Aug 30, 2009 8:52 am US/Eastern
CBS 2 At The Met: African And Oceanic Art
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
It's worlds away from Switzerland, and that's what intrigued Josef Mueller about African and Oceanic Art. The culture, the creativity and the impact on the world's art. Already a collector of Impressionist Paintings, barely out of his 20's, Curator Alisa LaGamma tells CBS2's Dana Tyler how the artist became a passionate collector of Modern and Non-Western Art.
"Joseph Mueller who began his collection at the beginning of the 20th century, was an aspiring artist who got excited about the art forms that inspired his contemporaries. Artists like Picasso and Kandinsky. He started collecting African sculpture. He traveled to the region to learn more about this part of the world. He put together an extraordinary collection of masterpieces."
Met Curator Alisa LaGamma says eventually Mueller gathered thousands of works of art, assembling one of Europe's most respected private collections. He died in 1977. Months later, his daughter and son-in-law, opened the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva, Switzerland. Now, they're sharing the collection with an even wider audience. Most of what you see in this Met show has never been seen in the U.S. LaGamma shows a rare terra-cotta sculpture.
LaGamma explains, "If you look at the sensitivity of the modeling in this face, you really get the sense that this was a portrait of an individual. An individual of great standing in society because of the elaborate way in which the head is dressed, you see this very eloquent arrangement of the hair at the summit and on the side. This was somebody of high rank who is being depicted."
Nearby an elaborate stool was created in Cameroon in 19th century.
"This looks to us like a stool, a very ornate stool, but it would have been a throne. And it's originally a wood sculpture that has been incased in all kinds of very expensive lavish materials. You have a surface of vibrantly colored beads. these beads were actually made in Bohemia in Europe and imported into the region and so they were very costly."
Mueller also collected prize examples of Oceanic Art, figures, masks and decorative art from Polynesia, New Guinea, the Solomon islands and indonesia.
"A Legacy of Collecting: African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva" is at the Met through September 27th.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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