ROBERT LEBEL’S NOTEBOOK the Penn Museum, and the University of California at Berkeley. Several of these, including the latter, were included in the 1941 MoMA exhibition Indian Art of the United States and also appear in its catalog. That some of these were sketched from the catalog seems clear, since the angles match. If the purpose of the notebook was simply to document Lebel’s friends’ purchases, there would be little point in including examples from museum collections. It is known that Lebel, Breton, and Duthuit had planned to produce a book on Arctic art—what certainly would have been the book on the subject at the time—but the project was abandoned for lack of support. It seems likely that Lebel’s sketchbook represents notes for this project, the more so since the drawings in the book may be by more than one hand. At least two hands also contributed to the text notes, with some parts even overwritten in a clearer second hand. A second notebook with thirteen pages of Lebel’s truly atrocious handwriting supports this, being notes on published sources, ethnographic information, and surrealist perceptions of Arctic masks. From what survives, it is clear that this would have been a remarkable surrealist publication on Yup’ik masks, but one that sadly was 147 never realized. For more information, see Collection Robert Lebel, Paris: Calmels Cohen, 2006. Yves le Fur (ed.), Hommage aux donateur. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac/Éditions Xavier Barral, 2016. as they are reputed to have done, but since most Yup’ik masks were produced in pairs, he generally retained one example (most now in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution) and released the other. Edmund Carpenter recalled that only some fi fteen masks were purchased directly from the museum, so many of the rest recorded by Lebel were likely sourced by Carlebach from Heye, though at least one certainly came via Ratton (fi g. 16). Drawings from Lebel’s notebook were fi rst published by Ann Fienup-Riordan in her excellent 1996 book, The Living Tradition of Yup’ik Masks: Agayuliyararput. However, a careful look at the notebook as a whole provides additional information. Acquisition dates are not included, but most of the individuals associated with them were in New York only between 1941 and 1945, and several of the pieces were published in the fourth issue of the surrealist journal VVV in February of 1944, indicating that these likely had been acquired by then. Thirty-nine of his fi fty-eight drawings document works presumably acquired by his friends and himself. A few of the remaining drawings are not paired with any name at all, though at least one of those masks eventually ended up with Breton. Others show works identifi ed with Carlebach, the Heye Foundation, the American Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of Canada, FIGS. 16a and b: Lebel notebook, leaf 54. Yup’ik, Yukon or Kuskoquim River, Alaska. Early 20th century. Wood, feathers, pigment. H: 50 cm. Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York; Charles Ratton, Paris, 1931 or 1932; Dolores Vanetti, New York; André Breton, Paris, 1935 or 1943/44. Association Atelier André Breton, Paris, inv. 4752000. Photo: Benjamin Krebs, © AAAB/ MCHM. This mask appears in an installation photo of the Exposition du Surréaliste d’Objet, held at the Ladrière-Ratton Gallery, Paris, in May 1936. See fi g. 1.
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