2 Editorial This issue is something of a milestone for us. It marks a full two decades of publishing this journal, which started out life under the title The World of Tribal Arts before moving to its present incarnation in late 2002. That first issue—which was largely produced in an Edwardian flat at the bottom of the twisty part of Lombard Street in San Francisco and at a sympathetically inclined publishing office—is fascinating to look at today. It’s less than half the size of the issue in your hands, has some interesting articles, and took almost a year to produce, but most of all, it represents the first step on what has turned out to be an utterly fascinating road. While it seems like only yesterday, 1994 was a very different world. The Internet barely existed, France used the franc, the computers on which we produced that issue probably had less memory capacity than your cell phone, and tribal art auctions were being held in London. The art market was still abuzz about the $3.4 million the Bangwa Queen had fetched at the Sotheby’s auction of the Harry A. Franklin Family Collection a few years before, a sale that had brought in a total of $7.1 million, by far the largest total for African art at auction in history at the time. Publishing this magazine has put us in a unique position to observe the ways in which perceptions about the traditional arts of Africa, Oceania, Indonesia, and the Americas have developed over the last twenty years. A simple way to check the temperature of this is to look at museums and how their presentation of the material has changed. Innumerable museums have reinstalled their collections, each time emphasizing the fine art aspects of the material rather than the funkier and outdated perspectives of ethnology. A leader in this was the Pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre, where 108 masterpieces were selected by Jacques Kerchache and installed in a beautifully minimalist space designed by J. M. Wilmotte, which opened in April of 2000. In a museum where the overall presentation is old fashioned, to say the least, the AOA installation stands out even more as something both elegant and of particular significance. Different in style, Paris’ Musée du Quay Branly, which opened in June 2006 and is entirely devoted to these arts, received mixed reviews at the time, but it has brought a major presence and sense of activity to a field that was obscure and all but stagnant for far too many years. This year, even that bastion of the old fashioned, the Musée Royal d’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium, closed for a major facelift. In the United States, nearly every major institution has updated its display concept over the course of the last twenty years, none more significantly than the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The former small and weirdly donut-shaped gallery that long housed its AOA collection (shared much of the time with children’s programming) was demolished with the rest of the earthquake-damaged building. When the starkly modern new structure opened in October of 2005, some one-third of its gallery space was devoted to that department, due in large part to the remarkable Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art, which is exquisitely displayed there. Prominent in our first issue are the ten pages we devoted to an auction roundup for 1993. Telling is a fine multi-faced Lega sakimatwematwe, which sold at Sotheby’s in London for £56,500, a seemingly healthy price until one recalls the one that went at that auction house’s May 2010 New York sale for $2,210,500. Private collections have been going to auction for as long as art auctions have been being held, but the results of such sales in our field show a steady increase in the market. Certain landmark events are particularly memorable. Hubert Goldet (2001, 88.4 million francs, or 15.5 million euros) and the Saul and Marsha Stanoff Collection (2007, $11,907,100 for only eighty lots) come to mind, though none compares to the wildfire of the Pierre and Claude Vérité Collection (2006, 44 million euros). By comparison, the renowned Helena Rubinstein sale in 1966 brought in $474,595 (approximately $3 million in today’s currency). The last two decades have also seen a shift of centers of interest from Brussels, London, and New York, when we started, to Paris, which today is unquestionably ground zero for tribal art. There are a number of factors for this, the most significant being legislation that passed in the French parliament on July 10, 2000, repealing law that had been in place since 1556 limiting auction licenses to French nationals. By late 2001, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s had moved in, bringing their tribal art departments with them. The same year, the first Parcours des Mondes was held in the city’s Saint- Germain-des-Près district. It has since grown to be the most significant show of its kind in the world. Add to these the interest in tribal art that grew up with modernism a century ago and it’s no mystery that Paris is a magnet for both dealers and collectors. What has not changed over the years is the passion with which those who love these arts approach the field. Since we began publishing, we’ve had the privilege of profiling more than seventy private collectors in our Tribal People section. Each is different in their interests and approaches, but they share an unquenchable love for the art. People of this ilk are the lifeblood of our field and an important part of our editorial perspective. We have run feature articles by leading experts in the field on subjects of incredible diversity, ranging from our issue one treatise on Lobi sculpture to previously unidentified Native American feather cloaks to historic exhibitions of tribal art and everything in between. After twenty years, we have barely scratched the surface. We are presently blessed with the finest editorial and production staff we have ever had and, thanks to our advertisers and, most of all, to the loyalty of our subscribers, we stand on solid ground in a world where print publishing is widely in peril. I can’t say that I know for certain just what the future holds for the tribal art field but, for the next twenty years, I certainly know where you can read about it as it unfolds. Jonathan Fogel Our cover shows a photograph by Elaine Ellman titled George Lois and Vitrine, 1989. Photo courtesy of George Lois.
CoverT71_FR.qxd_CoverF Vuvi
To see the actual publication please follow the link above