Word: guinea
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...which completes the last phase of its expansion, has been a long time coming. It was conceived by the late Nelson Rockefeller as a memorial to his son Michael, who died in 1961 at the age of 23 while collecting artifacts made by the Asmat people of western New Guinea. Young Rockefeller is thought to have drowned at sea; no trace of him was ever found. Though his contribution to anthropology was slight, he brought back quite a lot of Asmat art, and the works of this previously obscure swamp folk have been given an immense memorial prominence...
...course, the new wing contains a great deal more than Asmat art, or even New Guinea art in general. Nelson Rockefeller was a voracious collector of primitive art as such, and almost everything he owned-the 3,500 or so objects that were the nucleus of his Museum of Primitive Art, along with his smaller private collection-went to the Metropolitan in his son's memory. To this bequest have been added several very choice groups of objects from other sources: the Wunderman collection of Dogon sculpture, ancient Peruvian ceramics from the Nathan Cummings collection, and a number...
...ensemble splits into three broad geographical areas: Africa, the Americas and Oceania (that vast and anthropologically complex area from Easter Island to the Torres Strait, embracing the scattered island cultures of the Pacific as well as Australia and New Guinea). The sweep of the collection reminds one that at almost any time in the world's history up to now, the overwhelming majority of art made for any purpose at all was what we call primitive: that is, in the words of Douglas Newton, curator of the Met's new wing: "Primitive culture has been the major part...
...collection, as it now stands, is strong in New Guinea and Melanesian art. And its African material, particularly in the areas of Senufo, Dan and Dogon tribal art, is superb. But the coverage of Australian and (more surprisingly) Northwest American Indian art is sketchy. This may be because the roots of Rockefeller's own taste were set in the culture of European modernism-in the admiration for the primitive that formed the experimental work of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Brancusi...
...when Ghana got its independence from Britain in 1957, was overthrown following widespread discontent over food shortages, corruption and extravagant government spending. Ghana has since become a case study in African nationalism gone wrong, and lately a prototype for young African countries beset with similar problems. In West Africa, Guinea-Bissau, Upper Volta and Liberia have all suffered similar revolutions within the past two years; The Gambia and Sierra Leone have narrowly avoided similar revolts. Much of the difficulty, as Rawlings insists, stems from government elites that squander resources and are unable to control their economies...