140 LEFT: Sculpture, Ewa, Papua New Guinea. Witness to a distant past, this sculpture came from a cave where it was protected for centuries. It has the expression of a twelfthcentury Christ fi gure: Its face is tilted toward the left, its chin is elongated as if it had a beard, and the great sensitivity it expresses is reminiscent of what one would expect from a carver of the Middle Ages. The vertical body of the sculpture appears as a concave curved blade with a rounded end. It probably once had symmetrically arranged vertical hooks, now absent. It doesn’t matter. The weathering of the wood, the essential parts of which remain, allows us to imagine what it initially was. We can become lost in that dream. A person at the Musée de l’Homme who saw this Ewa fi gure fi fty years ago exclaimed: “What a beautiful Dogon!” Whether it comes from Africa or New Guinea, its beauty is universal. ADAM, fi g. 95. ABOVE: Mask, Bering Sea, Alaska. Oh, the silence of the absent fragments! At the risk of repeating myself, is there anything more beautiful than the silent resonance we hear when the music stops for a few seconds and we reconstitute the melody we just heard in our memory? The beauty of this mask lies in its unparalleled subtlety, which is enhanced by its cracks and missing parts. This miracle emerged from the ice that held it for more than 1,500 years in that extreme climate. It is a masterpiece of the ages. ADAM, fi g. 161. LEFT: Stool, Taïno, Bahamas. This fi fteenth-century stool was hidden in a cave after the arrival of the Spaniards. It survived there for 500 years before being found in the twentieth century and acquired by the Heye Foundation. Was it there when Christopher Columbus met with the caciques of Santo Domingo on that famous Sunday? As if frozen in time, the jaguar, with its anthropomorphic head and tensely bent legs, is poised to pounce at an intruder. Its head projects forward, and the angular bend in the neck accentuates its dynamism. ADAM, fi g. 179. BOOKS PILAT
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