Lot 129 Dα

The power of these figures from the Yuat river, with their huge heads, hunched shoulders and flexed legs, has always impressed collectors and artists, the most famous among them being the flute stopper (wusear) in the ethnographical museum in Basel, and a gable figure (paki) in the Barbier Mueller Museum, both exhibited all over the world.

Mundugumor is the name by which Margaret Mead referred to the Biwat, the group speaking a language of the Yuat linguistic family, who in the 1930s numbered approximately one thousand people living in six villages further upriver from the Anduar people near the confluence of the Yuat and Sepik rivers. Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune spent only three months among the Biwat during their field research trip of 1932 and the information they recorded about figures and masks in the area is only fragmentary. Free-standing figures are relatively rare and we have not found a close parallel for this exceptional figure. A group of gable figures and other artefacts collected in the area by Ernest Wauchope in the 1930s is discussed by Christian Coiffier in 'Ernest Wauchope and the Art of the Yuat River', Tribal Arts Magazine, no.78, Winter 2015, pp.104-117.

Mark Lissauer (1923-2016) collected his first object in New Guinea in 1948 and over the subsequent decades would collect thousands of artefacts during his annual trips to New Guinea. A name frequently found in international auction catalogues, objects he collected are today also to be found in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, The National Museums Scotland and the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques-Chirac.