An interior designer walks into a contemporary home and says, “this wall needs a mask.” Sounds like the start of a ‘bar joke’ but this is how Barry Hecht started his collecting journey. Little did that interior designer know that her recommendation to ‘enhance’ the white walls of the Hecht home with a mask would lead to the creation of one of the finest collections of eastern Nigerian art.

Barry not only focuses on the aesthetic appeal of the masks and figures in his collection but by combining scholarly research, expert networking with leaders in the field, and meticulous record-keeping, he has also built a wealth of knowledge about the use and distinguishing features of the works in his collection. “To me, the pleasure of collecting and writing about African art derives from the aesthetics of the objects, learning about their origin and use, and making a contribution to the art history of eastern Nigeria.”

We hear more from Barry Hecht in this Collector Spotlight. And without hesitation, Barry goes straight in!

We moved into the house that we live in now — it’s a very contemporary house — around 1985. One evening, we had some people over and one woman that we were friendly with was an interior decorator. She said, “do you know what would look great on the wall would be an African mask.” My wife and I looked at each other and said, what? She said, “well, you’re from New York. So the next time you go back to New York, there’re several places you could go [to find a mask]. Just drop in and see what you like.”

It sounded like a good idea so, the next time we were in New York, we visited a few galleries and needless to say, we had no idea what we were doing. We took everything at face value and we bought maybe four or five things and of course, ultimately, they turned out to be fake. But of course, I didn’t know that first-hand.

At that time, the National Museum of African Art was on Capitol Hill. So I went down to a couple of shows and the first show I saw was Chike Aniakor and Skip Cole’s show on Igbo Arts. When I went down there, they said, “we have docents and we’re going to have a new training session.” I said, great and signed up to become a docent — I was a docent for ten years.

[As a docent] I started meeting people that were knowledgeable in African art and one of the first people I met was Roy Sieber. Roy Sieber and I became fast friends. At that time he was in Washington, D.C. six months of the year and the rest of the year in Bloomington, Indiana. When I started seriously collecting, every Sunday morning I was down at his place with a box with a mask or figure in it and some books. We would sit around his kitchen table with his wife and talk about African art. And even when he went back to Bloomington, we spoke every Wednesday.

Also, early on, I met this guy, Bill Arnett, who was an African art dealer from Atlanta. He exhibited at an antique show in Washington D.C. What they considered antiques were 18th and 19th-century American furniture. What he considered antiques were pre-Colombian pieces of art! But they allowed him in the show which was where we met. He had published ‘Three Rivers of Nigeria’ and he still had many of the works in the book. I bought a couple of things for him.

Those were two early influences that I had.

G.I. Jones and his wife Ursula came to my house and he walked around and said, “We used to call this, this and we used to call this, that.” He was in Nigeria from 1928 to 1948. He taught at Cambridge until 1970 and then retired. What he was trying to do at the time that I met him, was to document as many pieces from eastern Nigeria as he could so that scholars could use [his research] in the future to learn about eastern Nigeria. He had, of course, also taken five or six thousand photographs in the field.

We talked for hours and we continued to communicate by mail. I have about six letters from him on the old blue paper that you fold over. He invited me to visit him in Cambridge in the late eighties. I went to his home and he showed me the things that he was allowed to take out of Nigeria by Kenneth Murray, who had set up the Nigerian museum system. I also saw his pictures from his time in Nigeria. We made arrangements to go over to the Cambridge Museum reserves, and of course, at that time, G.I. Jones was easily in his mid to late eighties. We’re going up and down on ladders for two or three hours and he said to me, “I hope you’re not getting tired!” We saw things that were collected at the beginning of the 20th-century that were donated to the museum.

He eventually had a stroke but I continued to communicate with G.I. Jones through his wife. He sent me a few additional pictures of things that he had seen in the field that were never published. That really was a great experience.

He also went to a Nok village where he was told — and this is way before all those Nok pieces came out — they said to him, “you know, if you dig there, you’re going to find something.” He had to pay them a small amount of money for permission to dig. He had pictures, serial pictures of him uncovering pieces. In 1964, he had an entire Nok figure, which was probably somewhere between three and four feet tall. It was in seventeen pieces. He put the head together but he never did the rest of it. I saw the figure in his home.

Once, when he came over to our home, I showed him a mask. It’s a very unusual mask — it’s five and a half inches tall. I had gotten it through Amyas Naegele who got it from a New York collection. I asked Duponcheel where he thought the mask was from. He said, “Oh, it’s Ogoni”. So I asked, “well, how do you know?” He replied, “I collected it in the field!” He really knew Nigerian art. He would find things that he knew would fit into my collection. He knew the kinds of aesthetics that I was looking for.

I also dealt with dealers in the United States — Merton Simpson, Eric Robertson, Mona Gavigan, and Charles Jones, who’s down in North Carolina. I dealt a little bit with Charles Davis and Joshua Dimonstein. In fact, I started dealing with Joshua Dimonstein’s father, who actually was a dealer and an artist himself. He did a couple of early shows on the Benue with Jim Willis in California.

I have a lot of documentation that most people don’t have. It’s very helpful to have PhD theses and photographs, they help you in this collecting field. One thing I would do every time somebody would offer me something is that I’d go to all these folders that I have to look at similar objects.

I also acquired additional documentation from Ekpo Eyo’s students — Christa Clarke and Christopher Slogar (now teaching in the University of California system). Christa worked on Cross River monoliths and Slogar worked on Oron figures and Qua (Calabar) terracottas.