Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

Known primarily as a surrealist poet, César Moro also created numerous paintings and collages in a surrealist mode. Born in Peru, Moro made the obligatory sojourn to Paris in 1925 to immerse himself in European avant-garde activities. In 1928 he met André Breton and began to experiment with surrealist technique as a means to push both his painting and his poetry in new directions. Moro was one of the first Latin American artists to take up collage as an autonomous art form, creating images that combine text with photographs from advertisements, scientific journals, and newspapers in bizarrely incongruous ways.
When he returned to Peru, Moro organized the first exhibition of surrealist art in Latin America at the Academía Alcedo in Lima, Peru in 1935. Given the dominance of Indigenism in the visual arts in Peru, this was a bold move on Moro’s part. While the exhibition baffled the public, it introduced new possibilities to young artists working in Peru and challenged the ascendancy of Indigenism. In 1938 Moro left Peru for Mexico where he would remain for the next decade. There he renewed his contact with Breton and the two joined forces, together with the painter Wolfgang Paalen, to organize the Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo at the Galería de Arte Mexicano in 1940.
This essay will trace César Moro’s extensive engagement with surrealism, from his early participation in Breton’s surrealist group in Paris, to the exhibition he organized in Peru, and finally to Mexico. By examining closely Moro’s surrealist collages and paintings, I hope to reveal the depth of his involvement with the movement, as an artist, poet, and organizer on a transnational scale.

“My world is surreal” says Yuxweluptun (b. 1957). The Coast Salish artist lives in Vancouver and therefore on un-ceded native land, where the ‘rights’ of Native people are, contradictorily, defined by the 1876 Indian Act. Yuxweluptun accounts for the surreal in his paintings as retaliation for a mode that drew on Indigenous sources to define itself. They are part of a capacious, populist discursive history that has long informed production and reception of Northwest Coast Native art. ‘The Colour of My Dreams: the Surrealist Revolution in Art’, at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2011) helped to establish its historical framework.

“Native American Surrealism” may be a contradiction in terms. If “surrealism” is a European creation, then joining it with “Native American” suggests an oxymoron. European surrealism was, however, based in part on Native expression. So “Native American Surrealism” could be used to identify an artistic mode avant la lettre appropriated by non-Natives. And some contemporary art by Native artists could be seen as a complex re-appropriation, a Native American surrealism après la lettre. This paper will examine the conjunction of “Native American” and “surrealism” and its significance by considering the work of five prominent Native artists from the Upper Midwest: Frank Bigbear, Julie Buffalohead, Star Wallowing Bull, Andrea Carlson, and Jim Denomie. To fully engage the issue of surrealism, the paper will also discuss their work in relation to other aspects of contemporary art, including the revival of interest in narrative, post-Pop representational styles, and the current fascination with satire.

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.

This paper examines the use of Native American objects in Surrealist strategies of display in order to interrogate larger issues of identity, place and nation. The 1942 "First Papers of Surrealism" exhibition, organized by Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp in New York City, is both grounded in the specificity of time and place that it occupied and emblematic of the international Surrealist exhibitions the movement staged from the mid-1930s onward. These shows, often designed as multi-sensorial environments, showcased an international display of art, ranging from painting, sculpture and photography by artists more or less closely affiliated with the Parisian Surrealist group to non-western objects, folk art, art of the insane, and children’s art.

Invariably displaced, the Native American objects, “which the Surrealists particularly appreciate,” function on a number of levels in the movement’s collective activities: both representing and performing Surrealist aims while inscribing it within the larger American landscape. New World attitudes toward Amerindian cultures and art inform Surrealism as it winds through the fabric of the real and imaginary spaces of the Americas. The exhibitions, as “contact zones,” thus establish a point of convergence and transit, an in-between space of “dwelling in travel,” a borderless spatial construct enacting the complexity and dynamism of the Surrealist project.