Two ornaments · Papua New Guinea, Abelam · ID: 3048817
John Friede, Rye, USA
presumably ex Nelson A.Rockefeller (1908-1979) New York, USA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Primitive Art in 1954 and donated his own collection of Tribal Art. The museum closed in 1976, and its collections were transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Description
wood, lygodium vine, lime, red ochre, handwritten inventory numbers in red ink: “R65.1975.1” & “R65.1975.2” (“R64.1975.1” & “R64.1975.2”)
In the center eye-shaped ornaments made of lygodium vine worked in Melanesian spiral coiling and attached centrally to a wooden stick.
There are different approaches to the function of these ornaments. Some refer to them as hair ornaments, others, like the Brooklyn Museum dub them dance ornaments (www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/168227).
The most plausible use seems to be as a body ornament, either of a human being or as an ornament of the particularly revered long yams, which represent ancestral spirits.
The object Two ornaments with the object ID 3048817 was last part of the auction 98th Auction at March 26, 2022 on Zemanek-Münster Auction house. The object with the lot number 132 achieved a sales price of EUR 1,800.
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