Magazines - Tribal Art Spring 2011

By Chris Boylan, dealer and collector specializing in the art of New Guinea and Johann Feilacher, director of the Museum Gugging.

Introduction
The New Guinea Highlands are an amazing place. Lacking metal at the time the first Westerners ventured there in the 1930s, its peoples were technologically still in the Stone Age. Academic publications tend to address the anthropological aspects of Highlands culture, and this is also true of studies about the shields. The artistic qualities of these have been shamefully neglected when compared to the work that has been done on African tribal art, for example. This may be due in part to the fact that at the time the modernist movement was developing in Europe, the Highlands peoples were yet unknown, so their works did not have the same influence on Western art as artworks from elsewhere in the Pacific and Africa. Nevertheless, the aesthetic sensibilities that developed in the Western world in the early part of the twentieth century were such that there is an affinity for the forms and colors of the Highlands.
I took this as a starting point when putting together the shield exhibition for the Museum Gugging in the Art/Brut Centre just outside Vienna.