PORTFOLIO 146 they would have had to Arctic art would not have been through actual objects but rather publications, chief among them Edward William Nelson’s heavily illustrated The Eskimo About Bering Strait, published in the 1899 Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. These and other publications would have been readily available in Paris in the 1920s and can account for the surrealists’ fascination with an otherwise virtually unheard of and alien art form. This situation changed in 1931 or 1932 (the date is lost since there was no catalog), when Charles Ratton held an exhibition of Northwest Coast and Arctic art in Paris, drawn from the collection of the Heye Foundation in New York, which was raising funds by selling redundant or irrelevant material to allow for new acquisitions. Writing in 1978, Elizabeth Cowling, in her excellent article “The Eskimos, the American Indians, and the Surrealists” (Art History I:4), tellingly notes, “The exhibition gave the Surrealists a unique opportunity to see with their own eyes a large number of those elusively rare Eskimo masks ... .” Attendance was low and sales were limited to a single piece to Man Ray. Several of these objects appeared again in the 1936 Exposition surréaliste d’objets (fi g. 1), also held at Ratton’s gallery. The discovery of Arctic art at Carlebach’s gallery in New York during the war was not an epiphany of radical new “poem objects,” but rather provided direct access to works that for the most part had been seen only in illustrations, and affordably so since Heye apparently did not place any real value on these extraordinary masks. To his credit, he did not allow the surrealists to pillage the collection at Galerie Surréaliste in Paris in 1926 and that the collections of André Breton and Paul Éluard, which were auctioned in Paris in July of 1931, included a signifi cant number of Northwest Coast and Arctic artworks. So why all the fuss about New York? The surrealists were iconoclasts, harshly reevaluating dominant fi gures and cultures while raising up those which, correctly or otherwise, they felt were consistent with their worldview. This search for intellectual and spiritual partners with whom they felt an affi nity went far beyond Europe (indeed, almost to the exclusion of it) and embraced the so-called primitive cultures—at least those that had not already been claimed by unworthy art movements (i.e., Africa). Collecting artifacts from these cultures was an important method of developing a deeper understanding of them, and exhibitions to which artworks from these collections were loaned were a way of sharing the resulting intellectual development. While Oceanic art was plentiful in Europe, North American Native art, and particularly Arctic art, was rare in Europe, even in museums. The most prominent material visible there before the wars was the Jacobsen Collection at the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde, which included a number of fi ne examples of Yup’ik masks that were published early on, and the Pinart Collection of Sugpiaq masks in Boulogne-sur-Mer, though these were less elaborate than the Yup’ik examples. Several of the Pinart masks were displayed in the Musée du Trocodéro in Paris, where they would have been easily accessible to the developing surrealists. However, most of the early exposure that FIG. 15 (above): Attributed to Paul Éluard (1895–1952), “Le Monde au temps des surréalistes.” First published in Variétés, Brussels, 1929.
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