Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2007

By Stéphane Massonet.
He publishes and lectures on the avant-garde, ethnology, and literature. He also works in the fields of digital media and long-term preservation of cultural heritage.

Introduction:
There was a time when objects that we once called primitive were once accessible to small budgets. For instance, when André Breton and I were in the United States, we knew that these objects were as beautiful as those of other civilizations. And one could acquire them for modest sums of money. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Far from Brazil, 2005, page 25

Visitors to the Musée du Quai Branly encounter a display case of Kwakiutl objects in the permanent Americas section. The pieces in this case were once in the collections of Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton, and several Eskimo masks directly across the aisle share the same provenance. Those who read the labels carefully may be intrigued to see these two historic names together, and to see the pieces that belonged to them displayed side by side. Located just a few steps away from the museum’s Dogon exhibit—which includes some of the most important works collected by the 1931–1933 Dakar-Djibouti Expedition, to which Breton dedicated many pages of his magazine, Minotaur—this fine collection of Native American art represents a less-well-known chapter in the history of the avant-garde and French ethnology. The founding father of Surrealism and the great French ethnographer assembled this group of objects jointly while they were both living in exile in New York during the Second World War.