André Breton and the Arts of Oceania
André Breton and the Arts of Oceania
1854-1937
Philippe Peltier
A text appeared in 1924 that would go down in art history as a milestone. It was the Surrealist Manifesto. A brilliant future as an intellectual and a committed writer lay before its young author, André Breton, who was twenty-eight years old when it was published. At that time, he was deeply in love with Simone Kahn, whom he had married in 1921. Thanks to the generosity of fashion designer Jacques Doucet, the young couple lived in Paris in a Pigalle area studio with high windows overlooking the Place Blanche.
André Breton in his atelier. AKG173618 – © akg-images / Paul Almasy
Over the years, and until Breton's death in September of 1966, the studio’s two rooms served as a place for writing and meetings, as a laboratory and for experimentation, but above all as a place to live where a wide variety of collections accumulated and flourished, including works by his painter friends (Picasso, Braque, Chirico, Miro, Picabia, Masson, Matta, Degottex, among many others), books, drawings, curiosities, and geological specimens, but most especially the Oceanic objects for which Breton had a particular predilection.
André Breton’s Atelier. AKG823627 – © akg-images / Paul Almasy
We know little about the first objects of “primitive art” (the term was widely used then) he collected. Breton does however tell us that his first purchase was made with money he had received from his parents in 1913 as an expression of their pleasure at his having passed his baccalaureate exams (equivalent to a high school diploma). To their great astonishment, he used their gift to acquire an Easter Island sculpture.
Galerie Surréaliste, c. 1927, photo by Man Ray
In March of 1926, the Galerie Surréaliste opened on the Rue Jacques Callot in the heart of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. The first exhibition was a tribute to the arts of the Pacific, and was devoted to Man Ray and to Oceanic objects. The little booklet that was published on the occasion lists the non-European works exhibited, including several pieces from the Breton collection.
Cover of 1926 exhibition catalog
It offers no information on those works but instead accompanies them with a series of quotations about birds. That may seem surprising, but the approach does conform to the idea that the group advocated, namely that any merely ethnographic interpretation is insufficient for the understanding of an object, and that a true and complete understanding can only be arrived at when it is derived from poetic imagery and a concordance of analogies.
Man Ray, Untitled (New Guinea mask, Sepik River), 1926, Private Collection Los Angeles
A photograph of the studio, probably taken around 1927, shows both African works and a Lower Sepik River mask hanging on the wall. In the years that followed, the African objects would, with only a few exceptions, fade away. In the eyes of the surrealists who were pushing for a complete and permanent revolution of artistic perception, they had the disadvantage of being too in vogue and fashionable at the time, and too attached to the reality of the world. Oceanic art on the other hand, was full of the unexpected and offered greater surprises.
The World at the Time of Surrealism map
Surrealist writings on non-Western objects were rare at the time. To better understand the preferences that guided their passion, it is useful to refer to two documents. The first is the famous The World at the Time of Surrealism map published in the 1929 issue devoted to Surrealism of the Belgian avant-garde magazine Variétés. The sizes of the countries on this map are distorted to correspond to the importance of their artistic productions in the group’s eyes: the United States (with the exception of Alaska), Greece and Italy have all disappeared, France is reduced to Paris, while Mexico and Russia occupy a considerable space. Oceania is illustrated as the center of the world. Not nearly all of its islands or archipelagos are however represented. New Caledonia for instance (whose art, according to Charles Ratton, Breton was not fond of) is missing, and so are Fiji, the Cook Islands and Tonga. The New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) are reduced to the islands of Santo and what appears to be Malekula. On the other hand, the Marquesas Islands, Hawaii and, more curiously, the Tuamotu Archipelago, are all well represented with their names carefully written out. Disproportionately large spaces are allotted to Easter Island, the Bismarck Archipelago and to a lesser extent to New Guinea, all areas seen by the Surrealists as great centers of creation.
Cover of André Breton’s and Paul Éluard's Auction of 1931
The second document is the catalog of the joint sale of André Breton’s and Paul Éluard's collections in 1931. Both were heavily in debt at the time and had to resign themselves to selling part of their collections. Before this sale, in order to enable himself to pay off his most pressing debts, Breton had offered Rene Gaffé a few paintings and an uli. Gaffé, a Belgian bibliophile and collector who had made his fortune in the manufacture of perfumes, acquired the uli sculpture. The rest of the collection of exotic objects was entrusted to dealer Charles Ratton. The latter assured them that a public sale organized to coincide with the opening of the Colonial Exhibition would guarantee a commercial success.
The sale was held on July 2nd and 3rd. Ratton published a catalog, lavish for the time, which would serve as proof that primitive art had gained legitimacy and recognition in the eyes of collectors. It listed 312 objects to which six lots were added outside the catalog. The heart of the collection was made up of Oceanic objects – the other pieces were from the Southeast Asian islands, Africa and the Americas. There were six objects from Easter Island, nine from the Marquesas Islands, seven from New Zealand, eight from Vanuatu, and three from the Solomon Islands. New Guinea was the star of the show: there were twenty objects from the Dutch part of the island, and twenty-two from the British part of the island, including the Papuan Gulf region, ten from the Admiralty Islands, three from New Britain, and, not surprisingly given its elevated position in the surrealist pantheon, fifteen from the island of New Ireland.
The best represented area was however the Sepik River Valley with twenty-six pieces. Although the region remained largely unknown at the time, many objects had been available on the market thanks to the sale of objects by German ethnographic museums. Some pieces pulled in very high bids. To put things in perspective, let us remember as we consider the results cited below that the average monthly salary of a Parisian metal worker was 1120 francs at the time.
Sepik Figure, No. 85
New Ireland Figures, Nos. 100 & 105
Highlights of the sale included a New Guinea figure (see pl. V, n° 85) that was acquired by dealer Pierre Loeb for 3100 francs, two malagan sculptures (see pl. XII, n° 100 and plate IX, n° 105) that were acquired by La Raucheraye (a Parisian forwarding agent who worked for Ratton) for 3600 francs and 4200 francs respectively,
Solomon Island Canoe Prow, No. 125
Maori Post, No. 142
Maori Hei Tiki, No. 144
a Solomon Islands canoe prow ornament (cf. VIII, n° 125) bought by gallery owner de Haucq for 7200 francs (the highest price of the sale), a wooden mask from Vanuatu purchased by Tristan Tzara for 4310 francs, a carved post from New Zealand (see pl. XII, n° 142) acquired by Paul Chadourne for 5200 francs, and a nephrite tiki from New Zealand for which Charles Ratton paid 3600 francs (see pl. XIII, n° 144), before also buying an Easter Island rei-miro for 3500 francs (see pl. XVI, n° 159). Lastly, René Gaffé took home the two Easter Island moko n° 161 and 162 (see plate XV) for 6200 and 3800 francs respectively. One of these two lizard-man figures is still considered by experts to be the most beautiful example known of this type of sculpture.
Easter Island Rei-miro, No. 159
Easter Island Moko, Nos. 161 & 162
In 1931 the Great Depression reached Europe. Money was scarce, and public sales of tribal art came to a halt. In order to weather the crisis and breathe new life into the flagging surrealist movement, Breton began to promote something new-- Surrealist objects. Once again in partnership with Charles Ratton, he organized an Exhibition of Surrealist Objects which opened in May of 1936 at 14 Rue de Marignan in the 8th arrondissement. It would be a milestone event, and featured pieces "seen in dreams" realized by artists like Dali, Magritte, Man Ray, Picasso or Tanguy, along with "natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natural objects, disturbed objects, found objects, interpreted found objects, mathematical objects, ready-made, and ready-made and enhanced objects". And of course Amerindian and Oceanic objects were on hand as well. For Breton this confrontation represented an attempt to investigate "the fixity of things in their daily use" and to favor "the creation of force fields through the juxtaposition of two different images" (Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 1934, p. 181, quoted by André Breton).
Exposition Surrealiste catalog cover
In a realm beyond the visible, openings leading towards new mental landscapes would spring from these rapprochements, and from the dual nature of the representations. The non-Western objects, and more specifically the Oceanic ones, were assigned a special status here. In the short text he published in the catalog, Breton describes them as god-objects, objects that belong to mythical times. They thus escape from being just of the time of men, and their formal inventions greatly exceed those of mere human creation. While they appeared here in a Surrealist exhibition Breton thus did not actually consider these pieces to be surrealist. In a letter addressed to Ratton on December 25th 1935 (Ratton-Ladrière archives, Paris) Breton notes: "It will be necessary that I try one day to clarify this question: what is surrealist in primitive art and what is not. I will certainly have the opportunity to do so.”
Because of the dramatic events that unfolded in the years that followed, it would be several years before this opportunity presented itself. At the beginning of the war, Breton was a refugee in the United States and lived in New York. There, he was drawn to American Indian art. Like his friends Max Ernst and Claude Lévi-Strauss, he put assembled collections of Yupik masks and Kachina dolls.
André Breton rue Fontaine by Lüfti Ozkök, circa 1963. Association André Breton, www.andrebreton.fr
Breton attempted to reestablish a Surrealist group upon his return to France in May of 1946 and he resumed his many activities there. One of those was his involvement in the Océanie exhibition that opened in June of 1948 at the Galerie Renée Olive in Paris. Breton lent several objects from his collection for display and wrote a presentation text and five poems titled Korwar, Uli, Dukduk, Tiki and Rano Raraku for the catalog. To begin with, after having paid tribute to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, he explains here why he believes Oceanic art surpasses African art. In his eyes the latter is dominated by topics that are too earth-driven, and too attached "to the external appearances of man", with structures that remain assignable to the physical being. For him, the superiority of Oceanic art rests on an "elusive and unfathomable formalism” that cannot be apprehended and marks the triumph of the dualism of perception over representation by devoting itself to "ethereal themes, the most replete with spirituality, and the most poignant also, as they deal with primordial anguish and anxieties". Beyond all these things and characteristics, Breton was fascinated by the amazing variety, and the wild effervescence of the imagination manifest in South Pacific objects. He was able to experience this most concretely during his visit to the Arts of the South Seas exhibition organized by René d'Harnoncourt at the Museum of Primitive Art in New York in 1945. In his eyes, this diversity gave rise to unequalled artistic triumphs. For example, “a tino figure from Ponape or Nukuoro in the Caroline Islands; here the nose, the eyes, the ears and the human mouth are erased. Halfway between these islands and the Bismarck Archipelago for example, one might wonder what a human figure from the Greenwich Islands could look like.” And in conclusion: “Whosoever feels he has better things to do, has never been poetically bitten by the great Oceanic mystery.”
André Breton in his studio rue Fontaine 1961 by Henri Cartier-Bresson “To Elisa Breton with my best memory. Henri Cartier-Bresson.” Association André Breton, www.andrebreton.fr
This aesthetic of the diverse is complemented by a force that has the power to grab one by the throat, that astonishes, and is at the heart of the Surrealist aesthetic: “There is also the fact that the magical, with all that it presupposes of surprise, splendor and a dazzling view of something other than what we can know, has never in the sculptural arts known the triumphs that it achieves with such very high quality Oceanic objects.”
He concludes his text with an enumeration of the most remarkable Oceanic artistic achievements: “One would dream of being able to bring together in a favorable light the masks of the Hawaiian god of war, with the terrifying mother-of-pearl shells of his gaze aflame amid the feathers of the i’i bird, some of the large openwork constructions of New Ireland, in abundance surrounding a man in a trance, with fish and birds, the most beautiful masks of tortoise shell and bird of paradise feathers in the Torres Strait, the marine deities with burgeoning human beings on them from the Cook Islands and Tubuai… which would still be dominated, in a rose garden of Sulka masks traversed by the trunks of the Baining butterfly masks, and the great mask of New Britain, of unrivaled sumptuousness, which can be seen at the Chicago museum - a sugar loaf-shaped mask like others, but crowned with an enormous parasol atop which stands a ghost-like praying mantis, two meters tall, made of pink elderberry twigs and foliage like the rest of the mask. Anyone who has not found himself in the presence of this object does not know how far the sublimely poetic can go.”
André Breton in his atelier in front of his objects circa 1958-1966. Association André Breton, www.andrebreton.fr
Breton imagines an ideal exhibition, a tower of objects where, on an invisible structure, arranged according to a strict hierarchy, there would be some rare Polynesian and Melanesian objects, that would be dominated and watched over, in a poetic epiphany, by a Sulka hemlout mask, whose absolute perfection is suitable for the celebration of "the triumph of the volatile or, as we still say, of the subtle over the thick."
Breton would play with these connections in his studio for almost twenty years. There, on the tables, on the walls and doors, and in all possible places, he accumulated a multitude of pieces found randomly in the course of his walks and his visits to the Parisian tribal art galleries. This accumulation owed nothing to chance. It was carefully meditated upon. It staged dazzling encounters in which each piece’s own individual circumstantial beauty was revealed.
One of the most symbolic places for these encounters was the long shelf affixed to the wall behind Breton’s desk. Numerous Oceanic objects were placed next to Pre-Columbian sculptures, curiosities, small paintings, drawings, engravings, stones and roots, and folk art objects. This was, in short, a whole world of finds in the center of which Giacometti's The Suspended Ball (itself more of an assemblage than a sculpture properly speaking) stands out, placed presiding atop a medals cabinet which houses a collection of Gallic coins. The wall is a cosmogony. To make an inventory of it is beyond the scope of this timid essay. It can be seen today just as its creator left it at his death at the Musée national d'art moderne in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. It is however useful to recall that its current state does not account for the multiple additions and withdrawals that were made over time, or show the permutations that came and went, and had "no other purpose than to provoke the omnipotence of the dream."
The upper level of this impressive assemblage is almost exclusively occupied by Oceanic objects; on the left, there are mostly Melanesian objects, and on the right, Polynesian ones. A few pieces, such as a malagan mask and an over-modeled Sepik River skull are displayed on the lower shelves. The exploration of these worlds yields some surprises. To be sure, there are some masterpieces, such as the small Kiwai figures, one of which was collected by Savage at the end of the 19th century, and the rei miro acquired by the French writer Pierre Loti during his stay on Easter Island in 1872. While it is difficult to affirm that Breton cared about provenance, he did care about the history of the objects. A piece of conus shell that must have been part of an ornament is a seemingly insignificant object per se, but one that takes on much more gravitas when you read its label and come to understand that it belonged to an important person from the island of Niue. We are also surprised by the presence of what we might consider to be trinkets, like the three small late production Easter Island figures. For Breton, the value of objects lay not only in their rarity but also in their evocative power and the places they were found in. That was the case for this improbable mother-of-pearl tiki from New Zealand bought from an antique dealer in the south of France and which he suspected to be of recent manufacture (letter from Breton to Charles Ratton, April 4th 1948, Ratton-Ladrière archives, Paris). Breton did not care about the patina or the age of objects. On the other hand, he would acquire several examples of objects that fascinated him, like the stilt steps, the stone tiki and the ivi po’o from the Marquesas Islands, or the small male figures from the Sepik River delta area. In his eyes, these sculptures were emblematic of the capacity of the men of the Pacific to metamorphose, to move into and through a magical and sublime world. Another form of sublime that was dear to Breton, more violent since it was born of fear, was embodied by an over-modeled skull from New Ireland. Its name in the local language of the place it came from – which Breton could not have been aware of but nonetheless somehow sensed – means "the assemblage that terrifies".
Some time before his death, Breton decided to sell the de Chirico painting that he had treasured since his youth. The money from this sale allowed him to realize a dream: the acquisition of a new uli. Luckily the one exhibited at the Galerie Olive in 1948 was available. He bought it, and set it up on his desk as a counterpart to a Sulka sculpture, a slender and wiry white figure with raised arms. These two figures seemed to watch over the wall as much as they watched over the writer's workplace.
As the closing lines of the poem he dedicated to this uli in 1948 reminds us:
You glare at us from the bottom of a shell
Your creation says hands up to you and yet you still threaten
You frighten and you amaze
Paris, May 2023
