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The Colour of My Dreams: Surrealism’s First Nations Connections

Since its birth in the 1920s, thousands of texts and exhibitions have explored the production and legacy of surrealism, a movement that is widely agreed to have grown out of European Dada and have been based in Paris and New York.

Now, a new show at the Vancouver Art Gallery is highlighting what has been, for many viewers, an overlooked aspect of the surrealists’ process: their fascination with First Nations art, some of it from the BC area.

“A lot of surrealists were collectors, and they were also interested in the art of non-Western cultures,” says the exhibition’s UK-based curator Dawn Ades, who has been studying and curating shows on the movement since the 1970s. “They were already collecting Kwakwaka’wakw masks from the northwest coast in the 1920s.”

The resulting exhibition comprises more than 350 works by leading surrealist artists like André Breton, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Leonora Carrington; a variety of related films and photographs; and some key First Nations masks and artifacts.

Kwakwaka’wakw Ya x wiwe’ (Peace Dance Headdress) 1922 / photo Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery

“We were very careful as far as possible to show the actual [First Nations] works that were in surrealists’ collections,” says Ades. “One of the most exciting things we have is a Peace Dance headdress that was in André Breton’s collection. This was a headdress that had been confiscated after the potlatch and had a long period of travelling around before it ended up in Paris, where Breton bought it in 1965. After he died, his daughter returned the piece to a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural centre, which lent it to us for the show.”

Also illuminating this connection is the fact that two of the surrealists, Kurt Seligmann and Wolfgang Paalen, didn’t just collect west-coast artifacts; they actually travelled up the BC coast in the 1930s. Ades explains that Seligmann was commissioned to collect art by the French Museum of Mankind and took many photographs of First Nations settlements. Those who look closely will see that some of these photographs are referenced in Seligmann’s paintings in the exhibition.

Kurt Seligmann Mat totem tombé (Fallen Totem Pole) 1932 © 2011 Orange County Citizens Foundation / SODRAC / photo Musée du Quai Branly / SCALA / Art Resource NY

But even where direct reference points can’t be drawn, Ades hopes to push to the fore a kind of general affinity the surrealists believed they felt for First Nations perspectives.

“I think something that they saw as shared with First Nations cultures was a belief in the importance of dreams,” says Ades. “They thought a lot of Western art had lost its contact with anything in the world that was not purely rational or conscious. They felt very strongly that nationalism and colonialism were a problem and looked outside for other ways of going about things.”

“I wouldn’t say the surrealists were exactly influenced by First Nations, but they certainly admired them.”

Gilles Ehrmann André Breton’s apartment at 42, rue Fontaine 1968 Courtesy Jean-Luc Mercié

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