Tobias Schneebaum; great Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
The Independent ~
Artist who went to live with cannibals
29 September 2005
Theodore Schneebaum (Tobias Schneebaum), artist, writer and
ethnographer: born New York 25 March 1922; died Great Neck,
New York 20 September 2005.
The death of Tobias Schneebaum was first reported in 1956.
As a painter on a Fulbright fellowship he had hitchhiked
from New York to Peru. His first stop was Machu Picchu,
after which he rode an open-topped truck from the Andes to
the Amazon, on a search for a Stone Age tribe. When he was
officially declared missing seven months later, the New York
press lamented the death of a prominent Abstract
Expressionist painter who had exhibited with Jackson
Pollock. But Schneebaum was not dead. He had simply shed
with relief the remnants of respectable Western life.
He was born Theodore Schneebaum, on New York's Lower East
Side, in 1922, the son of an orthodox Jewish grocer from
Poland. He later changed his name to Tobias. His Stone Age
mission was set in place by a mesmerising image in Coney
Island advertising a sideshow of "The Wild Man of Borneo".
The tribal nature of his Jewish heritage appealed to
Schneebaum but sat most uncomfortably with his
homosexuality. He switched from rabbinical studies to
studying art under the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo at the
Brooklyn Museum. After army service during the Second World
War, Schneebaum spent several years at an artists' colony in
Mexico, journeying off into deep forests for his first
encounters with remote tribes.
He later took a master's degree in anthropology, but never
considered himself an "anthropologist". His tribal
adventures were spurred by his search for a group who could
embrace who he was, sexuality and all. Men and women of the
Harakmbut tribe mated to create children, but otherwise
slept in huts divided by gender. Schneebaum shaved his head,
stripped off his clothes, and played and hunted and slept
with them.
He had walked deep into the Amazon with no map, no
equipment, wearing tennis shoes and following the
instruction to "keep the river on your right". In 1969 that
instruction became the title of his first book, in which he
sought to exorcise some of the demons from that time in
Peru. Most vividly he wrote of joining what he thought was a
hunting party. It was a massacre. His friends raided the hut
of a neighbouring tribe, slaughtered the men inside, and
roasted their bodies on a celebratory fire. Schneebaum was
whirled into their victory dance, forced to spear the side
of one of the dead, then eat a slither of roasted human
heart. The experience broke the spell of that particular
stay. Schneebaum left his tribe and walked from the jungle,
naked and painted. Body painting and scarification left the
New York art world seeming relatively shallow. He refocused
his painting into illustrations of tribal art.
A museum display of Michael Rockefeller's collection of
Asmat art captivated him with its power and ferocity.
Rockefeller had disappeared during an expedition to New
Guinea in 1961, presumed eaten by the cannibals of Asmat.
Such were Schneebaum's kind of people. In 1973 he travelled
to Irian Jaya to pay them his first visit. Once again he
placed himself at the heart of a tribe who embraced the
concept of physical love between men. He wrote of this
episode in Wild Man (1979), the title recalling that Coney
Island poster of his childhood.
The Asmat became an annual focus of his life for 25 years.
For 15 years he lectured on cruise ships to the region, and
from 1973 to 1983 he was assistant to the curator of the
Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress in Agats, Irian Jaya.
The way the Asmat cared for their dying blood relatives
became a model for his tireless work nursing Aids patients
in New York through the 1980s and early 1990s.
From 1955 the Yaddo artists' colony, in Saratoga Springs,
New York, was a regular creative haven for him. Where the
Spirits Dwell (1988) rounded off the trilogy of his tribal
times, and Secret Places (2000) brought the story to New
York. He wrote several volumes on Asmat art and culture.
In the 1990s the film-makers Laura and David Shapiro visited
Schneebaum in his Greenwich Village apartment, part of the
Westbeth artists' co-operative. Light filtered in through a
forest of green foliage, falling on a collection of skulls
given to Schneebaum by his Asmat friends. For Schneebaum
these skulls were the company of his ancestors, and his
apartment was Irian Jaya on the Hudson.
From the grace and gentleness of his welcome visitors could
glean something of how this white man strolled into the
heartland of tribal warriors and was accepted as one of
their own. Despite his three hip displacements and
Parkinson's disease, Schneebaum was enticed by the Shapiros
back to Indonesia and to the Amazon. Old tribal lovers were
met, and some nightmares laid at last to rest. The resulting
film, Keep the River on Your Right: a modern cannibal tale
(2000), won several awards and Schneebaum received standing
ovations from packed auditoria.
He has bequeathed his supreme collection of Asmat art to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Martin Goodman