the Call of the Wild

The history of the fascination of Surrealist and abstract artists with the indigenous art of the Arctic is a long one. It starts in the 1930s, when George G. Heye, founder of the Museum of the American Indian in New York, decided to deaccession some of the less-prized Inuit and Northwest Coast pieces in the museum’s collection. He allowed the dealer Julius Carlebach, a friend of Max Ernst and a close associate of the Surrealists, to sell these at reasonable prices, and the buyers included such luminaries as Ernst, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, Roberto Matta, and Enrico Donati. The works, especially the Yup’ik masks from Alaska, made a deep impression on the artists, with their evocative and bizarre imagery, asymmetry, and suggestions of the transformation of animal into human and vice versa. The masks seemed to speak from the uncanny realm of the subconscious, to which the Surrealists tried to gain admittance by the practice of automatism, suspending the rational and controlling faculty of the mind in order to let creativity flow.

Separately, at the end of the 1930s, the Austrian-born Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen became interested in Northwest Coast and Alaskan art and went on several collecting trips to those regions. A theorist and something of an anthropologist as well as an artist, Paalen believed that these indigenous works expressed a “totemic” mentality that refused