“The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art”

How does artistic influence work? This was the key question underlying the Vancouver Art Gallery’s brilliant recent exhibition “The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art.” Organized for the VAG by British art historian Dawn Ades, the show set out to explore the surrealist state of mind, noting, too, the impact of cinema and the dawning of mass media on the movement. But what made the show distinctive, and uniquely resonant for this British Columbian institution, was its chronicling of the Surrealist fascination with the indigenous art of the Pacific Northwest. Working as they were in the aftermath of World War I and its horrors, the poets André Breton and Paul Éluard and the leading artists Max Ernst, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy collected these indigenous objects with a passion (particularly after they regrouped in New York during WWII), experiencing the native art of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska as kindred in spirit to their own ideal of transgressive beauty. Writing in 1948 of this early affinity, Breton recalled: “I am still as captivated by these objects as I was in my youth when a few of us were instantly enthralled at the sight of them. The surrealist adventure, at the outset, is inseparable from the seduction, the fascination, they exerted over us.”

Photographs of Breton’s studio at 42 rue Fontaine in Paris near the end of his life bear out the talismanic importance of these objects to his own creative process. Front and centre on his desk, Surrealism’s great chieftain (I use the term advisedly) gave pride of place to a carved Haida wooden box, atop which he placed a ceremonial Kwakwaka’wakw hawk and raven frontlet, inlaid with abalone and dressed with white ermine at side and back. Its presence there exerted not so much a stylistic influence (though the trope of metamorphosis, and a propensity for pictorial compression and distortion, was shared by Surrealists and Northwest Coast carvers alike) as it did inspiration, granting a kind of permission to these Freud-saturated urban Parisians to plumb the depths of their own primal fears and desires. The dripping rain forests of Vancouver Island had become, for them, analogous to the dark-dreaming recesses of the unconscious mind.

In a curatorial coup of the sort that characterized this show as a whole, Ades was able to negotiate the display of this ceremonial frontlet in the opening gallery of “The Colour of My Dreams,” along with the accompanying story of how it had been taken from the coast (confiscated by the RCMP in 1922 during the potlatch ban), had travelled to Paris via Los Angeles and New York (passing from the relative of a BC police officer to the hands of a succession of art dealers), and had ended up in the collection of Breton, who bought the work in 1966, near the end of his life. Nearly 40 years later, in 2003, Breton’s daughter Aube Elléouët donated the frontlet to the U’Mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, from where it was loaned for this exhibition, a rare and providential example of cultural transmission come full circle.

In the same gallery at the VAG, Ades displayed a 20-foot high “speaking through” totem pole nearly identical to one acquired by Max Ernst during his marriage to the New York art collector Peggy Guggenheim. In the 1940s, Ernst installed the monumental object at the entrance to their home in the south of France, much to his wife’s consternation. “It was a terrifying object,” she later recalled in her memoirs, “and I hated to have it in the house.” It now resides in the Louvre.

This exhibition was full of such tales of charged artistic intersection. In Surrealism’s earliest incarnations—such as the 1927 Paris exhibition “Yves Tanguy et Objets d’Amérique,” with loans from the collections of Louis Aragon, Éluard and Breton—the art of the Tlingit, Tsimshian, Haida, Inuit (as well as the Indigenous people of the American Southwest and Central and South America) was a revelation. During the mid-1930s, the Parisian dealer Charles Ratton exhibited art from the Pacific Northwest in several shows, and Breton and Duchamp’s 1936 “Surrealist Exhibition of Objects” (reconstituted in part in Ades’s show) brought together objects as disparate as Surrealist sculptures, photographs and paintings, Northwest Coast and Inuit artefacts, as well as a variety of objets trouvés, among them deformed objects that had melted in the 1902 eruption of Mt. Pelée on Martinique. “Convulsive beauty”—in Breton’s famous phrase—was the order of the day.

With the Surrealist exodus to New York on the eve of WWII (Breton crossed the Atlantic on the same boat as the famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss), the Surrealist penchant to collect took hold in earnest through the ministrations of a German émigré dealer named Julius Carlebach, who had access to the hoard of objects then being deaccessioned from the Museum of the American Indian, under the direction of its founder, George Gustav Heye (an early encyclopedic collector of Northwest Coast materials). Both German-born Surrealist painters Kurt Seligmann and Wolfgang Paalen had travelled to the Northwest Coast—in 1938 and 1939 respectively—and Paalen met Emily Carr in Victoria.

Ades included several of Seligmann’s photographs in the show (originally published in the Surrealist periodical Minotaur in 1939), as well as numerous other objects that passed through the hands of Heye, Carlebach and their clients in New York, like a treasured handful of the notebooks in which the collector Robert Lebel documented masks collected by the Surrealists (an invaluable document of provenance), a Tlingit mask and carved ivory amulet once owned by Paalen, a Yup’ik mask with a walrus face collected by Surrealist artist Enrico Donati, and another formerly owned by Lebel, as well as a somewhat garish early-20th century Tsimshian carving of a kneeling shaman that was clearly made for trade (statues of this sort were never indigenous to this culture) from the collection of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Looking at it, you can imagine the Tsimshian artist imagining the exotic notion of the Indian that white collectors of the day were (yes) imagining—making it a kind of hall of mirrors of projected identities and cross-cultural assumptions.

Cultural theorists might reasonably be miffed at the thought of the Surrealists appropriating the ceremonial art of the Northwest Coast with no scholarly inquiry as to its ritual function or clan ownership, but the exhibition’s didactic materials and labels deftly pick their way through this political thicket without snapping a twig, acknowledging that complexity while also directing us to remember that Surrealists’ distinctly anti-colonial stance toward their own European mother cultures. Responding to the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris, and in collaboration with the French Communist Party, Breton and his circle mounted an exhibition titled “La Vérité sur les Colonies (The Truth About the Colonies),” a critique of “le massacre colonial” that featured a display of a Madonna and Child figurine titled European Fetish, deftly turning the tables on European notions of racial supremacy. This is post-colonial critique a half century ahead of the herd.

“The Colour of My Dreams,” then, functioned as a seedbed for new ideas. Much has been made, for example, of Emily Carr’s debt to European Fauvism, which she experienced at first hand during her travels in France as a young woman. But might she not be more properly considered as a Surrealist soulmate? And can we not look at the Surrealist love of gender morphing and bodily distortion as related to the formal compressions of iconography of Northwest Coast art, with its emphasis on transformation? Importantly, the show allowed us to see how objects can travel between cultures, igniting ideas in ways that their makers could never have imagined.

“They were not producing art for the market, but carving and painting and praying and dancing to restore harmony to the world,” writes Simon Fraser University professor and catalogue contributor Colin Browne of the carvers of the Pacific Northwest. “Disease, starvation, accidents, derangement and the supernatural were constant dangers. Is it any wonder,” he asks, “that the Surrealists, exiled from a home that had disgraced itself, broken its own laws and refused to acknowledge its complicity in mass murder, would be drawn to these masks that in their humility and sincerity were dedicated to restoring balance and order, to marking a safe passage from darkness into the light.” And is it any wonder that they continue to bewitch us still? ❚

“The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art” was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery from May 28 to October 2, 2011.

Sarah Milroy is a Toronto-based writer.