Objects of Desire: Surrealist Collecting and the Art of the Pacific Northwest Coast

• Author / Creator

  Davis, Karl J

• This thesis is an examination of four figures connected to the surrealist
  movement: André Breton, Kurt Seligmann, Wolfgang Paalen, and the
  anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and their interest in art and objects from the
  First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. It includes case-studies of
  four specific objects that each of them collected: a Kwakwaka'wakw Yaxwiwe'
  headdress, a Wet'suwet'en Keïgiet totem pole, a Tlingit Chief Shakes Bear Screen,
  and a Tsimshian Shaman Figure, respectively. While recent scholarship fixes their
  interest in these objects to their backgrounds in anthropology, philosophy and
  theory, I will argue that the basis for their collecting was driven by 'surrealist
  desire' and that other considerations were secondary to this desire. I examine the
  history of surrealist collecting, the intersection of anthropology and surrealism,
  and the role of the 'primitive' object in surrealism.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Wet'suwet'en
  • Kurt Seligmann
  • Andre Breton
  • Tsimshian
  • Pacific Northwest Coast
  • Claude Levi-Strauss
  • First Nations
  • Collecting
  • Convulsive Beauty
  • Wolfgang Paalen
  • Archives
  • Tlingit
  • Kwakwaka'wakw
  • Structural Anthropology
  • Surrealism

• Graduation date

  Spring 2014

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3N964

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.