by Bill Evans
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A scholar, author and collector specializing in the art of the Massim area of Eastern New Guinea, Harry Beran has studied the material culture of the region for over 30 years. He has made six trips into this remote area to meet the people, to see the places where the artworks were made, and to collect information. Although he fell into the field by chance, his focused pursuit of both knowledge and objects has led to the formation of one of the most comprehensive and best-documented collections of Massim art in private hands. In his research he has undertaken the examination and analysis of a significant percentage of the Massim material in public and private collections around the world. He refers to this single-minded pursuit as a "hobby."
A native of Vienna, Harry Beran moved to Australia in 1957 at the age of 22. Today he is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wollongong and president of the newly founded Oceanic Art Society of Sydney, but his first job in Australia was at the Nestle's chocolate factory where he worked with Leo Fleishman,* whom he had known well in Vienna. Neither had an interest in tribal art at that time, and it developed separately in each of them. Leo went on to work with Senta Taft at Galleries Primitif in Sydney. Harry's interest began later, in 1969, when he was a university student. He became involved in a cultural program in which he was invited by a Papua New Guinea villager to stay in a village located about 40 kilometers east of Port Moresby. He spent two weeks there and then went on for a week to Kiriwina in the Trobriand Islands, which is in the Massim culture district. He brought five or six pieces back from that visit, but did not really think a great deal about Massim artifacts until November of 1976, when the collection of Stan Moriarty, one of the largest private collections of Pacific artifacts ever to be assembled in Australia, was auctioned in Sydney over two days by Geoff K. Gray Auctioneers. A significant part of the collection was donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, but more than one piece was sold at auction to Harry Beran.
Harry Beran with a few of his artifacts At this sale, confronted with the entire spectrum of Pacific material, Harry found that the Massim pieces appealed to him the most. Over the next few years he acquired a few more pieces which he added to the ones he had field collected and those purchased at the Moriarty sale. Suddenly he realized that he was collecting Massim objects, and that yes, he really did like them. He admired the controlled aesthetic of the pieces as opposed to more expressionistic art forms, such as those from the Sepik region.
A fair amount of good-quality Massim material was to be had on the market as well as in the field at the time. It was readily available in 1969, when he was there, and when he went back in 1983, good material was still being made in the region. This availability, coupled with the fact that the market prices were relatively modest, inspired him to begin to seriously collect Massim material, and that material only.
2. A rare figurative Massim carving Harry is a good example of the type of collector that specializes in one particular area. As he notes, "I am a lecturer in Philosophy. In my work I specialize in political philosophy, rather than being a generalist in philosophy. I suppose that in collecting a single culture district, I am again expressing a character preference to do a small thing intensively rather than being a generalist. I like the idea of being fairly knowledgeable in what I am collecting. As a hobby it would be impossible to be a knowledgeable collector of everything, but you can develop a specialist knowledge in one area."
Harry has derived a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from building a focused, comprehensive collection. "It gives you a goal which you can't reach, but you can try to come close to. I enjoy finding better examples than the ones I have or rare ones. Of course, psychologists give a different answer to why people like collecting. They say that anything that either arouses or relaxes or induces fantasies can lead to addiction. Collecting does all three, and so is especially addictive. Think of the arousal and fantasies as the auction gets closer to the lot you are planning to bid for, and the relaxation after you've succeeded in buying it. Needless to say, it's another story if you are outbid."
He points out that there are distinct disadvantages to single-area collecting. One often encounters situations where the best pieces and best prices fall outside the area of focus, and a great deal of restraint and self control is required.
3. One of Harry s "toolboxes" of Massim artifacts It annoys him that the Massim culture district is often referred to as "The Trobriands." "It's a real nuisance," he says, explaining that earlier in this century, the term Trobriand was used for the whole Massim culture district that encompasses roughly 60,000 square miles and includes the Trobriand and Woodlark islands, the Louisiade and d'Entrecasteaux archipelagos, and the eastern tip of New Guinea. This means that many pieces that are recorded in museum records as being from the Trobriands are not from there at all. "Some people just use Trobriands to stand for the whole culture district and some people seem to have assumed that if it was a good carving it must have come from the Trobriands, but in fact absolutely first-grade carvings were made throughout the district, and for many types of carvings from the Massim area, people other than those living in the Trobriands made finer examples."
As an example he cites the drums from the southern part of the Massim area as being finer than the drums from the Trobriands. Likewise, the fine, crescent-topped turtle shell and wood spatulas (fig. 4) that were also used as handles for small shell currency disks were made exclusively in the southern part of the Massim area, and never in the Trobriands. The pieces illustrated here, and all well-carved pieces like them come from Sudest and neighboring islands in the Louisiades Archipelago. Small lime spatula imitations of these and even larger ones intended to be used as handles for shell money might have been made in the Trobriands, but only as imitations of the Massim form. The proper ones were made only in the Louisiades. This distinction is also to be made with regard to other specific lime spatula designs, as well as a number of other types of artifacts.
When asked whether lime spatulas are the major artistic expression of the Massim region,** his response is qualified. "In terms of richness and variation of design, probably yes. But only in that respect. There are some forty-five to fifty different designs of lime spatulas. There is a great richness of variety of design, and the execution of the finest spatulas of course is very delicate. But Massim dance paddles and Kula canoes - if you can call a whole Kula canoe an artwork - must be considered to be among the finest art objects ever created in Papua New Guinea."
4. Shell currency holders Harry Beran has viewed Massim collections in museums around the world and asserts that the Museum of Mankind in London has the best collection. Its resources include the oldest documented collection, that of the Rattlesnake expedition in 1849. There are also very good collections in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford, and the Cambridge University Museum. Certain museums in Australia have important collections, especially the Australian Museum in Sydney, the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, and the South Australian Museum in Adelaide.
Harry's investigations have taken him beyond the well-known collections to smaller but good collections of Massim material at the ethnographic museums in Berlin, Budapest and Florence. He also speaks highly of the collections in the United States at the Field Museum in Chicago and the Buffalo Museum. In the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, he found part of the Malinowski collection, which he notes, "even the people who published Malinowski didn't know." He estimates that there are between twenty and forty thousand Massim artifacts in public and private collections around the world. These are very substantial numbers, given that the population of the Massim culture district at the turn of the century was between twenty and thirty thousand.
Harry's research has led him to the identification of an individual Massim carver of the late 19th century known as Mutuaga. His investigations in this area form the basis for his next book on Massim art: Mutuaga: A Nineteenth-Century East New Guinea Woodcarver and His Art. Mutuaga lived in the Sua region of east New Guinea from about 1860 to 1920 and carved for at least 40 years. Harry's research has consisted of both stylistic analysis and specific field research done in a number of trips to the Massim area, some of which was time productively spent and some less so: "In 1989 I had only half a day and I asked two or three people whether they had heard of Mutuaga, and I met a 100-year-old man named Weibo Mamohoi who remembered him very well. In 1993 I went back and spent more than a week interviewing local people, and interviewed Weibo very extensively who was then 104. I went around the villages in the area where Mutuaga lived and I questioned other old men. I asked them if they could remember the names of any old woodcarvers, and a few of them said yes, they'd heard of Mutuaga. In each case I asked 'How did you learn about Mutuaga?' because I wanted to know what the source of their information was. One of these men said 'Yeah, I've heard of Mutuaga.' When I asked him how he came to hear of the carver, he said 'Well, I heard about him from you on your previous visit.'"
5. Figurative finials by Mutuaga *see Tribal Arts, issue 1, page 73
**see Tribal Arts, issue 4, pp. 35-46
