FEATURE 114 exhibited in 1948 at the Galerie Andrée Olive in Paris and was the subject of one of Breton’s celebrated poems, Uli. For sure you are a great god I have seen you with my own eyes as no other You are still covered in earth and blood—you’ve just created You are an old peasant that knows nothing To recover, you ate like a pig You are covered with human stains One can see you have them stuffed up your ears You can hear no more You leer at us from inside a shell Your creation ties your hands up, and you threaten still You are scary, you are wonderful11 (fig. 12) Perhaps the rarest piece in the Breton Collection was the large Tolai spirit figure, tabalivana (fig. 13), which stood opposite the uli statue on the other side of his desk. Unlike New Ireland sculptures, woodcarvings—and even more so, masks and fiber art—from New Britain are rare in public and private collections. There wasn’t as extensive a figural sculptural tradition in New Britain, and that, combined with the inherent fragility of the objects and, of course, the extremely secretive nature of the societies that these works were created for, precluded their being collected on anything near the scale that went on in New Ireland and the Admiralty Islands. Another factor may be that the spectacular New Ireland malangan displays readily captured the eye of the foreign visitor and that New Ireland art was perhaps more easily understood in the context of virtuosic woodcarving than the generally more ephemeral works from New Britain. After training as an architect and interior designer in Santiago, Roberto Matta left Chile in 1933 for Europe. Arriving in Paris he worked in the atelier of Le Corbusier for a year before traveling to Spain, where he was introduced to Salvador Dali. Impressed with his drawings, Dali suggested that Matta show his work to Breton. With the support of Dali and Breton, Matta officially joined the surrealist movement in 1937 and played an active part as an artist and architect. In the summer of 1938, he changed his method of expression from drawing to painting, and FIG. 12 (left): Standing figure, uli. New Ireland. Collected before 1914 by a German botanist. Herman Seeger, Stuttgart. Wood, opercula (Turbo petholatus), shell, fiber, adhesive putty, pigment. H: 108 cm. Private collection. Photo: © Hughes Dubois. FIG. 13 (upper right): Standing figure. Tolai, New Britain. Wood, pigment. H: 107 cm. Ex Andre Breton Collection. Private collection. Photo courtesy Calmel Cohen, Paris. FIG. 14 (right): Roberto Matta, How Ever, 1947. Oil on canvas. 218 x 365 cm. Photo courtesy of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
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