An American Indian collection.(Current and coming/"The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)

Many collectors of American Indian artifacts got their start in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but the first Indian piece that caught the eye of Ralph T. Coe was a Northwest Coast totem pole model he encountered in a shop on Third Avenue in New York City in the 1950s. American folk art, African, and other primitive art bad already caught on among collectors, but American Indian oat was not widely appreciated then outside ethnographic circles. While collecting Indian artifacts might have seemed avant-garde at the time, it was in Coifs blood. He was raised in Cleveland, where his parents were well-known pioneer collectors of French impressionist and post-impressionist art and of African art. Coe credits his father for instilling an appreciation for the unorthodox, when at the age of fourteen he was treated to a late-night tour of his father's paintings collection. A Paul Ganguin canvas of two Tahitian women made a permanent impression on him and kindled his later interest in the arts of Oceania, Africa, and Indonesia, as well as the arts of the American Indians.

As a graduate student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Coe concentrated on traditional European painting and went on to a distinguished career in the museum world, principally at the ...