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Editorial The Haida chief named Anetlas (sometimes Aniithlaas or Aniitl’aas) was born around 1816 in the village of Kiusta on Graham Island in Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) in what is now British Columbia, Canada. He was a descendent of the Sea Eggs clan of the Eagle moiety but, according to anthropologist Margaret B. Blackman, he moved about forty miles west to the village of Uttewas (White Slope, now Masset, formerly Massett), which was under the Raven moiety, to marry a woman of the Raven Kemlanas clan. Uttewas was a community that was to become known for its monumental artwork and chiefly architecture, the latter identified by names such as Monster House, Halibut House, Wild Man House, and Cloudy House (George F. MacDonald’s fascinating Haida Monumental Art: Villages of the Queen Charlotte Islands provides a detailed account of these structures). Anetlas built K’aayhlt’aa Na.as (Star House) there, a structure that came to be unusually well documented by Anglo photographers in the late nineteenth century. Sometime before Star House was photographed by Edward Dossetter in 1881, the childless Anetlas couple held a potlatch, or prestige feast, to formalize the adoption of a young girl, and a totem pole (in this case, properly a frontal post) was erected to commemorate the occasion. The carver may have been the noted Haida Eagle chief and sculptor Eda’nsa (better remembered by his baptismal name of Albert Edward Edenshaw), but this has yet to be substantiated. Standing just over thirty-seven feet tall and with its main bulk carved from a single piece of red cedar, it masterfully depicts lineage imagery relating both to Anetlas and his wife, myths, and potlatch iconography. Anetlas and his family perished in 1893 when their canoe capsized in Masset Inlet. Apparently there were no heirs. Right around the time of Anetlas’ death and on the other side of the world, Edward Burnett Tylor, keeper of the University Museum and the first professor of anthropology at the University of Oxford, became interested in acquiring a Northwest Coast clan post for the university’s Pitt Rivers Museum and, after several years of negotiating through intermediaries, he was able to purchase Anetlas’ potlatch post for $36, according to Hudson’s Bay Company records. This doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that, according to the 1900 census, the U.S. national average for a teacher’s annual salary was $452, it wasn’t a lot but it also wasn’t nothing. The pole was taken down and cut in half so it could be transported by train and ship at a cost of $118 to Oxford, where it was reassembled and erected in the court of the Pitt Rivers Museum by late November 1901. It has stood there ever since. Tylor published a short paper about it in 1902 in the then-new journal Man, complete with an illustration by his assistant, Alfred Robinson, which turns out to have been traced from an 1882 field photograph by Bertram Buxton rather than based on his own interpretation of the piece at the museum. The complexities of this decision are addressed in a small but interesting research exhibition currently at the Pitt Rivers. Provenance has become the byword in our particular corner of the art world. With prices on the high end soaring, buyers often feel more comfortable spending large amounts of money on pieces that they know have been have been out of their source cultures for long enough that they’ll have no claims against them. Association with major historical collections or important individuals, publications, or exhibitions is also a plus. The provenance for Anetlas’ post, to name just one example, is ironclad. There’s not much we don’t know about it: We know who had it made and why, it was photographed in situ on multiple occasions, no one questions the legitimacy of its sale, and it was published practically the moment it was installed at Oxford 113 years ago. In addition to all that, everyone, Haida and Anglo, is happy it was preserved when so many were not. But what happens when a piece appears to have good provenance but, in fact, doesn’t? The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston just found out. The MFA’s African and Oceanic collection was considerably enhanced by the late William F. Teel, who, with his wife, Bertha, gave more than $5 million in objects and funding to the museum during their lifetimes. Teel’s 2012 estate included a bequest of more than 300 objects, which most museums would have accepted and been thrilled by. However, the MFA has become particularly careful about acquisitions in recent years, so much so that in 2010 it brought on Victoria Reed as its full-time curator of provenance (a first for a U.S. institution) so that the museum can voluntarily research the backgrounds of the objects it acquires. In this case, Reed found that eight of the Teel Nigerian pieces—including Oron, Nok, Yoruba, Kalabari, and Benin material—fell on the wrong side of accepted legislation. The Oron figure, for example, was discovered to have been in the Oron Museum near Calabar, Nigeria, in 1970, before the building was looted during the Biafran War. Interviewed by The Boston Globe, Reed stressed that the Teels had bought the pieces in good faith and, as private collectors, were not in a position to do deep provenance research. Nor does she blame the French, Swiss, Belgian, and U.S. dealers who sold the pieces to Teel, saying that they had good reason to believe the artworks had been exported legally. The problem lay in the government paperwork from Nigeria, which was variously forged or issued by unauthorized parties. The MFA commendably announced in late June that it planned to return these pieces to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments. However, a call in July from that same body for the return of a recent gift to the MFA of thirty-two Benin objects taken as war booty during the Punitive Expedition of 1897 is far less likely to meet with the same success. Some collectors focus heavily on provenance, feeling it adds a sense of interest and security. Others, like Charles Derby, who is profiled in this issue, couldn’t care less, finding that the real fun lies in the challenge of personal discovery. Whatever your collecting perspective is, you’ll find rich opportunities this September at the thirteenth annual Parcours des Mondes art fair in Paris. We look forward to meeting you there. Jonathan Fogel Our cover shows a Hawaiian feather cape, ’ahu’ula, dating from the early 19th century. Feathers, olona fiber (Touchardia latifolia). L: 230 cm. Donated by Vincent Rumpff to the Musée Académique in 1829. Musée Ethnographie de Geneve, inv. ETHOC K000206.


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