Dream Piece #23 - Akatara, Rarotonga, Cook Islands - Sotheby’s New York - 14 May 2010, lot 85
Dream Piece #23
Akatara, Rarotonga, Cook Islands
Sotheby’s New York
14 May 2010, lot 85
$326,500
I consider the Akatara pole clubs from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands the king of Polynesian weapons. Their broad elegant, scalloped blade combine the two elements I most admire in Oceanic art—beauty and mortal dread. The massive scale of the blade creates a wonderful sculptural quality at the same time envisaging combat of an unthinkable violence. When seen in person the enormity of this lance suggests battle between warriors 14 feet tall. Your imagination cannot help but transport you back in time and place to clashes on the shores of a tropical island. In the scene that unfolds in my mind’s eye I cannot say I am ever the giant tattooed warrior wielding the Akatara but rather the unfortunate foe about to be gored by a blade as wide as a shovel—thus the mortal dread of the most extreme kind.
Maybe it is better to ponder its beauty instead. As far back as Captain Cook’s third voyage in 1877 his surgeon William Anderson noted the Rarotonga weapons were “made of a hard black wood launce shap’d at the end but much broader, with the edge nicely scallop’d and the whole neatly polish’d.” What I most admire by this particular example is that huge blade that is much wider by far than most examples in private hands. The scalloped edges are massive and more pronounced with a repetitive harmony and almost dignified restraint. The Polynesian art expert Edward Dodd remarked about this discipline when he wrote in 1967 that Rarotongan carvers could “execute the most intricate fretwork…and beautifully controlled dynamic decorations, but best of all they appreciated the virtues of restraint and spoke most eloquently on plain surfaces” (Dodd, Ring of Fire: Polynesian Art, pp. 255-256).
This Akatara pole club has a superb early provenance having been published in 1879 in Henry Charles Stephens’ “Descriptive & Historical Catalogue of the Anthropological Collection formed by Henry Charles Stephens.” Which was probably a significant factor in the then record price of $326,500 it fetched that day at Sotheby’s New York in May of 2010 (Which was surpassed eight years later by the Reverend John Williams and James Hooper example that sold for $399,000—also at Sotheby’s NY).
If you were lucky enough to be actively collecting Oceanic art back in June of 1979 the present Akatara was part of the Morris Pinto Collection sold at Sotheby’s London where it realized a modest 1,100 GBP (6975 UK pounds today). At that sale the 1879 Stephens provenance was not listed and presumably not known—probably contributing to its relatively humble hammer price. In 1979 I was an awkward high school sophomore collecting coins and planning my next fishing trip--imagined battles with Polynesian warriors safely out of mind.