Portfolio Lot n° 1

THREE IFUGAO SPOONS Luzon, Philippines Selections from the Seymour and Alyce Lazar Collection African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art dominated every room in Seymour and Alyce Lazar’s Spanish-style home in Palm Springs where museum curators, interested collectors and selected dealers were all made welcome. His early career gave no indication of these ensuing passions. Seymour was born in Brooklyn in 1927 and the family moved in 1933 to the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles. By the time he was 12 Seymour was keeping the books for his father’s accounting business. He trained as an electrical engineer at Lockheed after graduating from Los Angeles High School, followed by two years in the Army Air Corps. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics at UC Berkeley (1949) and a law degree from the USC (1951). He set up in private practice but when a Hollywood producer asked if he specialized in entertainment law he could not resist saying yes and was then forced to play catch up. He had found his niche and through the 50s and 60s had a colourful career as a young and hip entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles working for such clients as comedian, Lenny Bruce and Jazz musician, Miles Davis. He befriended the poet Alan Ginsberg, the psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary and Maya Angelou, whom he encouraged to be more than a cocktail singer. In her book, "All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes", she thanked Seymour “for belief in my youthful ambition.”. Driving around in a Rolls Royce and seen at times wearing a Pierre Cardin leather suit with no shirt he soon tired of life as a lawyer and turned to the stock market, becoming one of the largest independent traders. He once said ‘If I bought a stock in the morning, and still owned it at noon, that was a long-term investment’. He was not afraid to take risks, as he continued to do in a series of class-action lawsuits, in many of which he was successful. He collected groups of objects. Many of those from Africa and the Pacific were assembled with the help of his long time friend Peter Adler in London; Ewe cloths, Asmat shields, Oceanic clubs - some two hundred and fifty of which sat in large baskets on the library floor. His large Pre-Columbian collection was begun during his years living in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and later expanded and refined with the help of his close friend and dealer, Judy Small Nash. He could be a determined bidder in the auction room. When a group of Melanesian combs from the collection of Nelly van den Abbeele came up for auction in Amsterdam in 1999, Seymour was determined to have them and sat in the room with his hand raised until all had been knocked down to him, earning him a round of applause from those present. A selection of more than two hundred of his combs were exhibited in an exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art in 2011. His spoon collection also numbered in the hundreds. Inevitably the provenances for many objects contain such illustrious names as Lt. General Pitt Rivers, James Hooper, Ben Heller, Stéphen Chauvet, Cornelis Meulendijk, Paul Tishman and Jay Leff. A number of large New Guinea carvings from the George Kennedy collection stood amongst the palm trees in his sunny Californian garden. When one of our auction catalogues arrived with Seymour he would call asking “What should I buy?” but rarely followed advice. He was well aware that at times he had made mistakes but never returned an object to a dealer or auction house, simply putting it down to experience and moving on to the next purchase. Seymour regularly called his many friends, sharing the latest jokes he had heard from Bernie Cornfeld and others. He loved Paris and rented an apartment for a couple of months for many years, first on the rue Mazarine across the road from Jean-Pierre Laprugne of whom he was fond, and later overlooking the Jardin du Palais Royal. 16 to 19 cm. long Provenance Seymour Lazar, Palm Springs