Stephen Chauvet
Stephen Chauvet
By Christian Coiffier
(Attaché honoraire du MNHN-Paris)
Born in Béthune in the north of France in 1885, Stephen Chauvet was an outstanding student before becoming a doctor of medicine. He took part in the First World War and was wounded. Shortly after, through a present of an African statuette, he discovered the extra-European arts of which he quickly became one of the principal exponents in France and he thus began collecting objects pertaining to “l’Art Negre” (indigenous art). About 1920 in Nice, he was lucky to acquire the art collection from Oceania which the Hungarian aristocrat Festetics de Tolna had brought back from his voyage across the Pacific on his yacht, the Tolna, and which he had preserved in a villa in Antibes. As early as 1902, shortly after his return from the Pacific, he had already donated the major part (1,460 pieces) of his collection to the Budapest museum. His Antibes collection was seized by the authorities at the outbreak of the First World War. No inventory of this collection having been drawn up, according to Jean Roudillon, the official sale was kept private (Antoni & Boulay, 2007: 131). Stephen Chauvet thus became the owner of one of the biggest private collections of Oceania of his times. He discovered his rarest pieces in the collections of missionaries and in the French ports, but also in Belgium, in Antwerp and Brussels. In 1929, during a public sale, he purchased objects from Easter Island which had been brought back by Pierre Loti.
Stephen Chauvet was to devote himself wholly to presenting his finds to the public and, for more than fifteen years, was to become one of the most notable promoters of the “Arts Negres” movement in France. Moreover, we now know just how much the style “Art Deco” owes to extra-European art. In this way, he was going to participate in various exhibitions for their promotion. As early as 1923, Stephen Chauvet conceived the guide for the exhibition devoted to indigenous art from the French colonies in the Pavillon de Marsan (O’Reilly, 1951: 220). He loaned a number of objects for the famous exhibition in the Theatre Pigalle organized, in 1930, by Charles Ratton, then in the same year, he took part in the Paris exhibition of Oceanic art from the French colonies in the Galerie de la Renaissance before involving himself in the exhibition of “Art Negre” in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. In 1930–31, he was given the job of preparing an exhibition of indigenous art from the French colonies on the occasion of the Paris colonial exhibition. He corresponded with Pierre Loeb, Paul Guillaume, Francis Feneon and many others who, like him, were interested in indigenous art (O’Reilly, 1951: 220–221). In 1929, Stephen Chauvet very generously endowed the Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero in Paris with a very considerable collection of African and Oceanic objects. Out of a total of 814 objects, some people today estimate that 537 objects came from the Oceanic collection of Festetics de Tolna. The museums of Rouen, Lyon, Brest, Cherbourg and La Rochelle also benefited from his gifts or exchanges (Antoni & Boulay, 2007: 132). Stephen Chauvet did not merely collect objects, he also tried to document them. He had a global conception of the arts and so published his first ethnological work on African music, which was followed by reference works such as “Les arts indigenes de la Nouvelle Guinee” [The Indigenous Arts of New Guinea] and “L’Île de Paques et ses mystères” [The Mysteries of Easter Island] prefaced by his friend Doctor Etienne Loppé. His last work, “Les arts de Tahiti et de la Polynésie française” [The Arts of Tahiti and French Polynesia], remained unfinished. In the introduction to “Arts indigenes de la Nouvelle Guinee” [Indigenous Arts of New Guinea] (1930: 17), Stephen Chauvet notes: “We have chosen the works from New Guinea in preference to those from other islands in Oceania because they are particularly original and powerful and, on top of that, of an inexhaustible richness.” Indeed, the iconography of this work shows the great variety of the aesthetic production of the various populations of this large island where Doctor Chauvet never set foot. Stephen Chauvet was interested in everything, and through the various objects he wanted to discover the cultural particularities of their creators. He died in Paris in 1950.
Bibliography:
ANTONI, Judit and Roger BOULAY. L’aristocrate et ses cannibales, Le voyage en Océanie du comte Festetics de Tolna, 1893–1896, Paris, Actes Sud/Musée du quai Branly, 2007.
CHAUVET, Stephen. Les arts indigènes en Nouvelle-Guinée, Paris, Société d’éditions géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1930.
O’REILLY, Patrick. “Nécrologie de Stephen Chauvet (1885–1950),” Journal de la Société des Océanistes, Tome VII, n° 7: 219–222, décembre 1951.
Translation from the French: Grant Wright
Schouten Island Spear, ex. Stephen Chauvet Collection, ex. Jolika Collection
