JAY T. LAST from Charles Ratton’s collection was among the most intriguing of the book’s illustrations. Thirty years later, he acquired it from Mert Simpson. African art wasn’t especially easy to find in the United States in the mid sixties, although there were several dealers in New York City. His first visit to a gallery was J. J. Klegman’s at Madison and 76th. Jay recalls that Klegman didn’t have much use for a beginning collector, but he found others who did. Among them were Ladislas Segy, whom he remembers as “a great scholar but not a very great businessman”; Aaron Furman, who “was just starting and had a great eye”; and Julius Carlebach, who “was handling a remarkable amount of material.” Jay’s first purchase, a Kuba cup, came from Segy. He still has it. He bought about twenty more cups from the same source over the course of a year before he decided to branch out. His first Lega pieces, minor things, came from Furman, who soon after also provided him with his first major purchase, a multiheaded Lega Sakimatwematwe. FIG. 4: Group of abstract figures. Azande, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wood, metal, pigment. H: 14–18 cm. Photo: Scott McCue. 149 It cost $1,500. One thing that has characterized Jay’s collecting over the years is his investment in multiple, or serial, objects. If one piece of a given style of African art is interesting, a group of related pieces is considerably more so. While he already had some sense of this (nearly two dozen Kuba cups as his first purchases), the Jawlensky and the Serial Image show at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1968 really drove the concept home. As he says, “You learn so much more by seeing groups of things that are related, and
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