Southern Abelam Lintel - Dream Piece #28 Dream Piece #28 Southern Abelam Lintel Pierre and Claude Vérité Enchères Rive Gauche, Paris 17 June 2006, lot 318 $71,608 130” (330 cm) Abelam art rarely lights the auction market on fire so when this awkwardly large ceremonially house lintel came up for sale at the Pierre and Claude Vérité Sale at Enchères Rive Gauche in Paris in June of 2006 I actually thought I had a chance at winning the lot. Besides the untold number of mosquito bites and eight cases of malaria all the years tramping around Papua New Guinea’s East Sepik Province at least gave me an appreciation of Abelam art—what was good, what was great and how to recognize a masterpiece. The Vérité lintel was a masterpiece. The Southern Abelam area is also known as the Wosera or “worse area” because of the swarms of mosquitoes that show up every evening in these villages dotted along the rolling grasslands leading down towards the Sepik River. But with the bad comes the good as the incredibly gifted artistry of the Middle Sepik migrated north into the Southern Abelam culture. You often encounter this sculptural virtuosity in the area’s balsawood yam masks where the malleability of the material allows the carvers to exercise their unlimited imagination. It was just this artistic swagger that jumped out at me when I first encountered this lintel in the Vérité catalog. The vast, vast majority of Abelam lintels come from the north and east of Maprik town and are composed of rows of ancestral spirit heads, dome-like visages lined up cheek by jowl, literally, the entire length of the horizontally displayed carving. Not that this style of lintel can’t be compelling if the quality and expression of the individual heads is great but even at their best I find this style often too predictable. The Vérité lintel was definitely not that. The Southern Abelam artistic wizardry is on full display in this lintel. With an airy lightness it is composed of two central figures, male and female, on either side of a small splayed figure in the hocker or birthing position. Connecting the larger figures to the central child(?) are bands of openwork zigzags. I can’t help but think this section of amorphous, inchoate squiggly lines is the carved equivalent of “wut” the crosshatched motif often painted on sago spathe that symbolizes the string billum bags Abelam women use to carry their babies on their backs while heading to the gardens. It is the preeminent design representing fertility and is a perfectly apt connective material binding together the male and female ancestral spirits. It flows from both figures in different wave lengths but ultimately joins them through the child. Maybe I am reading too much into it but as a parent of three kids I cannot help but interpret both figure’s expression as tired and depleted. Then again we have to assume the Abelam ancestral spirits were stouter progenitors than your present Southern Californian suburban dad. On that day in June of 2006, bidding over the phone, I was quickly out gunned by a floor bidder that I later learned was John Friede—a nearly impossible opponent in an auction room—except of course for the French government who after the hammer fell preempted the object on behalf of the Quai Branly Museum which had just opened. I cannot say I was disappointed. It was heartening to realize I was not alone in recognizing the greatness of this beautifully attenuated sculpture with it’s airy openwork construction and gentle precontact curves that effortlessly flow together. How would this figure fare today at auction? Even without John Friede’s expertise, tenacity and financial muscle I think this lintel would go much higher than the $71,608 it fetched. There is just a greater demand for singular pieces no matter the culture or scale—such that a masterpieces such as this would not slip through the cracks.
