“Jac Hoogerbrugge: From Lake Toba via Lake Sentani to the Asmat” by Raymond Corbey
Jac Hoogerbrugge
From Lake Toba via Lake Sentani to the Asmat
by Raymond Corbey
Jac Hoogerbrugge (1923-2014) was a soft spoken, witty, erudite man and an astute collector-cum-connoisseur of tribal art. Serving as a transport agent and, subsequently, as a United Nations official in Indonesia and New Guinea allowed him to probe deeply into the ritual art of the Batak (North Sumatra), Lake Sentani, the Humboldt Bay, the Asmat (New Guinea), and the Dayak (Borneo).
Later in life, having returned to the Netherlands, he continued to hunt out items of ethnographic interest - in flea markets, at auctions, but also by means of his excellent connections in missionary circles and with former colonials. At the same time he explored colonial and missionary archives in order to contextualize and document the objects he found. This biographical note is based on numerous conversations and several interviews (including Corbey 2000) with Jac Hoogerbrugge during the last 20 years of his life as well as extensive consultation of the J. Hoogerbrugge Archive. The note stresses his dealings with his favourite art: that of the Asmat.
Among the Batak
When Jac arrived in Tenggara Balai on the east coast of Sumatra in 1954 he had already developed a keen interest in antiquities and tribal art, as an officer in the Dutch forces in Indonesia between 1946 and 1949, and subsequently, from 1951 on, as an agent of the Royal Dutch Shipping Company in Jakarta. When stationed on the coast of northeast Sumatra, he journeyed inland entering the Batak Lands around Lake Toba whenever possible. Hoogerbrugge:
“The Batak villages were isolated, protected, quite inaccessible socially, and the atmosphere was often pretty sullen but also, because of that, intriguing. They were not especially friendly, and why should they be - we were more or less intruders, my wife and I, with our old Ford and our cameras.”
He started to find objects, but also bought from dealers, who worked with ”trackers” (tukang cari), younger family members who were sent out to remote locations, including Nias, in order to search for ethnographics and antiques. It was from one of these dealers Hoogerbrugge purchased his first Batak objects: small pots for a magical substance (pukpuk), staffs of Batak priests, ornamentation of houses, and bone amulets with ritual inscriptions.
”But soon I myself had better access. The Bataks are fanatical chess players. I am too, so I played them regularly in the villages. Also, I often sat in the villages drawing - another passion of mine. Both activities led to good contacts, enabling me to obtain information on the meaning of all these strange things. After a while I could buy directly from the Batak themselves, without dealers coming between us. For example, at one point I was able to purchase a truly exceptional, very early, elaborately carved staff, a tunggal panaluan, from a Batak religious practitioner (datu) on Samosir, the island in Toba Lake. I had to promise him I would offer an egg to it every day.”
Fieldwork around Lake Sentani
In 1956, Hoogerbrugge was transferred to Hollandia, present-day Jayapura, and the capital of the Netherlands New Guinea. He immediately felt senang - at ease, a word Jac used frequently. Here he quickly found his way to the native villages surrounding Lake Sentani and the Humboldt Bay, a world secluded from the colonial milieu he worked in at Hollandia. Here once again, his passion for drawing and painting was of great help, as was the fact that several young men from the Lake Sentani worked in his office, including the son of an ondofolo, a traditional village chief. He interviewed villagers around the lake on the mythical significance of the spiral and wave motifs he sketched (Hoogerbrugge 1967).
Time and again he asked about the meaning of the creation myths which were recited in a special sacred language, about the significance of songs, dances, feasts and tattoos, of all kinds of ritual objects, and of recurring motifs in carvings.
“Those patterns point directly to the cosmic order and the coming into existence of all things at the beginning of time. By decorating the art with this pattern it was slotted into the cosmological order, and thus began to participate in that order in a productive manner, which is necessary for life and fertility.”
This fieldwork laid the basis for several much later publications. During these years spent in the Netherlands New Guinea, Jac also developed a lifelong interest in the ancestor figures (korwars) of the Geelvink Bay, a third style area on the north coast of New Guinea (see Art of the Ancestors).
“In fact it was a miracle I could still lay hands on anything old in the way of objects and stories. Two generations of Protestant missionaries had already been active in the region, proselytizing and, occasionally, burning indigenous art. Next, W.W. II with the Japanese presence and, after that, a large Allied Forces base right next to Lake Sentani. It was only in hindsight, long after I had returned to Holland, that it became clear to me how exceptional the unbelievable, really old cultural stuff was that I had still been able to put together - korwars and neck rests from the Geelvink Bay, bark cloths from Lake Sentani, amulets and canoe prows from the Humboldt Bay …. I was hunting for the really early pieces, was crazy about them - and just in time! I also bought from planters, missionaries, and other people in isolated locations along the coast. Although it could be really difficult to find old things, such contacts regularly bore fruit. Being a transport official helped a lot.”
Indonesian travels,
1964-1966
When the Netherlands New Guinea became part of Indonesia in 1962 the Hoogerbrugge family moved to the Netherlands. However, two years later Jac was sent to Indonesia again, now to travel around, discreetly checking out harbours in search of business opportunities for his employer, the Royal Dutch Shipping Company (Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij, KPM).
“With a thick wad of checks, I went adventuring. Those were crazy years, which I enjoyed profoundly. The country was unsettled: rebellious soldiers and provinces were challenging the state’s authority. But with money, patience, and a glib tongue I slipped between them and could go everywhere, from Sumatra through the Lesser Sunda Islands to the heart of the Moluccas. I found incredible stuff. For example, in towns along the southeastern coasts of Borneo, I was able to buy fine, elaborately decorated machetes (mandau) and various types of woodcarvings, including amulets, from the Dayak who came down the river to trade whenever a ship was expected from Singapore or Hong Kong.”
The United Nations Asmat Art Project, 1969-1972
The Asmat, a Papuan people of approximately 60,000 souls live in the densely forested mangrove swamps and adjoining rainforests on the southwest coast of Indonesian Irian Jaya. Their cultural tradition comprised elaborate cosmologies, intricate initiatory cult systems, headhunting practices and, related to all this, one of the most spectacular ritual woodcarving practices worldwide.
During the 1950s already, while stationed on the north coast of New Guinea, Hoogerbrugge had cultivated his contacts with Roman Catholic missionaries working among the Asmat. During his journeys along the Casuarine Coast and - often while accompanying missionaries - into the swampy interior he acquired some his best and oldest Asmat ancestor figures. One of his best contacts was Father van Kessel MSC, to whom he sent building materials in return for Asmat wood carvings.
Some ten years later, in 1969, Hoogerbrugge, with his practical experience and interest in art, was considered the perfect candidate for the position of manager of a United Nations initiative to revive the art of woodcarving among the Asmat, a mission which he accepted immediately. “When I arrived there in 1969 Asmat art was completely dead! The ceremonial houses were empty. A few good carvings could be found, but only in isolated villages. Directly after the take-over of western New Guinea the Indonesians had strictly forbidden anything linked to traditional feasts and rituals. All of the wood carvings were systematically destroyed. In their eyes, they were too closely connected to aggression and headhunting. The majority of priests in the region too, in those days at least, were not exactly in favour of a revival of traditional culture either, with one or two exceptions.” During the five years in which the project ran under Jac’s direction and austere quality control this situation changed for the better. Several thousand objects were produced, in particular ancestor figures, war shields and up to over ten meters tall ancestor poles (mbisj), all of which he carefully catalogued and often made drawings of or photographed. These wood carvings found their way to museums, dealers and collectors throughout the world.
At the same time Jac acquired - in order to either keep or trade - beautiful old, used shields and wood carvings which had played a role in rituals among the Asmat and various neighbouring peoples. These items were brought to him at the Asmat Art Project workshop on the coast, or obtained during his frequent trips deep inland, often in the company of missionary friends. He also acquired woodcarvings from go-betweens such as crocodile hunter who worked along the main rivers of the area.
Back in Holland
In the course of the second half of his life, from the mid-1970s on, Jac continued to enhance his acquisitions and expand his private collection in the Netherlands, “at flea markets, auctions, that sort of things. Really early pieces from Indonesia are not easily found anywhere, but more readily available here in Holland than in the region of origin, because of the colonial connection. At a street market in Rotterdam, for instance, I found a beautiful multicoloured bead apron from the Geelvink Bay, and a richly decorated loincloth made from beaten bark from the MacCluer Gulf, located more to the west – both wonderful pieces and both extremely rare.”
The contacts dating from his work in various parts of the Southeastasian archipelago helped a lot, as did the contacts he had established with museums, dealers and collectors through the Asmat project. For many years, Hoogerbrugge kept channeling woodcarvings produced by the UN project to destinations worldwide, including, for example, the Bishop Museum (Hawai’i); the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford); the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum (Cologne); and, of course, various ethnological museums in the Netherlands. The network of collectors he cultivated included such luminaries as the avant-garde painter and sculptor Serge Brignoni (Bern) and Jean Paul Barbier Mueller (Geneva).
One of Hoogerbrugge’s favourite stories - he was a great storyteller - was how, very early one Saturday morning, he had clandestinely travelled on a freight train from the port of Rotterdam to his depot in Rotterdam transporting an 6 m long Asmat ancestor pole (mbisj) which had arrived by boat.
Jac the scholar
However, he quickly discovered another means of access to his beloved indigenous ritual art. In the field this possibility had not been evident, with his limited access to books and archives:
“As soon as I got home I was travelling again, although now it was in books, missionary periodicals, old newspapers and various archives here in Holland. I read Paul Wirz on Lake Sentani; De Clercq and Schmeltz on the Geelvink Bay area; the catalogue of the 1959 Sentani exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and the gorgeous book on the latter museum’s Rockefeller Collection of Asmat art. All of this for me comprised breathtaking literature, for I knew from personal experience each and every village they were talking about.”
He fervently set himself to the task of obtaining documentation concerning the Netherlands New Guinea: brochures, photographs, postcards, archival documents, and articles from old newspapers and periodicals. During the 1980s and 1990s he was probably the most frequent guest of the rich archives of the Protestant missions in Oegstgeest (the Netherlands), which he knew as intimately as the librarians themselves.
Now the rare combination of his field experience and archival research started to paid off in another way. In 1967, he had already published a lengthy article on the mythical backgrounds of Sentani art in Volume 9 of Kultuurpatronen, the periodical of the Ethnografisch Museum Delft. This article still constitutes one of the most authoritative sources as to Sentani art. During the 1970s the Asmat Art Project led to two publications packed with well-documented photographs (Hoogerbrugge 1974, 1977), and an exhibition on that project held at the Volkenkundig Museum Justinus van Nassau in Breda (the Netherlands). In 1992 Hoogerbrugge contributed to the Festschrift for Leiden ethnologist-cum-curator Simon Kooijman and to the edited volume Art of North-west New Guinea: From Geelvink Bay, Humboldt Bay, and Lake Sentani (Greub 1993).
His major publication was also to be his last. In 2011, in a 333-page tome entitled Asmat: Arts, crafts and people - A photographic diary, 1969-1974 Hoogerbrugge documented his work on the United Nations project by means of 730 b/w and colour photographs, each commented upon in detail. This book not only includes numerous woodcarvings newly created during these years which are now in collections in various parts of the world, but also a fair number of examples of old Asmat art which formerly had played a role in their rituals. Jac was adamant that this publication should be bilingual, English-Indonesian, and thus accessible to the Asmat themselves. As soon it was available he immediately sent a consignment to New Guinea to be distributed among them.
In conclusion
Hoogerbrugge's contacts with museum and his publications, based on firsthand knowledge, have brought this modest, discreet connoisseur-cum-scholar a certain degree of renown in and beyond professional circles worldwide. The list of publications on the arts and history of Indonesia and New Guinea in which he is one of the first to be thanked for his assistance as well as his loans to exhibitions stretch over several decades. It even includes a monograph on the 1920s trade in bird-of-paradise feathers.
It was Jac Hoogerbrugge’s emphatical wish that after his death the remarkable, often meticulously documented ritual art he had assembled during his lifetime would not “disappear into some dusty museum depot” but circulate among and be appreciated by all those who are as passionate about the arts of Indonesia and New Guinea as he was. So it happened.
Hoogerbrugge Bibliography
J. Hoogerbrugge 1967. Sentani Meer: Mythe en ornament / Lake Sentani: Myth and ornament. Kultuurpatronen: Bulletin Etnografisch Museum Delft 9, pp. 3-90.
J. Hoogerbrugge 1974. Asmat artists present: A collection of fascinating Asmat art and crafts. Jayapura and Geneva: Department of Small Scale Industries and Handicrafts (Indonesia) with the UN International Labour Office.
J. Hoogerbrugge 1977. 70 Jaar Asmat houtsnijkunst / 70 Tahun seni pahat As-mat / 70 Years of Asmat woodcarving - Volkenkundig Museum Justinus van Nassau, Breda, December 1976 - May 1978. Breda/Leiden: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde.
J. Hoogerbrugge 1992a. Notes on the art of barkcloth painting in the Jayapura area, Irian Jaya, Indonesia. In: D. Smidt, P. ter Keurs and A. Trouwborst (Eds.), Pacific material culture : essays in honour of Dr. Simon Kooijman on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Leiden: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, pp. 167-179.
J. Hoogerbrugge & S. Kooijman 1992b. Maro paintings of Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay. In: S. Greub (Ed.), Art of Northwest New Guinea: From Geelvink Bay, Humboldt Bay, and Lake Sentani. New York: Rizzoli.
J. Hoogerbrugge 2011. Asmat: Arts, crafts and people . A photographic diary, 1968-1974 / Seni, kerajinan dan manusia: Sebuah buku harian fotografik, 1969-1974. Leiden: C. Zwartenkot Art Books (www.ethnographicartbooks.com).
--------------------- see also:
R. Corbey 2000. Collector in the Tropics: Jac Hoogerbrugge. In idem, Tribal art traffic: A chronicle of taste, trade and desire in colonial and post-colonial times. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute / KIT Publishers, pp. 141-154.
R. Corbey & N. Stanley 2011, The Asmat art project / Proyek kesenian Asmat, in Hoogerbrugge 2011, pp. 6-21.
Raymond Corbey
Raymond Corbey holds a chair in both Anthropology and Philosophy of Science at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Most of his research focuses on human evolution. The present feature issues from a second research line: western representations and practices (stereotypes, photography, collecting, exhibiting, missions, iconoclasm) regarding nonwestern societies and, in particular, nonwestern ritual art.
His research in this field focuses on the Netherlands East Indies and includes the following monographs:
Jurookng: Shamanic amulets from Southeast Borneo (2018)
Raja Ampat ritual art: Spirit priests and ancestor cults in New Guinea’s far West (2017)
Of jars and gongs: Two keys to Ot Danum Dayak cosmology (2016)
Headhunters from the swamps: The Marind Anim of New Guinea as seen by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, 1905-1925 (2010)
Corbey also published an analysis of the Brussels-Paris-Amsterdam tribal art scene: Tribal art traffic: A chronicle of taste, trade and desire in colonial and post-colonial times (2000). In 2015 he co-edited The European scholarly reception of "primitive art" in the decades around 1900 (with Wilfried van Damme).
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