Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

Evoking a deChirican sensibility of “mystery and melancholy,” Laughlin capitalized upon, yet also ultimately contributed to, the mythology of mysterious New Orleans—city of the marvelous. Thus the possibilities and limitations of Regionalist Surrealism as place finds a test case there. Later in his career, Laughlin would go on to explore Surrealism as place with the rugged topography of the Arizona landscape. The changed locale is accompanied by a shift grounded in Dalian double images.

Francesca Woodman's emphasis on practice and the narrative quality of her photographic series links her to surrealism. With the caption to one of her Providence photographs she visually explores André Breton's definition of automatic writing by reformulating it as a kind of play, at once musical, textual, and visual: "Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands." Michel Foucault's reformulation of Bretonian automatism as a kind of writing concentrated on experience helps to situate Woodman clearly in the surrealist tradition. She takes a turn reformulating surrealist activity herself in the manner of other surrealists like Robert Desnos who contributed to the "surrealist conversation" by providing his own definitions of terms. Like Breton, whom Foucault dubbed a "swimmer between two words," Woodman's photographic series function like visual narratives, making of her a swimmer between two worlds where the concentrated energy lies in the in-between spaces.

Woodman's experiments with space and time in her Space2 and On Being an Angel series further invoke surrealism's exploration of the liminal spaces between waking and dreaming that has led to its characterization as anamorphic. Like women surrealists before her, she concentrates on the body as the locus of automatic experience; like Desnos, she at times conceives of that body as transparent, as functioning like a "nocturnal bottle." She thus links the physical body with its psychic interior allowing her images to be read as maps to inner space.

The Surrealists established the importance of Oceanic and North American Indian Art – mainly Inuit, Northwest Coast and Southwest – in the 1920s. While Max Ernst and André Breton traveled through the Southwest in the 1940s, during their American exile, two members of the Surrealist circle, the Swiss painter Kurt Seligmann (1900-1962), and the Austrian-born artist Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959) visited the Northwest Coast, respectively in 1938 and 1939. Both not only showed a strong interest in collecting artifacts but were also fascinated by Native American mythology and art, and their relationship to totemic thought. While the Surrealists did not leave a large body of publications explaining their relationship to Northwest Coast art and culture, the various documents left by Seligmann and Paalen allow us to delimit three implicit themes in their work as described below. This paper focuses on their writings, published and unpublished, and their photographic documentation as well as their own collections of artifacts. It examines from an anthropological perspective their visions of Northwest Coast art and cultures, which undoubtedly contributed to the development of their sensitivity to the outside world. In that framework, their scholarly contribution and treatment of ethnological data appear independent from their artistic practices. Two distinct figures come to light: Seligmann as an ethnographer in contrast to Paalen as a theorist. While they may differ in their conception of totemic landscapes, they share a common view on the future of the Northwest Coast cultures.

Comparison of the literary and artistic uses and images of pre-Columbian Mexican and Maya cultures across Surrealist authors and artists reveals both their indebtedness to persistent European stereotypes of Native American societies originating in the early colonial period and their differing positions within and manipulations of a basic binary in such stereotypes between the demonic barbarian and the Noble Savage. Bataille draws upon the language, emphases, and some of the sources of the demonic model to create his picture of the Aztecs, but inverts the original negative valuation placed on this vision in accordance with his celebration of the base. Artaud seems to follow a variant of the utopian trope shaped by late 19th-century and early 20th century European occultism, including the Traditionalism of Rene Guenon, in envisioning ancient Mexican myths as enshrining the same metaphysical truths as Western and Asian mystical literature, and as a source of spiritual renewal to a European civilization desiccated by rationalism. Breton, in his literary production following his 1938 journey to Mexico, colors a romanticized and essentialist view of Mexican culture past and present with both the psychoanalytic primitivism characteristic of orthodox Surrealist ethnographies and with political hopes related to contemporary historical events and to political variants of the Mexican indigenismo of the time. After the death of Trotsky and triumph of fascism in Europe, members of the Surrealist movement turned increasingly to myth and mysticism, and this is reflected in their adoption of stances toward ancient Mexico in the 1940s and after that approach Artaud’s in their emphasis on the mystical. The work of Wolfgang Paalen represents a paradoxical combination of awareness of the pitfalls of primitivism combined with a tendency towards an idealizing vision of Native American cultures. These variations in the deployment of traditional tropes in Surrealist visions of the pre-Columbian are situated in their specific contemporary social, political, and biographical contexts.

It is now generally agreed that Surrealism had a particular affection for non-Western art, objects of interior revelation and inexhaustible sources of the marvelous. The artists of the movement immersed themselves in study of foreign cultures and in the human spirit of people of distant regions. In their quest to renew appropriate sources to support their vision of the world, the movement was passionate about anything associated with the strange and the foreign. The Western world, having sunk into irrationality by abusing reason, and having broken the tie between the physical and the mental, needed to regain a new harmony. Primitive arts provided a path for reconquest of instinct and long-forgotten qualities.

These preoccupations, which they believed similar to their own, led them finally across the globe to the Far North. Some of them, such as Max Ernst, were hypnotized by the Hopi Indians, while others, notably Wolfgang Paalen, were under the spell of British Columbia. However, the fascination for the Far North had a definite place in the history of Surrealism and the Americas.

If their interest in the American Indians is today widely known, that for the Inuit of the Arctic still remains abstract. The principal difficulty of such a study lies in the flagrant absence of written testimonies. The only evidence of their interest is found in a few sentences, letters or poems. Collections, auction records, and inventories of books bought by the different protagonists are also very helpful for understanding their degree of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, these elements remain rather scarce, especially in comparison with the data available for other cultural areas. And it goes without saying that without the famous 1929 Surrealist Map of the World, early interest in the Far North would have remained unexplored. Indeed, this essential document shows an entirely rethought planisphere, in which Alaska, Labrador and Greenland are magnified and almost supplant Oceania.
This paper consequently aims at defining the appreciation of Inuit art, and more generally, the Inuit world, by the Surrealists. It will be shown that this interest was already firmly ingrained in the 1920's, long before the exile. It is highly likely that the renowned art dealer Charles Ratton invited members of the group to see the pieces he regularly acquired. We know that André Breton and Paul Eluard started their own collections soon thereafter and, as attested by the 1931 auction catalogue of their collections at the Hôtel Drouot, they possessed a good number of Inuit artifacts.

The exhibition of then still-little-known Inuit and Northwest Coast objects at the Galerie Charles Ratton in 1935 is also considered. This first encounter between the Surrealists and Yup'ik masks was of great importance since many Surrealist artists and writers, as we know, were fascinated by these shamanistic creations. Paul Eluard, in particular, was amazed by this art and wrote "La nuit est à une dimension" - the only published article dedicated to Inuit art – for Cahiers d’art on the occasion. In this text, and through a rereading of Knud Rasmussen, he reveals his own perception and understanding of the Inuit way of life, its struggles and hopes.

Emphasis is placed on the exile period, in which the attraction for Inuit art was at a climax and multiple opportunities for viewing and acquisition were possible. Most of the individuals gravitating around the Surrealist core saw, loved, and bought Yup’ik masks in New York. In a letter to her husband, Isabelle Waldberg summed up everyday life very well: “We threw ourselves into the poetic atmosphere of Eskimo masks, we are breathing Alaska and we are dreaming Tlingit and we are loving ourselves in the Haida totempoles.”

Finally, this paper will treat the subject from a slightly different perspective than that of previous studies: not only will the history of collecting and the visual panorama of the time be recalled, but the appearance of a specific Inuit representation, unavoidably bound to its unique territory, will also be questioned. Moreover, my argument will focus on possible affinities shared in Surrealist and Inuit thinking. The members of the group admired the aesthetic and plastic inventiveness of Inuit art; but they were also impressed by the inner life of this culture, found in its poetry and beliefs.

The conclusion of this paper will demonstrate that the Surrealists were generous in sharing their knowledge and discoveries. They thereby greatly contributed to acknowledgement of non-Western cultures and transcended the vision we have today of these arts.