Male figure

This statuette was collected by Pierre Ledoux between February and June 1936 during his trip to the Murik Lakes region. Our statuette is represented in the classic kandimbong position , standing with arms detached from the body and hands resting on the hips. The legs are slightly bent.
The large forehead supports a headdress
The long, curved nose, the tip of which meets the torso, indicates that we have here a representation of a clan ancestral spirit.

This statuette acted as a protective charm. Individually owned, it brought its owner luck in hunting and war, as well as in love.

After graduating from Harvard with a degree in anthropology in 1935, Louis Pierre Ledoux (1912-2001) consulted Margaret Mead (1901-1978), then Associate Curator at New York’s Museum of Natural History and a leading figure in American anthropology at the time, in preparation for his expedition to the Murik Lakes region. She gave him advice on anthropological research among the Murik people, as well as a list of equipment, including how to get out of the country’s “curios”. On his return from his trip, Louis Pierre Ledoux donated part of his collection (279 objects in all) to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Other objects entered the collections of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, the Brooklyn Museum and, finally, the University of Sydney. The objects he kept were displayed in the basement of his house, which he had set up for the purpose, and then stored in crates after his death in 2001. It was only in 2015, when his wife’s estate was settled, that the collection was rediscovered in a garage, some of the pieces still wrapped in newspaper dated 1936 having never been exhibited. The collection, together with a set of photographs taken in the field by Pierre Louis Ledoux, was sold at auction in 1921. Price: €12,500