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NAm 4725

Producer unknown to us
Pipe bag
Americas, North America, Great Plains
19th century
Leather, feathers, beadwork, quills of the New World porcupine
Erich Hösel (professor and sculptor)  probably acquired the pipe bag during his trip to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904
Purchased by the museum from Herta Hösel in 1962
NAm 4725


Calumets (“peace pipes”) were revered as sacred and when not in use were kept in such decorated pipe bags. To use the pipe, pipe head and tube are joined together and are then considered to be animate entities.

The bag was part of Saxon sculptor Erich Hösel’s (1869–1953) estate. He had worked at Porcelain Manufactory Meissen for many years. On a business trip to the United States in 1904, he visited the St. Louis World’s Fair, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which celebrated the westward expansion of the United States beginning in 1803. The “ethnological expositions” he attended there sparked a lifelong artistic interest in Indigenous North America. On this trip he acquired a number of valuable ethnographic objects of Indigenous communities and subsequently became active in German networks of enthusiasts and collectors, for example, in the Karl May Museum in Radebeul. By purchasing a large part of his estate in 1962, the Leipzig Museum was able to partially replace its wartime losses in the North America collection.

Frank Usbeck

 

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