by Crispin Howarth
Main image caption: Le Lys as currently displayed in the exhibition ‘Emotional Bodies’ next to works by artists including Miro, Epstein and Modigliani. Image courtesy National Gallery of Australia.
One object that has been almost always on permanent display since its acquisition by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in 1974 is the Lake Sentani figures with the nickname acquired in Paris in the 1930s – ‘the Lily’. It has long been considered a ‘masterpiece’ of Pacific art with Australian art critic Robert Hughes once describing the sculpture as a ‘work of astonishing quality’, full of ‘gaunt expressionist pathos’. It has been suggested they are a mythical married couple connected to the birth of Sentani culture on the island of New Guinea.
Remote freshwater Lake Sentani lies in the north of the current day Indonesian province of West Papua and is about 25 kilometres long. At the time these figures were created in the mid-19th century, a homogeneous society consisted of the west, central and east Sentani peoples. These lake communities lived in relative peace having regular trade for essentials like salt and value placed on traded beads from the coastal people of Yos Sudarso (Humboldt) Bay and with both groups also intermarrying. Each village had a series of clan chiefs, Ondofolo or Ondoafi,[i] with strong connections to both ancestors and the supernatural world. Within Sentani society at this time, maintaining a celestial equilibrium with the natural environment, community and the interconnected realms of ancestors and other spiritual beings (Uaropo) was critically important. Like today, most Sentani houses were built out over the lake with their supporting posts driven into the lake-bed. Tall trees were felled to build these houses, the largest supporting the roof beams with shorter ones holding up the floor beams.
The architecture of the Ondofolo’s meeting house would reflect his powerful relationships with ancestors and the supernatural world. Typically, these meeting houses had no side walls; the roof came down to the floor or left a small space, and the supporting upper ends of the house posts were carved in the round as the bodies of ancestors or spirit beings. These figures jutted out of the floor boards or rose up to meet the roof beams. These figures range from a few feet tall to over life sized and became an integral part of the spiritual soul of the meeting house presided over by the Ondofolo (Koojiman 1959: 17).
By 1900, only three large ceremonial meeting houses were still actively being used (Smidt 2011: 24). Many others had fallen into the lake dilapidated and disused due to economic, political and societal changes due to increased outsider influence. Dutch Missionaries worked hard in suppressing religious activities and introducing new Christian ones; ancestral images were no longer needed, moving from being central in spiritual matters to being discarded. Perhaps these sculptures reverted from respected ancestors back to simply being pieces of wood. In the 1920s, Swiss ethnologist Paul Wirz in the 1920s recorded the name To Reri Uno – literally ‘people made of wood’. Local stories suggest that either the figures were cut from houses and thrown into the lake to protect them for fear that missionaries would destroy them or that the community zealotry that often accompanies a new religion wanted to remove past practices. A lack of recorded knowledge by outsiders and the cultural loss from one generation to the next due to the events including the American military presence in the 1940s has meant it is now unclear who these figures represented – are they mythological culture heroes, spirit beings, or more recent ancestors from the living memory of the creating artist?
This sculpture is just the very top of a longhouse post. These figures would have come up through the floorboards into the chief’s house and would have looked magical in the ambient light of an Ondofolo’s house.
Looking at the figures, each figure has one hand up to the chest. To have both hands up to the chest has been recorded as a gesture of reverence at burials (Smidt 2011: 25). However, the other hands are missing. Their lower arm sections were carved free of the body and with age and submersion in the lake they have broken away although it is evident the hands once rested upon the lower stomach. The male figure has two additions to the female; at the back of the legs are raised ridges suggesting decorative fibre leg bands and one shoulder has a carved design which represents either scarification or tattoo-like skin markings. In the group of known figures from Lake Sentani, these figures are quite unusual for having slender long legs; often New Guinean sculptures have stocky legs, with an emphasis on a powerful thigh and buttock. This elongated nature of the figures lends them an air of silent serenity, this sculpture holds something elemental about the couple, as if the carver’s intent was to show a lifetime of companionship. Whoever created this sculpture was a highly accomplished artist but there is so little is known about their true origin and purpose.
These figures travelled from the depths of Lake Sentani nearly a century ago to being on display in Canberra by traversing the globe. Paris in the 1920s was the sparkling centre for the artistic avant-garde including the Surrealist movement led by poet and writer Andre Breton. Surrealists looked for modes of expression beyond their own lived reality and so they turned to the visual arts from other cultures. These arts were co-opted or appropriated, as to the Surrealist, art from distant lands and from little understood cultures were viewed as ‘exotic’ food to feed their dreams and imaginations. Pacific arts for the Surrealists presented fresh conceptual challenges in the way these arts were created as the use of bone, stone, wood, feathers, teeth – everything which oil paint on a two-dimensional canvas cannot show – inspired these artists who wanted to escape European conventionalism and the standing ideas of ‘good taste’.
While Cubism drew upon the resolutions of volume and form by African artists in sculpture, the Surrealists went further in finding inspiration. Through connections to the arts of other cultures, they were keen to find connections to some form of truth in spiritual realms (Dixon 2007: 278), Andre Breton writing, ‘the development of Surrealism at the outset is inseparable from the power to seduce and fascinate that Oceanic art possessed in our eyes.’ (White 2007). Many Surrealists coveted Pacific objects and built collections of them without much understanding of the cultural context of these works so that a decorated coconut bowl would be equally as appreciated as an important ancestral figure. Exhibitions were organised where Pacific and African art works were shown alongside the work of Surrealists; Pacific arts were particularly revered for their visual strength. It was appropriation and appreciation in equal measure.
A lesser-known Surrealist was poet, adventurer and filmmaker Jacques Viot. A talented entrepreneur, once described as ‘fun and sarcastic’ (Van Dyke 2011: 9), he was employed at Galerie Pierre on Rue des Beaux Arts by Pierre Loeb in the 1920s. The gallery was a thriving venue for Cubist and Surrealist art offering works from then emerging artists as well established artists including Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. Pierre Loeb also offered the arts of Africa and the Pacific. While African cultural objects were accessible in Paris, objects from the Pacific were rare.
While talented, Viot grew sizeable debts and he opted to disappear in September 1926. Leaving debts in his wake (Peltier 2011), he stole the identity papers of one ‘Georges Poupet’[ii] (Presse Océan 2017) and lived in Tahiti. After returning to Paris, in April 1929 Pierre Loeb funded a business proposition from Viot to undertake a one-man expedition to Australia to collect scarce Aboriginal art unobtainable in Paris. Viot never reached Australia, spending most of his travels in Tahiti, and on his return chanced upon Yos Sudarso Bay and was told of a great inland lake where he might be able to collect art.
Pierre Loeb’s 1945 memoir has an account of Viot finding the sculpture (Webb 2011: 96), Viot “was a poet without a publisher and without a job … One day he disappeared, hastily, if you know what I mean … He returned two years later after wandering about in China and the Pacific, a little nervous but having lost nothing of his natural arrogance mixed with a gentle irony. Knowing my passion for ‘art sauvage’ he proposed that I pay – voluntarily this time – for him to go on a new voyage. Without ill-will, but also without much expectation and mainly in sport, I accepted. His first shipments arrived after a few months … all fairly nondescript. But a little while later I was intrigued by the arrival of a long, heavy box.
It contained a single statue: a masterpiece. Sculpted from hardwood were two figures, a man and a woman, both thin with long stiff arms stretching down their bodies. They appeared to have been born from the tree itself, their feet resting close together while their bodies gradually grew apart. They were almost life sized. Their facial expressions, already less precise from wear, were serious and concentrated. This remarkable statue came from Dutch New Guinea, where some years earlier the aboriginals had hidden it and others in Lake Sentani, to save it from the destruction that had been ordered there and elsewhere by missionaries. My friend … had befriended one of the medicine men and had learned of the existence of this treasure lying underwater in the lake a few metres from the shore. He called the statue Le Lys.”
Viot’s own written recollection from 1933 may be the start of a romanticised myth, “I had become friendly with a few old men who still, in all innocence, left their sex uncovered. They gave me a present. Somewhat unsteady on their legs, aiding each other along the way, they went and dug in the silt at the water’s edge with their hands … uncovering a representation of their souls. It was the most moving object I had ever seen. Carved into the same trunk… two figures emerging from the same stalk, a couple at the moment of creation in all its virginity. I understood that they preferred to see it in my hands rather than in the waters of the polluted lake. I have called this statue Le Lys – The Lily. (Peltier 2011: 48-55)”
Although he was part of the colonial project, in the position to travel and collect art from communities, Viot formed a negative view of colonialism during his travels, writing, “there is only one way of colonizing: against the natives” (Peltier 1992: 160-161). It is believed that Viot collected over 60 sculptures cut from old houseposts before returning to Paris. Le Lys was exhibited in two exhibitions staged in 1933; firstly, in January at Galerie Pierre Colle and in July at Charles Ratton and Louis Carre present African, American, Polynesian and Melanesian sculpture. With the aggressive elements of African sculptures highly popular in the 1930s, it is not surprising the refined arts Viot collected from communities on the tranquil waters of Lake Sentani did not strike a commercial popularity[iii].
Around 1935, the American-British pioneer of modern sculpture, Jacob Epstein visited Galerie Pierre, became enamoured and purchased the Lily. He was one of very few at the time with an interest in Pacific art who also had the resources to secure this object. For the next thirty years, the Lily remained hidden away in Epstein’s London home at 18 Hyde Park Gate as part of a remarkable collection drawn across all the cultures and epochs of the world. As a creator of works with religious subjects, Epstein appreciated that these arts were made for cultural purpose and were embodiments of spiritual belief systems. Epstein’s autobiography describes the Lily, “These two frail, ghost-like figures rise somewhat obliquely, moving away from each other. They are spirits not of earth – The earth part of them has been drained out. They are Mother and Son – ancestral ghosts – or Husband and Wife … The inexpressible melancholy of their heads is matched by the delicate hands – fingers like the tracery of veins on leaves…a breath…a frailty unparalleled … The enchantment of the group is beyond description … I so desired them that I mortgaged my future earnings – for a long time … to obtain them. Their discreet and sympathetic presence lifts me into a world as ethereal as the last quartets of Beethoven … This is a piece of sculpture which seems to reject the very quality by which sculpture exists – solidity of form’ (1940).
Following Epstein’s death his collection was exhibited by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1960. At some point in the next few years, the Lily was acquired by New York wealthy art collectors Gustave and Franyo Schindler and moved to their New York apartment. It was purchased in 1974 by James Mollison, the first director of the National Gallery of Australia, as part of the aim of acquiring work for the Pacific collection which could be termed ‘out-right masterpieces’. The sculpture moved to its current resting place of Canberra. During a lecture by Douglas Newton of the Metropolitan Museum of Art given in Canberra in the early 1980s Newton simply described the Lily as ‘the most sublime oceanic art extant’. The Lily has remained on mostly permanent display for the past 30 years, moving occasionally between galleries, placed in visual dialogue with other sculptures created by artists from around the world. It remains one of the most impressive works in the Gallery’s collection of 166,000 works.
[i] Ondoafi is the eastern end of the lake word of the Asei people. [ii] As noted by Peltier 1992, Viot embellished his life. [iii] Webb mentions Loeb was interested in the quick sale of these arts, possibly to recoup expenses – Webb 2011: 19.Bibliography
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