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notebook somewhat sketchily shows the distribution of the elements that made up the piece. This drawing can be compared to another published in the Journal de la Société des Océanistes in 2003 (fig. 6 ).2 Soon after visiting Biwat, Mead ended her relationship with Fortune and began another with English ethnologist Gregory Bateson before returning to New York. Consultation of the archives shows that more than a third of the Mundugumor collection (more precisely 130 of the 331 pieces on the official collection list in the field notebooks) never made it to the United States. In fact, Mead’s Mundugumor collection in the American Museum of Natural History includes only 217 pieces. In a letter she later addressed to her colleague Camilla Wedgwood, Mead writes about “the defaulting Mr. Overall.” This implies that Overall had not carried out Mead’s instructions faithfully, but no trace of any official inquiries by the museum’s administration concerning the missing objects has been found. On August 13, 1935, two years after Mead and Fortune had returned to New York, the yacht La Korrigane dropped anchor at the port of Rabaul on New Britain. On the day after their arrival, the members of the French expedition acquired some thirty objects from a Burns Philp company store. Among these were a group of paintings on vegetal fiber supports, and they were packed and sent to Marseille aboard a cargo ship that left Rabaul on September 4, 1935, in advance of the expedition. Upon the expedition’s return to France, various of these paintings that were constituent elements of the larger whole were presented in the exhibition Le Voyage de La Korrigane en Océanie at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1938. The largest of these elements remained on view for several more years as part of the permanent Oceanic collection. In December of 1961, at the famous La Korrigane auction at the Hotel Droûot in Paris,3 various elements of the painting elements were sold (including one showing two male figures, and a smaller one of a bird). A small painting at the auction—which is not part of the large one— was pre-empted by the Musée de l’Homme. All of the remaining elements were subsequently given to the Musée de l’Homme by the members of the expedition. FIG. 1 (left): Large painting, mboampalik or yangndumba, at the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006. © Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, 71.1961.103.338, 339, 340, and 70.2002.36.1. FIG.Crocodileshaped 2 (above): rattan support for the painting. Photo: Reo Fortune, 1932. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, inv. LC-MSS-32441-325. FIG. 3 (right): The painting in Kinakatem village. Photo: Reo Fortune, 1932. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LC-MSS-32441-324a.


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