San Francisco's de Young Museum, which is scheduled to re-open in a new, state-of-the-art facility in Golden Gate Park later this year, has received a collection of Oceanic art valued at well over $100 million, the New York Times reports.

The collection, which was amassed by John and Marcia Friede over forty years and made their Westchester, New York, home a magnet for scholars, curators, and art dealers from around the world, is probably "the best collection of this [kind of] art in private hands," said Eric Kjellgren, an associate curator and Oceanic specialist at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Since the nineteenth century, the art of Oceania — the more than 25,000 islands comprising Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia in the South Pacific — has attracted a passionate Western following and inspired artists such as Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso. And although the Friede collection represents only one geographic area, it is a significant one: New Guinea, the world's second-largest island (after Greenland) and home to thousands of languages and cultures.

Initially, three hundred and fifty pieces from the collection will be exhibited at the de Young, including some dating from as early as A.D. 660; eventually, all three thousand objects in the collection will be turned over to the museum, which has included the Friedes in every phase of planning for the collection's installation. Current plans call for a permanent, 5,000-square-foot gallery named for the couple and located center-stage in the new facility. "A clean blackboard is pretty appealing," said Harry S. Parker III, the museum's director. "In a museum as incomplete as ours, a collection can be given the kind of dominance it deserves."