San Francisco Chronicle - May 23, 2018
A 200-year-old carving of the war god Ku has returned home to Hawai`i after spending untold years abroad and in the hands of private collectors.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, purchased the rare piece at a November auction at Christie’s in Paris, paying more than $7 million for the figure, which is less than 2 feet tall.
The San Francisco couple then donated the piece to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, which announced the acquisition this week.
“We felt strongly that this ki`i (Hawaiian for image) belonged in Hawai`i for the education and benefit of its people,” Marc Benioff said.
The carving, made sometime between 1780 and 1819, had been in the collection of Claude Vérité, a Paris art dealer, who apparently acquired it in 1940. It’s unclear where the carving was before that.
Similar pieces are found only in museums, said Susan Kloman, head of African and Oceanic Art at Christie’s, in a description of the piece prior to the auction. She described the carving as “an incredible discovery.”
“When I first saw this figure I was astonished — really speechless,” she said. “We couldn’t imagine that such a work could still exist in a private collection.”
Benioff said he learned of the piece only a day before the auction, when Danny Akaka Jr., Hawaiian cultural practitioner and Bishop Museum board member, called to ask for the billionaire’s help.
The carving was probably part of a temple on the Big Island, where King Kamehameha I prayed to Ku to unify the Hawaiian islands, Benioff said. Missionaries presumably boxed it up along with other sacred Hawaiian relics and sent it to Europe.
It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to return something like this to its home, Benioff added.
“It was either going to go back into someone’s living room for another 200 years,” he said, “or it was going to go back to Hawai`i and be on display for the Hawaiian people.”
Benioff, who owns an estate in Hawai`i, said he had to beat out a “significant bidder,” to get the item.
“It’s a spiritual item,” he said. “It’s not really something that should be held to help the power of one person.”
The carving was returned to the islands about a month ago — the land-eater idol arriving about a week before the eruption of the Kilauea volcano — the timing of which was not lost on Benioff....
