25 Maluku Masterworks in Global Museum Collections

Ancestor Shrine | *Luli*
© Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum | Germany

25 Maluku Masterworks in Global Museum Collections

Curated by Steven G. Alpert

This month, Art of the Ancestors highlights the aesthetic mastery of Maluku, formerly known as the Moluccas and sometimes also referred to as the "Spice Islands." Here are twenty-five personal favorites from this artistically rich area within Indonesian art.

When lecturing on this particular region, or while taking school children through the Dallas Museum of Art, I always like to begin to engage with my youthful audience by saying, "When Columbus found his way to North America, he was really looking for the fabled spice producing Islands of the East Indies. Codified in the Second Treaty of Breda (1667), the now-forgotten island of Run, whose landmass covers only a mere sixty-six square miles, provides us with an indelible historical footnote. The Dutch acquired Run (the westernmost landmass in the Banda chain of eleven islands, which was, at the time, the world's only source of nutmeg and mace) in exchange for all of New Amsterdam; the city and state that we now all know as "New York." As it turned out, this was one of history's most lopsided land swaps and the reason why New Yorkers began to speak English instead of Dutch.

Today, it is hard for us to imagine while staring at rows of bottles of easily accessible spices on store shelves that these were once extraordinarily valuable commodities. It is not hyperbolic to ponder that the immense profits and the hunger to acquire some of these spices from their places of origin helped propel 'The Age of Discovery,' and subsequently five hundred years of Western domination of the globe. These lands were often violently contested and, by turns, controlled by a succession of European powers. This was particularly true of the northern Moluccas where traditional trading patterns were disrupted, and the creation of ritual art began to contract rather than expand, and sometimes even completely disappear due to European interventions, conquest, colonial administrative policies, and latter-day missionary activity (See Tribal Arts Magazine, Alpert: 2003: An Early Ivory Spoon with Stylistic connections to Eastern Indonesia).

The majority of the surviving artworks illustrated here derive from southwestern and southeastern Maluku, from Leti, Moa, Lakor, Damar, Tanimbar, Kisar, and the Babar islands.

Ancestral House Altar | Tanimbar
© Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen

The finest gold items found on these islands are among Indonesia's oldest surviving non-archaeological adornments. Some individual pieces may be centuries old. Moluccan jewelry and gold ceremonial items are anchored by design elements deeply rooted in localized traditions. Over time, aesthetic elements from trade goods brought by spice seekers and traders from Java, China, India, Arabia, and Europe also began to appear in the lexicon of adornment. However, the most iconic pieces invariably reflect the earliest design elements or impulses from local traditions. From our gallery, these include a famous gold headdress in the form of a large face with leaf or ray-like projections (Honolulu Academy of Arts), the finest gold chest roundel extant with two figures facing one another (Musée du quai Branly, Paris), both from Luang. A complete aristocrat's necklace (Dallas Museum of Art) with golden anthropomorphic creatures perfectly positioned on a string of once highly prized translucent trade beads. Other notable pendants include a small face mask suspended on a substantial gold chain (Yale University Art Gallery) and a figurative crescent moon pectoral with nuanced repoussé work from Tanimbar (Dallas Museum of Art).

The celebration of ritual creations and adornments from the Moluccas is perhaps no better illustrated than in the region's magnificent porka masks (Dallas Museum of Art and Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne), cloth flags (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), and ceremonial hats (Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, The Netherlands). In the realm of fabrics, hangings, and other wearables, a barkcloth from Halmahera, a carefully stenciled blanket, and a beaded jacket from Kisar collected in 1876 (Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, Netherlands) are all superior representations of the skill and unbridled imagination associated with older creations.

In general, art-producing islands in the Moluccas were not large landmasses. They were isolated, hard-to-reach places that supported small populations. Given their cultural nomenclature, they remind one of the other island cultures with navigational prowess in Polynesia, its outliers, and in Melanesia, where living on a small body of land amid an immense ocean and broad, expansive skies inspired some of mankind's most ethereal, abstract, and breathtaking sculptures as well as refined utilitarian objects. Transiting through Art of the Ancestors' Maluku gallery, I am also always struck by the diverse array of mediums skillfully employed by the region's local artisans.

The figurative carving and architectural elements from diverse Moluccan traditions can be breathtakingly beautiful. Whether punctuated by rolling flourishes of surface decoration or as an austere and minimal work, curved and linear lines are often skillfully and successfully harmonized within the same composition. Visually, there seems to be little aesthetic 'middle ground' in the sculpture of the Moluccas. Artistically, statues or architectural embellishments are seemingly either profoundly good or sometimes curiously clumsy, even when they are of venerable manufacture.

Naturally, this has to do with the skillset and creative powers of their makers and the competitive instincts exercised by expert craftsmen within their communities. Whether it is the most exquisite ritual art or personal adornment as revealed in Drabbe's photographs of Tanimbarese warriors, women, and dandies, the idea was always to impress others with one's station and prowess. Making something as good, functional, or beautiful as it could possibly be underscored this drive.

There is also another factor that may help to explain the gulf between refined and aesthetically balanced Moluccan creations and those that are of the lesser ilk. Over the last forty years, there has been a revival in the production of new non-ritual items to satisfy an overseas appetite to acquire the region's antique artifacts that are, in fact, not readily or easily available. However, it might surprise many of our readers that the production of handicrafts for sale to outsiders dates back to the arrival of Dutch ships in the 19th century. Knowing that a ship was at anchor, locals would often create impromptu markets where everyone from sailors to scientists, curators to collectors of ethnographica eagerly sought 'souvenirs' or 'specimens.' The first accounts of this trade were already being related by Van Hoevell in 1887-88 (See: ter Keurs and Hardiati (eds): 2005: Collectors on Distant Islands: The Discovery of the Past, pages 172-202).

No introduction to the celebration of the material culture of southern Maluku would be complete without reaffirming the magnificence of luli, statues of "holy" founding mothers of matrilineal noble descent groups. Shrines to these figures were described by the Dutch missionary, Rinnooy, in 1892. The greatest surviving examples are now housed in Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, with two other well-known examples being stewarded by the Dallas Museum of Art and Cologne's Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum. As a group, surviving luli figures and tavu altars are as iconic as epaku, women's ceremonial headgear from Enggano, or true riverine Dayak figurative carvings of the quality illustrated in Dallas' Eyes of the Ancestors (pages 134-137).

To learn more about these marvelous sculptures and their fabrication, as well as a general introduction to Moluccan symbology, we recommend the work of the noted scholar, Nico de Jonge, and in particular Forgotten Islands of Indonesia, The Art & Culture of the Southeast Moluccas (1995), as well as his noteworthy chapter in Eyes of the Ancestors, Life and Death in Southeastern Moluccan Art (2013: IN: Reimar Schefold and Steven Alpert (eds), pages 274-303) and Tanimbar - The unique Moluccan photographs of Petrus Drabbe (1995). In addition, in presenting twenty-five stellar pieces from this remote yet impactful corner of Indonesia, we invite our readers to visit our renovated Maluku gallery. Artistic gravitas makes for an enchanted journey.

— Steven G. Alpert, founder of Art of the Ancestors