Authors:Megan O'Neil, Mary Miller Abstract: This paper addresses the Stendahl Art Galleries’ expansion of their trade in pre-Hispanic art from their home-base in Hollywood to New York and Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After an initial success in acquiring and selling ancient Mexican artworks in the early 1940s, the gallery, founded by Earl Stendahl, experienced leaner years in the late 1940s. But they found renewed success after 1950 by placing family members in distinct locations – in Mexico and Central America, to acquire pieces, and in Los Angeles and New York, to cultivate buyers– and by organizing exhibitions in the US and Europe, for which host museums received commissions for sales. What began as works sold one at a time from the Los Angeles gallery would become a network of looters, agents, and buyers that expanded across the US and into Europe, selling both high-priced and inexpensive items in order to capture a broader market. Over the years, they also expanded their sources of pre-Hispanic art, beginning in Mexico and later moving to Panama, Costa Rica, and other countries. This article analyzes letters exchanged among Stendahl family members and clients to shed light on both their acquisitions and sales. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.23690/jams.v7i1.143 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Andrew Turner, Payton Phillips Quintanilla Abstract: The role of the international art market in the looting, trafficking, and sale of Latin American antiquities has shaped the currently accepted canon of pre-Hispanic art to a degree that remains underrecognized. In the case of Classic Veracruz materials, Los Angeles-based Stendahl Art Galleries deftly exploited both a history of illicit excavations and an avant-garde collecting aesthetic to market archaeologically decontextualized objects. Beginning in the late 1930s, the Stendahls and their suppliers brought portable stone Mesoamerican ballgame equipment (yokes, palmas, and hachas) to the fore, which not only perpetuated the looting in Veracruz that robbed scholars and descendant communities of knowledge about the cultures that made them, but also of the opportunity to document, study, and view traditions of monumental stone sculpture that, as a result, are now largely overlooked, or even erased. This article provides a brief history of the collection and classification of Central Veracruz materials; an examination of the Stendahls’ entrance into this market via bibliophile and antiquarian Guillermo Echániz; and a consideration of the practices that shaped prominent institutional and private collections and, in turn, the art historical canon. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.23690/jams.v7i1.145 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Mariana Francozo, Caroline Fernandes Caromano Abstract: Borys Malkin (1917-2009) is arguably one of the most important yet least known twentieth-century collector of Indigenous material culture from South America, with especially numerous collecting expeditions to the Amazon region. In fact, his contact with museums worldwide and the systematic way in which he collected and sold his materials can be characterized as a form of wholesale collecting that rested upon the creation of chains of supply and demand typical of a market economy. In this article, we explore the ways in which Malkin engaged with Indigenous peoples, intermediaries, and museums in South America, North America and in Europe in order to create this network of ‘producers’ or ‘suppliers’, on the one hand, and potential buyers on the other. We do so by presenting information about the scope and breadth of his Indigenous collections, and then investigating his modus operandi. We conclude that the successful spreading of his collections in various museums and the constant presence in exhibitions of objects from collections formed by Malkin shaped, in a significant way, the face of Lowland South America in ethnographic museums of the Global North. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.23690/jams.v7i1.142 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Martin Berger Abstract: This article analyses and compares the formation of the precolonial Latin American collections of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, both in the Netherlands. Ultimately, this data-driven history of collecting should not only enhance our understanding of the historical processes affecting acquisition, but also give an indication of the extent to which these collections are based on strategic and calculated notions of value employed by museum staff in the acquisition of objects. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.23690/jams.v7i1.147 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Viola Koenig Abstract: Taking the important and extensive Mesoamerican collection of the Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum) in Berlin as an example, the following article explores the background and motivation for purchases of collections on the art market in the twentieth century. Among the entire holdings of the ethnological museum in Berlin (EM) – founded in 1873 as the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde (Royal Museum for Ethnology) – almost 200,000 objects from pre-Columbian America account for nearly two thirds. Accordingly, the collection’s provenance is heterogeneous. Until World War II, they were mostly the result of collecting trips, expeditions and field research organized by the museum itself. More recently, a group of objects considered to be problematic from today’s perspective was purchased from the art trade, with provenance histories in Mexico and Central America that are no longer traceable. Following the significant losses sustained in two world wars, the museum pursued a new acquisition policy. Closing gaps through the international art trade and, as we now know, also from dubious illegal sources was commonplace, for example in the Berlin Museum für Asiatische Kunst and the Antikensammlung. PubDate: 2023-12-21 DOI: 10.23690/jams.v7i1.148 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2023)
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