2 Editorial As we were assembling this issue, an unexpected theme emerged, which was that it happens to be particularly rich in especially old artworks with early documentation. While the details of their stories often have been forgotten or fragmented over the years, each of them has a life that started in one place and has ended up somewhere entirely different, usually in place and almost always in context. The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, for example, is the major contributor to the remarkable Royal Hawaiian Featherwork exhibition that is the subject of an article herein. The Bishop is the repository for the traditional regalia of Hawaiian royal families and holds examples that date from the eighteenth century. Some of these brightly colored feathered objects have been in the unbroken custody of Hawaiian hands, while others have left the islands and roamed the world, passing from one collection to another before being returned to join their companions. The African sculptures in the Barnes Foundation, also featured between these covers, have had an entirely different trajectory. It holds one of the earliest collections of African art that was specifi cally collected as “art.” This was formed over a period of less than two years in the early 1920s and is very much the product of the taste and motivation of the foundation’s founder, Albert C. Barnes. The specifi c stories of most of these objects stop with Parisian dealer Paul Guillaume, from whom they were sourced, though the vast majority were old at the time and come from cultures scattered throughout what was then French West Africa. Our cover shows a Dogon seated couple by the Barnes Foundation Master from Mali and dating to the late 19th–early 20th century. Wood. H: 64.5 cm. The Barnes Foundation, A197. Another personal endeavor, that of Henry Syer Cuming and his son, Richard, resulted in the formation of South London’s Cuming Museum (pronounced “Cue-ming”). Private museums were a bit of a fad in Enlightenment and Victorian Europe, particularly in Great Britain. Descendants of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities of the nobility, these gentlemanly collections both demonstrated the erudite taste of their owners and provided educational diversion for the public. Certainly not the oldest of these private museums—that distinction goes to the Tradescantianum, which will be the subject of a feature article in an upcoming issue—the Cuming was particularly rich as far as artworks from faraway cultures are concerned. Many of the objects the Cumings acquired had already been in similar private museums, notably the Leverian and the museums of Peter Dick, Daniel Boulter, and Robert Francis Seale, to name just a few. Today, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London is an intact and fascinating example of one of these personal/public collections that froze in time in 1837. A contemporary iteration of a similar concept is the notable Musée Dapper in Paris, whose founder, Michel Leveau, is profi led in these pages. The contemporary artist we feature in this issue’s Portfolio section, Coco Fronsac, has her own take on the lives of objects. Rooted in surrealism, her work uses antique photographic portraits as a foundation. These now anonymous individuals are transformed into mask-wearing characters and are reinvigorated with an entirely new life beyond that of their original documentary intent. Fronsac’s work is in many ways analogous to how the art of traditional cultures functions in our world. Created and used for highly specialized purposes in their original context, they have been transformed during their journey to the West. This may be physical, involving the removal of ritually charged elements and other non-sculptural elements to reveal the form of the piece, but it is almost always the case in terms of meaning, since while they once served a “practical” ritual, utilitarian, or prestige purpose, as they move through space, cultures, and time, they also move into the more abstract realm of artifact and, eventually, art. The subject of our Object History section, Temeharo, has had a particularly rich and interesting journey in this regard. Created on Tahiti to be the central deity of the Pomare royal dynasty, he was adorned with red feathers that arrived in 1788, trade or gift items that represented the greatest rarity and wealth. In 1816 he became the centerpiece of a major political gesture on the part of the then-Christianized Pomare II when he was shipped off to London as one of “Taheiti’s foolish gods.” In the popular Missionary Museum, he languished in a case as a material example of the triumph of Christianity over heathenism. He certainly would have interacted with Richard Cuming (of the Cuming Museum), as the latter worked to preserve the Missionary Museum’s neglected and moldering exhibits, recognizing them as essential specimens of vanished cultures. After the closing of the museum, Temeharo and much of the rest of its collection were transferred to the British Museum as items of ethnography, but he was relegated to storage, probably because he lacked the quality that most Western viewers would call “art.” It was not until 2015 that he took a central place in the Missionaries and Idols in Polynesia exhibition—unfortunately a temporary one—at SOAS in London, where, though tattered and featherless due to neglect at the hands of his nineteenthcentury foreign keepers, he was once again acknowledged as a major deity and a signifi cant work of art. God, political chip, religious hostage, sideshow freak, cultural representative, ethnography artifact, conservation problem, and, fi nally, work of art and god again, Temeharo has led many lives over the last two centuries. Virtually every object we see from the traditional cultures of Africa, the Pacifi c, and the Americas would have a comparable story to tell us, if only they could speak. Jonathan Fogel
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