[NEW GUINEA] Art styles of the Papuan Gulf. (Ian Hogbin’s copy, inscribed by Douglas Newton)

New York : Museum of Primitive Art, 1961. First edition. Quarto (285 x 220 mm), publisher’s pictorial black papered boards printed in white (corners bumped, spine with a few small abrasions), a significant association copy, the front free-endpaper with the ownership signature of Australian anthropologist Ian Hogbin, inscribed below by the author, renowned ethnographer and museum curator Douglas Newton, ‘with love from Douglas’; pp 99, illustrated with 259 b/w photographic plates, folding map at rear; internally excellent; from The Papuan Collection of Charles Fletcher (Melbourne), his bookplate also to the front free-endpaper.

The now-famous catalogue produced for Douglas Newton’s landmark exhibition of Melanesian art staged at New York’s Museum of Primitive Art in 1961.

This copy is inscribed by Newton for his close friend and academic colleague, British-born Australian anthropologist Herbert Ian Priestley Hogbin (1904-1989). Hogbin is best known for his studies of various cultures of the Solomon Islands and of Wogeo Island off the north coast of New Guinea. The Israel Museum holds in its collection an Admiralty Islands war amulet (keindin) (Accession number:B98.0012), which was presented as a ‘Gift of Douglas Newton, New York, to American Friends of the Israel Museum, in memory of H. Ian Hogbin’.