War Club ('U'u) (early 1800s): Art, History and Details

War Club ('U'u) (early 1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The head of this war club is carved as an abstract face, with small additional faces appearing at the eyes, nose, and forehead. Low-relief patterns encircle the club's neck. Fashioned from dense-grained ironwood (casuarina) or toa wood, the club is quite heavy. Like stilt footrests, war clubs were carved by expert artists (tahuna) and cured in the mud of a taro patch. The glossy finish is the result of regular rubbing and polishing with scented coconut oil. Similar war clubs were seen and recorded by the crew of Captain Cook's second voyage to the South Seas in 1772-75.

Object facts

• Title: War Club ('U'u)
• Date: early 1800s
• Culture: Polynesia, Marquesas Islands, early 19th Century
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: stained ironwood
• Dimensions: Overall: 148.2 x 19.8 x 11.2 cm (58 3/8 x 7 13/16 x 4 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Oceanic Art
• Department: Oceania
• Accession number: 1963.255

Collection credit

James Albert and Mary Gardiner Ford Memorial Fund

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.