South Sea Spooks

While Michelangelo was furiously improving the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for Pope Julius II, a handful of Papuans were equally hard at work in a New Guinea clubhouse. They fashioned masks 10 feet high out of bark. Each mask represented a mythological spirit, but no Renaissance classicist could have recognized the 100 weird, bearded birds and sharp toothed half-humans who emerged, after ten years of labor, from the clubhouse. And Europeans, who like to think of art as immortal, would have been amazed to see the masks burned (after a month of ceremonial dances) amid the acclamations of the populace. The Papuans have been making and burning masks ever since.

Eager anthropologists have snatched some from the flames and last week a few of them were on display in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. For its big midwinter show, the Museum--which often baffles outlanders by its cultist concern with the ultramodern descendants of Dada--put on an excellent exhibition which may baffle them more: 400 strange South Sea objects ranging from hand-painted skulls and intricately carved canoes to an immense stone head (see cut).

The head came from barren Easter Island, where the natives are at a loss to explain the great stone images, up to 60 feet high, which dot the island. They say their old king knew all about them, but he and his court scholars were carried off by Peruvian slave raiders in 1862. More explicable objects:

P: Old explorers' engravings of Marquesas Islanders dressed from top to toe in nothing but elegant tattooed abstractions. The men excelled at tattooing each other, and the women (who had several husbands apiece) spent what little spare time they had weaving plain mats and baskets.

P: Elaborately whittled, fragile-looking Fiji spears. The kinky-haired Fijians did a lot of fighting but very little damage, although when they did succeed in sticking somebody, they ate him.

P: A combination human figure and frigate bird, from New Guinea's Sepik River area. The men kept such winged whatsits in their clubhouses, set them up only on great occasions. The women & children were thereby convinced that the sculptures were incarnate gods.

Most of the objects were borrowed from other U.S. collections; many a Pacific veteran has seen (and sometimes brought home) similar souvenirs. A few visitors were shocked by some of the obscene gods, crocodile gongs and grinning masks; others reminded themselves that art history begins with magic rites.

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