Gope votive board

Thomas Schultze Westrum (1937-2022)
This gope was one of the first objects collected by Thomas Schultze Westrum on his second trip to Papua New Guinea.
In these field notes, T.S.Westrum indicates that the piece was collected in “Gauri, Papuan Gulf, Urama language, in a long house, but a private house. The gope is called Cepu, which means human trophy”.
While Thomas Schultze Westrum’s first trip in 1959 lasted just 12 days, the second, organized with the support of Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde, lasted four months. The collection began on January 10, 1966 and ended on April 27 of the same year.
Nearly 1,500 objects were collected during the trip. The Berlin Museum will retain the agreed part, while some pieces will be sold to the Hamburg Museum and others to the Munich Museum. The rest was kept by T.S. Westrum before the sale of his collection to the American collector John Friede in 1980.
Some of the nearly 1,200 objects purchased by John Friede were subsequently donated to several American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hood Museum of Art in Dartmouth, the Smithsonian Institution and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. A number of objects were sold at auction to collectors and art professionals, including this former gope.

Price: €9,800

sold without base