Comb
Bering Sea, Alaska
500 – 1200 CE
marine mammal ivory
height: 7 ½"
Inventory # E4120-75
Sold
acquired by the Diker Collection, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Provenance
Will Channing, Santa Fe, NM
Bill and Carol Wolf, Hawthorne, NJ
Exhibited
Princeton University Art Museum, “Gifts From the Ancestors”, October 3, 2009 to January 10, 2010
Published
World of Tribal Arts Magazine, Winter 1997, "Arctic Abstractions" Steinhacker, pg. 90 fig.6
Gifts From the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait, Princeton, Princeton University Art Museum, 2009, pg. 153, fig. 18 and pg. 308, cat. no. 156
RELATED EXAMPLES
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, cat. no. 1997-234 – See: Fitzhugh, et al., Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait, Princeton University Art Museum, Yale University Press, 2009, pg. 153, pl. 20.
Hurst, Norman. Arctic Ivory: Two Thousand Years of Alaskan Eskimo Art and Artifacts. Hurst Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998, page 36, no. 81.
The elegant simplicity of the exquisite comb illustrated here is remarkable in its flawless execution. The overall shape is reminiscent of human figures seen in Okvik (200 BCE – 100 CE) and Old Bering Sea (100 BCE - 500 CE) cultures from the same region. The highly abstracted rendering of the head is further enhanced by the reduction of the surface design, lending the comb a powerful yet graceful appearance. The truncated shoulders and the gentle flaring of the torso suggest a human form, yet viewed from a different perspective the suggestion of a whales tail is evident. The extraordinary sophistication of this work of art, carved almost two thousand years ago, establishes it as possibly the finest example of its type extent.