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TRIBAL people Gordon Sze Collecting Pacific Masterpieces By Jonathan Fogel When you step into Gordon Sze’s urban loft, the first thing you’re confronted with is a sense of order that is both aesthetic and ascetic. The gleaming wood floors are dark, the smooth walls are a subtle neutral shade, the lighting is subdued, and the furnishings are sparse. And then the artwork starts to emerge, all of it from the traditional cultures of the Pacific. It’s everywhere 110 and it’s of the highest quality, existing seamlessly with the architectural environment that was designed for its display. A surprising number of objects are instantly recognizable. Gordon isn’t what you’d think of as a typical tribal art collector. Far from being an eccentric individualist, he is a well-regarded medical doctor who presently serves as a professor of diagnostic radiology and chief of neuroradiology at Yale University. He brings scientific precision to an aesthetic sensibility that he began to develop early in life, in part through his interactions with his uncle, renowned architect I. M. Pei. Where many collections have a sense of frenzy and/or obsession, this group of ob- FIG. 1 (above): Gordon Sze with three Melanesian shields from his collection. The shields at the left and center were collected in the Sepik River region of New Guinea on the Südsee Expedition, 1908–1910. The New Britain shield on the right was collected by Reverend Roffe-Silvester in 1906–1907 and is ex James Hooper, Sussex. Photo: Reed Young. All of Young’s photos in this article reproduced courtesy of Apollo magazine. jects is calm, sophisticated, and—well—collected, much like their owner. Pacific art wasn’t the first thing on his mind when he started his career, but he encountered it early. Before he went to medical school, he received a fellowship to study healthcare delivery in developing countries. He picked New Guinea from the available options and, having heard at a cocktail party from a friend of his parents that art from that region was interesting, stopped by the museum in Port Moresby, which was then in better shape than it is today. He was intrigued. His project was in the Highlands, but he was able to travel through the Sepik area. Despite the restrictions of the time, he also visited the Asmat region, which had then only recently been annexed to Indonesia. He was particularly interested in this because of the writings of Dutch anthropologist Adrian Gerbrands, who had documented specific Asmat artists. He found that he could still go from village to village and talk to the artists Gerbrands had written about, which was fascinating, although he didn’t find most of the art


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