Robert Lebel’s Notebook We threw ourselves into the poetic atmosphere of the Eskimo masks; we breathe in Alaska, we dream Tlingit, and we make love in Haida totem poles. Carlebach’s on 3rd Avenue has become the place of our desires. And we pay. Robert has a beautiful collection. Dolores is spending a fortune and André has overcome the impossible to have two. The story is well remembered. A group of European surrealists were riding out WWII in New York. These included André Breton, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, and Isabelle and Patrick Claude Lévi-Strauss, Enrico Donati, Georges Duthuit, Dolores Vanetti, and Robert Lebel. Ernst is credited with discovering Julius Carlebach’s Avenue, attracted by a Northwest Coast spoon that was in the window. He found that there was 134 ticularly that of the Far North, which was to so infl uence their thought and their artwork. Given its surrealist context, this story is typically aggrandizing and borders on the mythic. Like many myths, it has its roots in fact, though the truth is actually far more interesting than the fi ction. While certainly a signifi cant moment, this was by no means the surrealists’ fi rst introduction to northern art. That interest in the Far North was an early part of surrealism is clearly articulated in the “Surrealist Map of the World” (fi g. 15), fi rst published in a special issue of the Belgian periodical Variétés in 1929, though likely drafted by Paul Éluard a few years earlier. While layered in meaning, the areas that were respected by (and to a greater or lesser degree collected by) the surrealists are hieratically scaled. Oceania, a central source of surrealist inspiration, is at the center of the map and disproportionately enormous, while Europe is a speck relegated to a far margin. Africa, an acknowledged source of inspiration for modernist artists, is tiny. Russia is vastly prominent as a source of political inspiration, and North America is entirely composed of Alaska and Labrador, situated below an equally prominent Greenland. That the art from the Arctic was known to the surrealists early on is further evidenced by the fact that Native North American objects were paired with works by Yves Tanguy in an exhibition held FIG. 1 (left): Man Ray (1890–1976), installation view of the Exposition du Surréaliste d’Objet, held at Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, in May 1936. © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP. FIG. 2 (above): Cover of the notebook of drawings by Robert Lebel (1901–1986), c. 1942–1946. Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, gift of Jean-Jacques Lebel, inv. 70.2007.11.1. Photo © Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Images © Jean-Jacques Lebel. All drawings in this article are from this notebook. FIG. 3 (below): Carol-Marc Lavrillier (b. 1933), Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel (right) viewed through Duchamp’s sculpture Bicycle Wheel, c. 1959. Photo © Carol-Marc Lavrillier. By Sebastian Miller Waldberg, who were all close friends with eclectic gallery, then located at 943 Third more Northwest Coast art inside, as well as rare Yup’ik masks from Alaska. He tried to keep his fi nd secret, but his friends ferreted the place out in short order and, being collectors themselves, reveled in what they found there. They soon discovered that much of the northern Native American material that they were interested in had come from the Heye Foundation, and they met with the museum’s curator, got him drunk at Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment, and then raced in taxis to the museum’s Bronx warehouse, where they acquired more treasures. Art writer Robert Lebel kept a sketchbook, pages from which are reproduced here, in which, amid this frenzy of art acquisition, he documented the Arctic objects, recording what information was available about the Yup’ik masks they were buying. And so the surrealists discovered Native American art, par- Isabelle Waldberg, c. 1944. PORTFOLIO
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