Art from across the world meets Moorish architecture at Mallorca’s Jakober Foundation

It’s a long, winding drive through Mediterranean pines, with glimpses of the dancing blue sea just ahead, to Sa Bassa Blanca, a Moorish-style walled estate near Alcudia on the north-east coast of Mallorca. Waiting to greet us under the great arched gateway are Ben Jakober, an almost unbelievably limber 93, and his artist wife Yannick Vu, herself in her early eighties. Both are dressed in crisp black and white; both seem to have, quite undimmed, the astonishing energy that has created their Jakober Foundation — home and museum — at this unique place.

They are from very different backgrounds: Jakober is from a Hungarian family, with a pan-European upbringing; Vu is the daughter of a distinguished Vietnamese artist and a French musician, brought up in Paris and Saint-Paul-de-Vence. But his roots in Mallorca go back to the 1960s and the heady days of the expat artistic community that flourished there, based around Deià. After he retired from banking, Jakober’s passion for collecting grew: it is, he laughingly says, “almost an illness”.

It was in the 1970s, after their marriage, that they started to build. The main house, known as the Hassan Fathy building for its Egyptian architect, reflects the Moorish heritage of the island in an amalgam of the north African sensibilities and Spanish tradition — terraces giving huge sea-views, a stunning courtyard-garden laid out with Islamic geometric tropes.

The house is loaded with historic detail — here are antique Spanish floor tiles, heavy wooden doors, gridded mashrabiya windows traditional across the Islamic world. A small chapel-like room was constructed for one of their greatest antique architectural pieces: a jewel-like “Mudéjar” domed and coffered ceiling dated 1498, from Tarazona in Spain’s Zaragoza province. Commissioned for a Christian church but executed by Moorish craftsmen, its intricate, interlocking geometric patterning mixes elements of both traditions. In this gorgeously lit windowless room, a circular mirror is laid on the floor; it evokes the traditional and the contemporary together — are we looking into a deep pool in a Moorish garden, or a sculpture by Anish Kapoor?

The Moorish and north African influences reflect the couple’s other home, in Morocco, where they spend six months each year. The contemporary and historic art and objects of north and sub-Saharan Africa form a great part of their collections, and the sheer accumulation of pieces is almost overwhelming. To call the range eclectic would be an understatement. Every wall and surface is covered; the Jakobers talk of each work lovingly and with real learning.

The lobby is smothered in pictures of the couple: from bronze busts by Vũ Cao Đàm, Yannick’s father, to a 1985 photograph by Snowdon and a 2021 image by the British-Moroccan Hassan Hajjaj in his signature neo-Pop style. In the hallway, although it contains a Brice Marden etching and a small Miró, we begin to understand that big names are not the point here: everything is about the juxtaposition of images, of cultures. There’s a love of the rough, the self-taught and hand-hewn; the placement of disparate works so that they resonate and speak to each other is all-important. The theme in this hall is snakes: a giant painted wooden spirit statue from Guinea, an exquisite 18th-century Dutch print of writhing cobras, a “Rainbow Serpent with Spirits” (2000) by the Aboriginal artist Jack Nawilil, an iron ceremonial sword with a snake’s head from Togo. Also here, as throughout the house and grounds, is a work created by the Jakobers themselves: a stainless steel python in vivid blue.

This collision of cultures, of objects carefully selected and delicately placed, continues. There is a room of chairs, sited in a glorious former winter garden, with pieces by Tom Dixon, Ron Arad, Shiro Kuramata and more. Elsewhere a resplendently sculptural Tuareg camel saddle shares space with a 19th-century armoured jacket in brass and silver from the Philippines; Nigerian masks with antique Moroccan jars; a Yoruba body-mask, with prominent breasts and a pregnant belly, with a coffin in the form of a giant shoe. On a landing stand vividly coloured life-size ceremonial figures (c1950) covered in shells, from the Bangwa people of Cameroon, facing a small chest created out of decommissioned weaponry (bullets, guns) by a Mozambican artist. And more, and more.

Within this eclectic accumulation, there are two in-depth passions: contemporary Aboriginal art and the Essaouira artists of Morocco. Both are, Jakober points out, newly created as artistic schools — the Essaouira artists were established only in the past 50 years, and the Jakobers have watched and nurtured their development. Here the two schools are hung side by side in dialogue, and interspersed through the other rooms.

The house-museum (the couple no longer live there) is only part of Sa Bassa Blanca. Outside, we duck down into the newly built Sokrates space, where the Jakobers’ genius for curation and juxtaposition of works is even more vibrantly on display. Dedicated to pre-Columbian, African, Nepalese and Himalayan ethnographic pieces, set against more recent western art, the inspirations, they say, were two seminal exhibitions: “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art at MoMA in 1984 and the legendary Magiciens de la Terre at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1989.

Here, for example, a gloomy Catalan oil painting of Christ with arms upraised is set between two Congolese sacred ancestor figures in the same pose, in polychrome wood. A brilliant vitrine sets grotesque masks of varying sorts and dates against a small reproduction of Francis Bacon’s “Study for the Head of Lucian Freud”, its contorted features mirroring the more ancient art around it. Giant ceremonial carved figures from Papua New Guinea accompany pieces that speak of waste and recycling, especially detritus remade into art. A tiny butterfly in perpetual motion, by sculptor Rebecca Horn, seems to signal human frailty. 

And over it all, a photograph of the family’s dog Snoopy (RIP) looks down from the ceiling, perhaps from doggy heaven. If this is the playful side of the collectors’ passion, it’s borne out in the sculpture park that stretches through olive groves around the property. Many of its pieces are animal creations by the Jakobers, as well as megaliths, a table that is a scholar’s rock, found objects. And fun: a sombre tombstone is inscribed “I AM STILL HERE”; a “dead” tennis player lies on a court under a piece by Yoko Ono declaring “WAR IS OVER”.

You can’t help but feel a strong theme of mortality, even in the light-hearted installations. Indeed, theirs is a family overshadowed by grief: their only daughter was killed in a motorbike accident when she was just 18. But from this tragedy grew another part of Sa Bassa Blanca’s offerings, something quite different. In another underground gallery is the Nins collection (nins means children in the Catalan language): portraits of children across Europe, many of them aristocratic, from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

Here Vu shows herself to be scholarly, with extraordinary knowledge of the details and codes of these portraits of usually sombre, elaborately dressed children. They are miniature adults, attired to show their rank and wealth, usually with only a dog (symbol of fidelity) for company. Although the paintings are extraordinary, the setting rich, overall the effect is sepulchral. There are very few smiles on these stiff little faces; we know many did not live long. As ever, though, a shaft of Jakober humour lightens the mood: in the middle of the floor stands an enormously oversized, almost Koons-like baby’s dummy, a sculpture in wood by the couple.

It’s hard to synthesise the unique qualities of this remarkable place, but perhaps the best way is to imagine the whole thing — buildings, gardens, house, contents, special exhibitions and more — as a total work in itself, the ultimate cabinet of curiosities.

Museo Sa Bassa Blanca is open Wednesday to Sunday year-round, msbb.org