Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

of the Gallery Trustees is usually confined either to introducing those who are about to open an exhibition, or to thanking those who have just done so. In the present exhibition, the qualities of the works of art are indeed outstanding– the more so because I doubt if many of us have seen their like before. The Director is to be congratulated for putting the exhibition on view and Mr Peter Hallinan for putting the collection together. It is therefore worthwhile, I think, to say a few explanatory words about the exhibits themselves. They are from the northern part of the island of New Ireland, which once had the rather more beautiful native name of Tombara--an island in the Bismarck Archipelago, north-east of Bougainville. This area has been called by a distinguished German scholar, 'One of the first rate and most important art provinces of the world'. It is noted for its large wood carvings, characterised by much open work, colourful decoration, and rhythmic compositions of conventional motifs, derived from human forms, fishes, and especially birds. These carvings are called Malagans because they are associated with a festival called Malaggane, at which the totemic ancestors are supposed to return to the villages to take away the spirits of the dead. The birds and the fishes act as their carriers to the other world. The festival is held from May to June every year. The carvings are exhibited in special huts or courtyards and masks are worn by the participants. In preparation for all this, a suitable tree is selected in the forest and the men of the village cut it down and take the log to a secret place, where the carver will work on it with stone and shell adzes and chisels. During the months of work required to complete the carving, feasts are given to the craftsmen and the villagers. Considerable wealth must be accumulated before a sponsor can afford to have the Malagan made, provide the feasts and have the ceremonies performed. The foreword to the catalogue vividly describes the final day of the ritual cycle: [The day] •.. begins at dawn when masked men come in from the sea. They are an awe inspiring and frightening sight, silent men coming in from the open sea past the reef, masks hiding their identities. They represent legendary killers from a previous era, spies and demons out of the deepest nightmares. These silent menacing figures are guarding the towering tottering mask, the transformer, the one who will remove the influence of the dead from the graveyard so that women and children can enter to witness the final stages of the revelation of the Malagans to the young initiates. A drum-like instrument made from a hollow log, the garamut, is struck twice. But the Malaggane is not only a memorial day for the dead; it is also a time of rare aesthetic exultation. According to Maurice Leenhardt in his book Arts of the Oceanic Peoples, there is, throughout the primitive world, no standard of art higher than that which has been developed by the woodcarvers of Tombara. Not too long ago, such a statement would not have been made by a European. Objects like these Malagans would not even have been regarded as art, but rather as ethnic curiosities. Their place would have been in an ethnographic museum and not in a gallery. It was only at the turn of the century that, -following their discovery by painters like Matisse and Picasso, primitive objects began to take their places as art in European eyes. 144