Photo by John Taylor/ Courtesy the De Young Museum, San Francisco

A 15th–17th century Samban suspension hook, from the Friede collection

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The famed Jolika Collection of tribal art from Papua New Guinea appears to be caught in legal limbo as courts in New York, California and Florida vie to determine its fate. John and Marcia Friede, of Rye, New York, who assembled the 4,000-odd pieces, committed in 2005 to give them to San Francisco’s de Young Museum, which currently has some 400, insured for $90 million, on display. But the institution’s claim to the collection as a whole is being challenged by John Friede’s brothers and Sotheby’s, who both assert rights to part of it.

The de Young already owns some 142 items that are not in dispute, and Friede has promised the rest to the museum eventually. But he also pledged part of the assemblage as $20 million in collateral for a $30 million debt he owes his two brothers under an October 2007 settlement of a dispute over the estate their mother, Evelyn Hall. And he put up some 150 objects as security for a $25 million line of credit from Sotheby’s, which he drew down in 2007 to purchase the holdings of Philip Goldman, a London-based dealer of New Guinean art. “Goldman’s collection included some extraordinary things,” he says. “It was a unique opportunity.”

Friede, who took out a life insurance policy to repay Sotheby’s should any of the debt still be outstanding at his death, says he intended to settle the line of credit in part through the sale of duplicates in the combined holdings. Some 46 items from the Jolika and Goldman collections were indeed offered at Sotheby’s Paris in December 2007, estimated at €975,000 to €1.5 million ($1.4 million to $2.2 million); 22 sold for a total of about €716,000 ($1.1 million).

But the month before the sale, Friede’s brothers, Robert Friede and Thomas Jaffe, caught wind of it and obtained a court order in Florida, where Hall’s estate is in probate, instructing that the proceeds be held in escrow. In February 2008, they sued Friede, claiming violations of the liens he had granted them, and this past September a Florida judge ruled that they could seize the entire collection, as well as the proceeds from the December sale. Friede, who says the first $20 million owed to his brothers will be available from Hall’s estate later this year, is appealing.

In September, the San Francisco city attorney jumped into the fray on behalf of the museum and obtained a temporary restraining order barring the brothers from selling any works until a court can decide who really owns them. And in October, a New York court ordered Friede to turn over 54 objects to Sotheby’s and to refrain from selling 99 more, also pending a sorting out of the various claims.

So far the case doesn’t seem to have been affected by allegations that at least nine items in the Jolika Collection had been designated as national treasures by Papua New Guinea and were exported illegally. Friede, who bought the pieces from dealers in Europe, the U.S. and Australia, asserts that he was an “honest purchaser,” but he is reluctant to see them returned to their country of origin. “People on both sides of this issue can have legitimate arguments, but I believe that at the moment they are safer in San Francisco,” he says, adding that “major thefts” have occurred at the [New Guinea National] Museum, in Port Moresby,” in recent years.

Unlike most source nations, which vigorously pursue repatriation claims, Papua New Guinea seems to have sided with John Friede, both over the nine artifacts and over his dispute with his brothers. “It is our firm view that the entire collection should...remain at the de Young Museum,” the New Guinean ambassador, Evan Paki, wrote in an October 6 letter to John Buchanan, the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, of which the de Young is a part.

This stance dismays some scholars, including Barry Craig, the Australian anthropologist who first identified the pieces as suspect. While stressing that no evidence implicates Friede in any wrongdoing and acknowledging that the Port Moresby museum is in dire straits, he notes that “one of [Paki’s] tasks as a representative of his country surely is to uphold its laws, and the export of those nine objects without an export permit is against the law.” Craig also notes that “the argument of rescuing these pieces from the country of origin’s lack of care and making them available [to] a wider public is now turned on its head, as the pieces are under threat from the fallout of a family dispute . . . and could be dispersed at auction.”