 he traveled
from Monrovia to Ganta.
That took him two weeks by
foot, with 50 hired men.
Apparently, this was not
part of the progressive part
of the Kennedy School's
indoctrination.
And he arrived in
Ganta in early 1926.
And what's important
about Ganta,
in terms of the history of
African Art and material
culture, is that Ganta
is really situated
at the heart of the
major ethnic groups
producing masks in this
region of sub-Saharan Africa.
So Ganta is close to the Mano
people, neighbored by the Dan,
which Harley refers
to as the Gio,
the [INAUDIBLE] on the Cote
d'Ivoire border, the Krahn,
and the Kpele.
So, he's well placed
to collect masks,
even though in 1926
he doesn't realize
that's what he's
going to be doing.
This is not on his radar at all.
The question is, how does he
come about collecting masks?
What's the impetus for this
interest in collecting masks?
It's hard to know, exactly.
We know-- there's
a documentation
that the first
object he ever bought
was this fulani or peul
hat, which he bought
in 1926 from a Muslim trader.
And this is now at
the Smithsonian.
And, you know,
unfortunately there
is no letter or diary
that he kept saying why
he bought this particular work.
But to me, this is the beginning
of his collecting mission.
I would say that when he begins
to collect sacred materials,
a lot of that is dependent
on his changing relationship
with the local community.
So from 1926 to 1928, he
really is seen as an outsider.
Building his own house,
trying to build the mission,
but really is not connecting
to the local communities.
Then, by happenstance, in
January of 1927-- I'm sorry.
Actually I should have
said 1927 he's alone.
In January of 1927 there are
cries in the village at night
that the leopard
that had been preying
on the local
livestock and chickens
was spotted outside the village.
So Harley gets his
double barrel shotgun
in the middle of the night,
tracks down the leopard,
and shoots it.
He was very proud of his kill.
In fact, in his diary
he even inks the paw,
an gives us a paw print of
the leopard in the diary.
But what's important
for this is that it's
this sort of moment of
acceptance by the community,
that the community celebrated
the kill of this leopard which
was plaguing the
livestock, and Harley
becomes a hero for the moment.
In anthropology you might
compare it to Clifford Geertz's
cock fight moment.
He had figured out a way to
bond with the local community,
and after that he
had connections.
And I think it's through
those connections, that's
one of the ways to
explain the opening up
of masks and sacred materials
being made available to him.
The other impetus
for his collecting
was a visit by
another missionary,
a Presbyterian missionary
called Dr. George Schwab
who had been working in Cameroon
for the previous decade,
both as a missionary,
and also collecting
material for the Peabody
Museum at Harvard.
And he's best known for having
collected this couple, Fang
reliquary couple,
from Gabon, which
is one of the masterpieces of
the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
So when Schwab visits
Ganta for about six months,
he encourages Harley to
begin collecting material
for the Peabody Museum,
and he puts Harley in touch
with Earnest
Hooton, who was then
the head of the Anthropology
Department at Harvard.
A few months after Schwab
leaves and is encouraging Harley
to begin collecting
material, there's
another one of these
pivotal moments which
engages Harley with
the local community,
and again gives him another in
to the possibility of having
sacred materials sold to him.
And rather than tell you
myself, I'll let Harley speak.
This is a voice
recording from 1963
of Harley speaking to
Peace Corps volunteers
who are about to
head off to Liberia,
and he had been invited
to Lincoln University
in Pennsylvania to
give this address.
The address is about an
hour and a half long.
He is the most uninspired
speaker you've ever heard.
I'm only going to play
you three minutes,
but this is his
explanation of how
he collected his first mask.
And you can imagine,
working on this project
for four years, when I found
him speaking, I was delighted.
Hopefully you can hear
it and understand him.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-He came one day saying
that his people were
dying of an unknown disease.
That they had caught
three old women,
and put their foot in a stick,
that is one foot per woman,
and one stick per woman, so they
couldn't walk around very well.
In other words, they were
prisoners as suspected witches.
He wanted me to go and look
and see if I could do anything
about this disease.
So I carried my microscope
and paraphernalia
and went through this town
and found that the people had
amoebic dysentery.
It was as [INAUDIBLE]
a case as you
can find of tracing the
origins of the epidemic
to one person who had
been down to Monrovia
and come back very sick with
amoebic dysentery and died.
And other people at his own
house had gotten the dysentery,
and here was a town with
roughly half the people sick.
Well I had them all
line up, the people
who got drinking water
from this little creek,
and the people who got drinking
water from that little stream.
All the sick people,
with only one exception,
got their drinking water
from this little stream.
And at the top of
the slope, the rain
would wash the filth
down into that stream
with the house of the first
victim of amoebic dysentery.
So I said, you will not
drink water from this stream
any more.
I dropped in some
chlorinated lime.
I went and found a new place
and dug a well for them,
and I said, drink from this
well and you'll have a chance.
And I gave the people who were
sick some chiclets of medicine
by mouth, and the whole
epidemic cleared up.
And they turned the
three old women loose.
[LAUGHTER]
Now this young chief was
rather grateful for that.
He came one night,
bringing to me
the first mask I have ever got.
He said, I could wear
this, but the government
has suppressed-- at that
time, this whole thing
was suppressed.
He brought me the mask, which
was something like this.
He said, I could wear this, but
it isn't being worn anymore.
So he brought it to
me, and gave it to me.
I got the idea there,
that wearing these things
was limited to certain families.
Unless you were
the proper family--
[END PLAYBACK]
CHRISTOPHER STEINER: So
the point of the story
is there's amoebic
dysentery in this town.
He cures it, and the
chief rewards him
by giving him the first mask
that he had ever collected.
What's interesting
about the audio clip
is that he also indicates that
the government had suppressed
the use of these
masks at this period.
And that, in a way-- and I'll
get into this more in a second,
but in a way, the government
suppression of Porro,
which is the male initiation
society for which these masks
were used, was one
of the reasons why
the elders, the men,
were trying to, in a way,
to get rid of them.
That it was extremely
dangerous to be using them,
to be caught with
them, if you were
caught by government soldiers.
And selling them to Harley was
one way to dispose of them.
There are other reasons, which
we'll get into in a second.
Between 1930 and
1948, while Harley
is collecting for
the Peabody Museum,
he purchases 400 masks, which
end up at the Peabody Museum.
He also collects
another 400 artifacts,
together with the masks,
including household implements,
chairs, baskets, kitchen
implements, as well as
ritual paraphernalia.
His first shipment of artifacts
in 1933 to the Peabody
included 19 masks, and
in 1937, 329 masks.
So you can see that the
rate of collection, which
could be accounted for by the
contacts that he was making
and the word that he was buying
is sort of spreading, I think
is also an indication of the
rapid acceleration of people
wanting to get rid of these
masks for whatever reasons.
And one of the
reasons, I think, is
the ban on using them
by the government.
The Harley's were
visited in Ganta in 1935
by Graham Green and his
cousin Barbara Green.
And in her account of that
trip published in 1938 called,
Too Late to Turn Back, Barbara
and Graham Green in Liberia,
Barbara Green describes
a locked closet in which
Harley kept these masks.
And she says, quote, "during
one evening in the dusk when
the light was dim and somber,
Dr. Harley took us to a room
that he kept locked up.
Looking over his
shoulder to make sure
that no one was about, he
slipped in and we followed.
All around us we saw
strange masks of every kind.
Cruel faces grinned at us,
and other ugly and grotesque
seemed almost alive.
We were surrounded by them and
they were all hideous, though
carved with great skill.
I could find no
beauty in any of them,
but they were certainly
a valuable and unique
collection."
I like her double ambivalence.
They're not good,
but they're well-made
and they're important somehow.
Also interesting that he was
looking over his shoulders.
Harley feared for his life.
He knew that what he was
collecting was sacred material
and that he might be poisoned
for making this collection.
And there are instances where
he actually medicates himself
because he thinks he
has been poisoned.
So again, to go back
to this question, why
were people selling sacred
masks in such large quantities
between 1928 and 1948?
We answered the first one, which
was a government prohibition.
And even beyond
1948, the government
was enforcing the ban on Porro,
the use of masks in initiation,
and the use of
Porro paraphernalia.
This is a photograph from 1954
by a British doctor, Wallace
Peters, who visited
Ganta and took
this photograph of
Liberian soldiers
stopping a man who had Porro
paraphernalia in that box.
It turns out, and I don't
know the exact circumstances,
but it turns out
Wallace Peters actually
ended up buying everything
that was in that box.
So, another example of someone
collecting sacred materials.
The other reason
masks were being
sold in such vast quantities
during this time period
was the government
imposition of a so-called hut
tax on the Liberian interior.
And the hut tax, or
the household tax,
was imposed to,
first of all, extend
the reach of the Monrovian
government into the interior,
to raise money for the
Monrovian government,
and also to support
the Firestone Rubber
plantation which had established
itself in Liberia in 1926.
Coincidentally, the same year
that Harley arrives in Ganta.
So the vast terrain
of central Liberia
is operated by the
Firestone Rubber plantation,
and they need laborers.
And one of the ways
they get laborers
is to coerce labor by
forcing a tax which can only
be paid in the new currency,
the British West Indian-- West
African, sorry, a bank
currency which can only
be attained either by
working for Firestone
or by selling objects to Harley,
out of two possibilities.
Harley never wrote about
the specifics of exchange
of money or purchasing objects.
He's frustratingly
silent on these points.
But his wife did write
in a letter in 1950,
"when they knew that my
husband bought old things,
they were tempted by the chance
to shift the responsibility,
get the trouble things
off their hands,
and come into some of
the money as well."
So I think that supports the
idea of selling for cash.
The third point, I would say, is
a loss of power by the elders.
The society was shifting.
The power structures
within indigenous societies
were shifting.
And young men were
coming into power,
and were really trying to
leave this material behind,
and did not want to pursue
that into the next generation.
And part of that reluctance
to pursue these practices,
was due to missionary schooling.
So in a bizarre sort of way,
Harley's mission school program
is creating the
circumstances under which
the young men are no longer
interested in masking
or in Porro.
So he, sort of
unbeknownst to him,
he was supporting the ultimate
sale of the merchandise.
And then, finally, I would say
that the other reason objects
were being sold is
that there's a growing
market for African
art outside of Africa.
And although Harley doesn't
discover that market
until 1950, as we'll see, the
carvers in Liberia and Cote
d'Ivoire we're
certainly producing
work for the external market
beginning in the 1920s.
So some of those
objects that were
being made for export
and for the trade
were likely coming
from Cote d'Ivoire,
crossing the border
into Liberia,
and being sold to
Harley as objects
made for indigenous use.
So interestingly,
Harley's collection
is a mix of both objects that
were made for indigenous use,
as well as trade objects or
tourist art, if you will,
beginning in 1926.
And, you know,
this article which
was published in 1926 as
Harley is going to Ganta, sort
of talks about the so-called
craze for African art
in New York, which
was certainly-- there
are equivalent articles in
Paris and in London as well.
All right.
I want to take a brief
autobiographical moment here
as we transition into
the next phase of what
I want to talk about.
Not to be egocentric,
but because I
think my own approach
to dealing with Harley
has changed radically
in the 30 years
that I've been
involved studying him.
Plus, I have to show this
picture of me in 1986.
So in 1986, while I was
a grad student at Harvard
in anthropology, I became
involved with the Harley
materials in a
project of curating
an exhibition of Harley
masks and other artifacts
at the Peabody Museum.
This was my first encounter
with the Harley material,
and I knew nothing about it
when I started the project.
But at the end, with
this exhibition called
To Dance a Spirit, I had
a pretty good introduction
to Harley.
Now what I understood
about Harley,
and what we presented
in this exhibit in 1986,
has changed radically in
my re-visitation of Harley
which began a few years ago.
And part of that, I think,
has to do not only with access
to new materials.
Oddly enough, Harley's
papers are not at Harvard.
They're at Duke
University, which
we were not aware of when
we were curating the show.
So now that I've read
everything at Duke,
my perspective
has changed, but I
think also my own
research in the field
has changed the way
I interpret what
Harley was doing in the
period that he was in Liberia.
I went to Danane in 1986,
which is a border town right
across from Liberia,
not far from Ganta,
a region inhabited by
the Dan speaking people.
And I thought I was going
to do a re-study of Harley,
a study of masking,
the use of masking
in Danane and in the region.
And when I got there, there
was no masking being performed.
I couldn't find anyone who
wanted to talk about masking.
And what I did find
were African art traders
who were buying and
selling African masks.
So the whole nature
of my research
shifted from a study of
traditional masking practices
to the international art
market in African art.
And I focused my studies on
a group of house art traders
who migrated across Cote
d'Ivoire and other countries,
collecting art and
then selling them
on the international market,
which is what my book African
Art in Transit is focused on.
So, having published
African Art in Transit,
having worked in Cote
d'Ivoire on the art market
and really not thinking
about Harley since 1986,
all of a sudden, in
2012, I got a call
from the director of the
National Museum of Art
at Duke University,
asking if I would
curate an exhibition
of the Harley materials
that were at Duke.
Not only did I not know
Harley's papers were at Duke,
I also didn't know there
were Harley objects at Duke.
So, I learned fast.
Of course I didn't
admit that on the phone.
I accepted with
delight, and said
I would be happy
to curate the show.
Went down to Duke and
saw about 150 objects
that Harley had sold to Duke
in 1964, not long before he
passed away in 1966.
This was essentially
a teaching collection
that was purchased by the
anthropology department,
curated by the
anthropologist Weston Labar.
This is how it was
exhibited, apparently,
for years in the
anthropology department,
a kind of quintessential
1960s ethnographic display.
And what my
re-engagement with Harley
allowed me to do
was to now see--
and reading the papers at
Duke, knowing the art market
from my field experience,
is seeing the kind of market
that he was intersecting with.
And it turns out
that after 1950-- he
sent his last shipment
to Harvard in 1948.
After 1950, his whole
approach to collecting
and to selling
changes radically,
and that's the part
that in the 1986 exhibit
we didn't talk about
and I didn't know about.
So in 1950 he has a complete
falling out with Harvard.
He has a fight with Earnest
Hooton over a number of issues,
a major monograph that
Schwab and he authored,
called Tribes of the Liberian
Hinterland, published in 1947,
was supposed to be
coauthored by Harley.
He did more than half the
work, and Hooton listed him as,
with contributions from Harley,
and a book by George Schwab.
He was furious about that.
He also felt that
his collections--
he thought his
collections would be
highlighted in a special
gallery at the Peabody Museum.
His name was nowhere to
be seen at the Peabody,
and he also realized
that the Peabody vastly
underpaid him for the objects
that he was selling them.
He always needed money, so
he was selling everything.
And in retrospect, he felt
that they had gypped him.
So he said in a letter,
"at Harvard, my name
has been completely lost."
In 1950 his eldest son Robert
was in college and his younger
son Eugene was on his way to
college and to medical school,
and Harley needed
money to pay tuition.
And on his salary from the
Methodist Board of Missions,
he could not afford to send them
to college so he was looking
for other sources of income.
He came across a collector
in New York, Paul Rabut.
It's a little unclear
exactly how they met.
Rabut was a commercial
illustrator, graphic designer,
and a collector
of non-western art
who had collected,
up until 1950,
primarily Northwest
coast masks and statues.
When he met Harley, he became
interested in Liberian material
and started to buy in large
quantities from Harley.
All of the masks that are
in this photograph, which
is the one I used for the
poster for this talk, probably
ended up, in some way,
going through Rabut's hands
into the American art market.
The picture was taken in 1950.
The poster says 1958.
I sent the wrong date.
It was taken by Griff Davis,
a photo journalist who
had visited Liberia.
And Griff Davis also
knew people in New York,
and was sort of
spreading the word
that Harley had masks to sell.
Rabut essentially worked
as a middleman for Harley.
Harley would either ship
masks directly from Liberia
to Rabut's home in Connecticut,
or he would sometimes
send little photographs
that he, I guess,
cut out of contact sheets.
I don't know.
It's like it's the pre-thumbnail
thumbnail, or something.
And then Rabut
would annotate them
with comments like
poor, moth eaten,
repairs on the upper
lip, jaw patch visible.
What this tells me is that a
lot of the material that Harley
had left by 1950 was
in pretty bad shape.
These were objects
that were either
too broken or damaged to
send to the Peabody Museum,
or things that he had
come across that people
were literally at the
bottom of the barrel
getting rid of materials.
There were a few good pieces
that emerged after 1950,
but not many.
One of the dealers-- Rabut was
selling to a number of dealers
on Harley's behalf, men
like Julius Carlebach, Alan
Alperton, Ladislav Segy,
Boris Mirski, and Ralph Alton,
all of whom had African art
galleries in New York, Boston,
and LA.
And I just want to focus on
one of the galleries, Ladislav
Segy's gallery.
This was-- Ladislav Segy
is a Hungarian artist who
emigrated to the
US in the late '40s
and opened a gallery of
African Art in New York
on Lexington Avenue in 1949.
I'm going to play
another 3 minute clip.
This is Segy being interviewed
for a radio program in 1951,
soon after his gallery opens.
And what is particularly
interesting about the clip is,
you know now that Harley
was sending him sort
of the dregs of his collection.
But if you listen
to what Segy says,
he only purchases the
finest, oldest pieces
from European collections,
and that there's nothing left
in Africa to buy, which is
sort of a classic perspective
from African art
dealers and collectors.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-Good afternoon.
This is Lloyd Moss speaking,
and presenting at this time
a special feature of
your city stations
second annual
American art festival.
This afternoon,
by transcription,
we're taking you on a
tour of the Segy gallery.
And to guide you through
the gallery, here now
is Mr. Ladislav Segy,
director of the Segy gallery.
Good afternoon.
-How do you do?
-Why, first of all,
I think we ought
to talk a little bit
about the gallery
before we get onto
a personal note
and talk about you
as an individual.
How about that?
Will you tell us how it happens
that a gallery in New York City
specializes in African art?
-Well, I tell you, it was
quite a venture on my part
to start the gallery, but
the answer is very simple.
I love it.
I have an awful lot
of fun doing it,
and I thought that
probably there
are some more people here in
this big country of the United
States who might
feel just as I feel.
That is to say that
African art gives
a tremendous emotional thrill.
[INAUDIBLE] on that basis,
because it's actually
a human connection
with the sculpture,
I thought that that was a
justification to open it.
[INAUDIBLE] you wouldn't
know that, what I know
is that this is quite
a unique gallery,
not only here in New York City,
but also in the whole world.
-Really?
You mean it's the
only one of it's sort
that specializes in African art?
-That's correct.
Because there are
lots of galleries
which handles
sculptures or handles
primitive art,
so-called primitive art,
including South Sea
or pre-Columbian,
but I am specializing
only in African art
because I feel that there is
such a tremendous material here
that you have to know the
thing, you have to study it.
By the way, if I may
place a little plug here.
I have a book which
will be published
by [INAUDIBLE] in spring,
called African Sculpture Speaks.
-Consider the plug placed.
-Because the supply question
is a very intricate one,
due to the fact
that in Africa they
don't produce any more the type
of sculptures what I handle.
I handle only what we call
genuine antique sculptures.
On account of the
infiltration of the Europeans,
the missionaries and so forth,
that whole art really died out.
So presently what I have in
the gallery are really old
pieces [INAUDIBLE],
and the only way
I can get them is from
old collectors in Europe.
-That is of the only way
they'll come to your gallery?
-That's the only way.
And sometimes I have to put
up really like a detective,
to work out who might
have one, who might have
a collection, how to find it.
And again, that person, who
might be an old colony art,
may not know, as I know,
the artistic quality.
He just grabbed them
during his stay as a curio,
as an exotic object.
Within that collection, I
have to make a selection also.
Which one lives up to an
aesthetic or plastic quality?
-Yes, I can see that.
But how do you
know, for example,
that this certain objet
d'art was preserved by being
placed on a family shelf?
Do you actually have
backgrounds on all these?
-Definitely.
We know the different
customs of different tribes.
-Oh, that's where that's--
-There's a lot of field report.
By the way, in my
book I am using
a bibliography of
about 290 books
and articles, which I had to
read in four languages in order
to get the proper
background material.
So because I wasn't in Africa,
very mainly for the reason
because you can't find
anything now there,
I was consulting old field
reports or field studies
which had been made way back.
-Yeah.
-So my present experience
is based upon those studies
of field searches.
[END PLAYBACK]
CHRISTOPHER STEINER: All right.
So knowing that Segy is in
correspondence with Harley
beginning in 1950 before
this interview was done,
it sort of puts in a
new light his claims
that there's no more
sculpture produced in Africa.
There was work being
produced in Africa,
but it's not necessarily the
kind of work he wanted to sell,
or he was selling it
under the pretense
that it was older work.
I only collect from old
collections in Europe,
which Segy was
saying this in 1951.
If you went to Pace Primitive
in New York this afternoon,
they would tell you
the exact same thing.
And, I don't travel to
Africa because there's
nothing left there to collect.
So these are sort of the
tropes of the dealer,
the tropes of the collector,
that we hear over and over
again.
When Rabut, Rabut
as the middleman,
was selling to
Segy-- I just want
to quote two
interesting passages,
because they again underscore
the kind of manipulation
of perception that's going
on between Harley, Rabut
as suppliers, Segy as dealer,
and the ultimate customers who
were buying from Segy.
Rabut says in a
letter to Harley,
"incidentally in talking with
Segy, I made no mention of you
at all, but merely offered
the lot as being my property."
So again, sort of erasing
the connection to Harley
in that transaction, coming
from an old, in this case,
American collection.
He also talks about how he
needed to improve or fake
some of the masks before
he could show them to Segy.
And he says, and this is
quite an extraordinary passage
in the letter, quote,
"I felt like something
should be done about the
finish on some of these masks.
So I took them all to
Connecticut with me,
and in my spare time at
night rubbed wet clay, earth
or mud into each of
them, let them dry,
and with a brush
rubbed off the excess,
leaving only slight traces
in the crevices, cracks,
and corners.
This gave them a more
natural appearance,
similar to the older
ones, which in many cases
have such traces from
being stored in the huts
and on the ground.
I took them back and
showed them to Segy."
You know, so having worked
in the Cote d'Ivoire
market in the
1980s when this was
standard practice
for African traders
to fake objects
in this manner, it
was sort of startling
for me to read
that Rebut is doing this
in 1951 with Harley masks.
I think the other thing that's
interesting about Harley,
and this is hard for
me to pinpoint exactly,
is to what extent
he understood what
he was doing in his engagement
with the art market.
It seems clear
that he understood
when he was collecting for the
Peabody Museum, in that role
he was trying to
create typology,
sort of a standard
ethnographic collecting
from the early 20th century
or the mid century where
he wanted certain types of masks
that had certain functions.
And in that case, the idea
between replica and original
didn't seem to matter to Harley.
So it turns out this
massive Loma mask
that he's holding in
this photograph was
a replica that he had
commissioned for sale to him
because he didn't have an
example of that type of mask,
and then he sold it
to the Peabody Museum.
So that's one example of where
the boundary between replica
and authentic, or however
you define authentic,
didn't seem to matter to him.
He also was constantly
repairing and refinishing masks,
and this endless tampering
annoyed Rabut to no end.
Rabut kept writing
to him, please
stop messing with the masks.
You're compromising
their authenticity.
But he felt that a good mask
had to be a complete mask,
and a well-preserved mask.
He developed his own patina,
which he would put back
on masks where the patina
had been scratched off
or was weathered.
This is from the
Duke collection.
You can see from the
back of the mask--
it's an old mask, probably well
before he got to Ganta in 1936.
And he covered it in
this black material
that ends up looking like
sort of a chalkboard material,
and doesn't have what a
normal patina would look like,
which is a shiny patina.
Luckily, we have his formula,
which a collector gave us
at the Peabody Museum, which
includes black powder, which
turns out is gunpowder.
I made this.
I made it in the summer,
so I wasn't in our house,
and tried it on this
tourist copy of a Dan mask.
Sort of paint goes
on shiny and then
that's the final product,
which doesn't really
look like an indigenous mask.
But looking at that, I can now
go through the Peabody Museum,
the Duke collection,
and identify every piece
that has a Harley patina.
So he ruined a lot of masks.
Just before leaving Ganta
for his retirement in the US
in 1960, he trained
a handful of carvers
who were lepers at
the leper colony
that he had built in the
1940s, and he gave them
instructions to copy masks
from his publications, which
they did.
And this is an example of
a post 1960 reproduction
from the leper
colony, based probably
on the type of mask that's
from Harley's 1947 publication.
I want to give you, in ending,
two encounters that I think
really illustrate-- the
first one illustrates
a sort of misunderstanding
of the art market by Harley.
And the second
one is, we finally
get to meet Tulk, which
I told you we would
meet at the end of my talk.
In February of 1960, so again,
just before George and Winifred
Harley are about to
retire to Virginia,
they're visited
by Betty Stanley,
the wife of civil
engineer and business
executive, Max Stanley.
Max Stanley was in
Monrovia consulting
on a civil engineering
project, and Betty
takes a single propeller
plane from Monrovia to Ganta
to see Harley, whom she had
met at their church in Iowa
a few years earlier when they
were talking about the mission
work that they were
doing in Liberia.
George is not home,
so Winifred Harley
hosts Betty for the night.
And as Betty is leaving, she
picks out a handful of objects
that she wants to buy
from George's collection,
including a game board, a pair
of brass anklets, a few masks,
and, quote, "a
Janus form carving
used by the Porro
elders for divination
or personal protection."
When Dr. Harley returns
home from his trip,
his wife explains to him what
Betty-- sorry, too many names,
what Betty had purchased.
And Dr. Harley
approves the purchase
of everything including the game
board, which Winifred writes
in the letter
accompanying it to Betty,
"Dr. rubbed it up a little, so
it now looks quite handsome,"
but he did not approve the
sale of the Janus head form.
And in the letter
to Betty Stanley,
this is what Winifred wrote.
"The little Janus
figure with hair
is not the one you picked out.
When Dr. Came back and
we looked things over,
we found that the
one you had chosen
was the one and only original
from which the copies were
made.
I was confused by the
fact that the boy who
had been blackening up the
copies had got hold of that
and blacked it also.
Dr. Harley was not
willing to let that go,
but he has fixed up this copy,
and hopes you will want this,
if the other can't be had."
So, this is interesting.
One, this is clear proof that
he was commissioning copies.
And also the sort of
profound misunderstanding
of what Betty and
Max Stanley, who
are major collectors of
African Art in the US,
that they would want anything
to do with this copy.
This was clearly not
what she was purchasing.
And they were not
interchangeable,
which is what I think this
letter sort of indicates.
When Paul Rabut visited
Harley in Virginia in 1962,
this is his attic in
Virginia where he stored
what he had left to sell.
Rabut again spots the
Janus form figure,
and Rabut asks to buy it
and Harley refuses again.
Rabut writes to
Harley the next day,
"you will recall that
I was in Virginia.
I respected your wishes and
did not press you to sell,
but at this point I would
like to bring all my powers
of persuasion to
bear in the hope
that you will let me have the
remaining three pieces that
interest me, including
the Janus form."
He then includes a
sketch of the Janus
from, in case Harley doesn't
remember what it looks like.
"I am your best customer,
and for whatever it is worth,
I would be very grateful
for any consideration
that this might have
on your decision."
Harley refused to sell
it again, and today it's
on the mantle of his son, Dr.
Eugene Harley, in Atlanta.
When I went to Atlanta to
interview Dr. Harley, Jr.,
a major collector
in Boston asked me
if I would try to convince
Dr. Harley, Jr., to sell
the piece to him, which
was not going to happen.
So let me return, in
conclusion, to Alfred Tulk.
As I said, I wanted
to bring him in.
Alfred Tulk spent
one year in 1932
traveling in the same
lack of style as George.
And he left us not only
an interesting repertoire
of paintings and
ethnographic sketches,
but he also left us a 50
page handwritten diary,
something that
Harley did not keep.
Harley was very bad
at record keeping.
He was very bad
at correspondence.
And in fact, when Barbara
Green visited them,
she said that every
night at dinner
he would just fall
asleep from exhaustion.
So he was completely
overworked, and didn't have time
to do this kind of chronicling.
When James Tulk was on a trip
in the Liberia Cote d'Ivoire
border region, he
recounts an encounter
with an elder where he purchases
an object from the elder.
And I just want to read
you this quote in ending,
because I think it raises a lot
of questions that sort of bring
together the point of my talk.
He says in the
diary, "Thursday I
went to see an old town
on this [INAUDIBLE] road.
While there, I met the
chief medicine man,
and bought his own snake horn.
There was one thing
odd about this.
He asked four shillings for
it, and I knew that was high.
After some silence, he agreed
to sell for three shillings
if he could take off one
certain bangle or bracelet.
I could see no particular
value to the one
he wanted as it
was like the rest,
as much as two bracelets
are ever alike here.
I bought the horn, and
afterwards thought more
about it.
All the 28 bracelets were
used ones, they were worn,
and moreover, most of
them were small ones,
indicating they have
come from children.
We know that human sacrifice
has been considered necessary
as part of the magic connected
with making medicine.
Is it possible that each
represents a sacrifice?
How about the one taken off?
Was it some special
person, or would it
be necessary to each time
carry on one bracelet
to the new medicine
horn so as to make
continuous the original charm?"
The medicine horn,
unfortunately, is gone.
It was sent back from Liberia,
and Alfred Tulk's daughter
sold it in the 1990s
to an antique dealer,
but we do have a
photograph of it.
And I leave you with this
object and this passage
from Tulk's diary,
because I think
it captures so
nicely the tension
and friction between two worlds,
the world of magical belief
that's empowered in this fetish,
and the world of collectibles
or commodity
fetishism, if you will,
into which this object
was being taken.
Tulk speculates wildly on the
possible connections of this
object to human sacrifice
and its magical powers,
just as I am sure the
seller speculated widely
on the motivation of Tulk
to acquire this power object
for nearly the equivalent
of one year's hut tax,
or four shillings,
about $3.80 at the time.
The complexities
of these encounters
that mark the history
of Western engagement
with African art
and material culture
are embedded in the
objects collected
by people like Harley and Tulk.
And it is our challenge, I
think, to unpack their meaning
and read the legacies
of encountered that
are inscribed herein.
Thank you.
