Footnotes

Paul Éluard and André Breton first met in Paris in March 1919. Breton, along with fellow writers, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, had recently started a new surrealist magazine, Littérature. Impressed by what the shy Éluard read to them on the occasion, they invited him to contribute to the next edition of the magazine. Breton and Éluard became close friends.

In 1924, exactly 100 years ago, Breton published his first Surrealist manifesto along with Éluard and fellow writers Louis Aragon, André Breton, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Jean Carrive, René Crevel; the photographer Jacques-André Boiffard and the artist Georges Malkine. Claiming to be the successors of the legacy of Guillaume Apollinaire who had first used the term 'surrealism' in 1917, they sought to allow the free expression of the unconscious mind.

The arts of the Pacific would play an important role in the Surrealist movement. Breton had purchased his first object of 'primitive art', an Easter Island sculpture, with money given to him by his parents in 1913 for passing a school exam. The arts of the Pacific best represented the revolution of artistic perception the Surrealists sought with its variety and unexpected visual appearance. On a map entitled 'The World at the Time of Surrealism', published in the Belgian avant-garde magazine Variétés, countries were accorded a size relative to their importance in the eyes of the surrealists with Pacific islands at the centre - Easter Island appears as large as the continent of south America. As Yaëlle Biro points out in her article in Contact Zones: Africa, Oceania, and North America as Sites of Dialogue and Friction Surrealism (p.10) Breton would explain later in the preface to his catalogue Océanie in 1948 the surrealist preference for Oceanic over African arts. The latter he described as realists, anchored in materiality, far removed from Surrealist preoccupations, while the former are spiritual and poignant, with the potential to spark both dreams and desire.

In 1931, reputedly due to financial difficulties, Breton and Éluard organised a sale of "Sculpture d'Afrique, D'Amérique, d'Océanie" at the Hotel Drouot. The sale was planned to coincide with the opening of the Exposition coloniale internationale in Paris. Pacific objects dominated with six lots from Easter Island. Charles Ratton bought the Easter Island rei-miro for 3,500 francs and René Gaffé acquired the two Easter Island moko for 6,200 and 3,800 francs respectively, one of them being the present lot. Ahead of the sale Gaffé had also bought directly from Breton, his uli figure. Yaëlle Biro (op.cit., p.10) points out that Breton, Éluard and other members of the Surrealist movement, were not merely participating in the burgeoning market for non-Western objects in Europe, but were actively shaping it. Their involvement in the market, their large scale selling at auction and influence on the descriptions in auction catalogues, contributed to the dynamism in the market and the shaping of the Western narrative on such works.

René Gaffé, a Belgian bibliophile, collector and journalist, had made a fortune in the perfume industry and had formed an important collection of Cubist and Surrealist works by painters such as de Chirico, Braque, Picasso and Miró, as well as important Oceanic and African art. Many of the paintings and other works he acquired through Breton and Éluard who acted as dealers. Gaffé loaned works to the International Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936 and the following June organised two exhibitions at the Zwemmer gallery in London with works from his collection - Joan Miró and Chirico – Picasso. Forty of the exhibited paintings were acquired by Roland Penrose, the artist, historian and poet, for £6,750, a very modest price at the time.

For years Gaffé supported Breton and Éluard financially, buying objects for them when they were in need. His debt to them he acknowledged in his A la Verticale: Reflections of a Collector, published in 1963.

"It is, I believe, quite rare for a collector to move, spontaneously, from one school to another out of an appetite for knowledge. It is more natural for someone to point him a direction that could lead him on the path of new discoveries. André Breton and Paul Éluard helped me in this first step. Indeed, they had brought together carefully selected Cubist works with the most moving statues from black Africa and the Pacific. Without much explanation, they led me into an area that was still little explored at the time and revealed to me its truth. Breton had written that it was impossible for him to conceive of a spiritual joy other than as a breath of fresh air! What had immediately impressed me was discovering the science of taste they both shared when encountering objects that conveyed feeling. They never bought anything mediocre and, prodigiously inspired, had succeeded in transforming an apartment, which, without their expertise, would have been banal."

His friendship is clear from a dedication written by Breton:

"To René Gaffé, whose active friendship has never ceased to be of the greatest help to surrealism. August 1, 1932."

Gaffé retired to the south of France in the mid 1950s with his wife, Jeanne where they lived surrounded by their collection. Gaffé sold his important collection of Dadaist and Surrealist books in Paris in 1956. After Gaffé's death in 1968 his wife kept the collection intact until her own death in 2001 when the collection, including the present lot, was sold for the benefit of UNICEF, in accordance with the terms of his will.

Moko miro or Moai tangata moko are hybrid beings, half man and half lizard. They are only known in the form of wood carvings and do not appear on petroglyphs or carved on rongo rongo tablets.

Michel and Catherine Orliac, writing about moai tangata moko (in Treasures of Easter Island: Collection of the congregation of the Sacred-Hearts of Jesus and Mary SS.CC, Paris, 2008, p.145 ) explain that the term moai moko coined by Routledge is less appropriate than their preferred term, moai tangata moko; moai describing all anthropomorphic and zoomorphic carvings of Easter Island, moko being 'lizard' and tangata referring to human figure which forms the lower body. Their function was reported to Wihelm Geiseler in 1882 as being clubs intended to protect the entrance of houses. According to Alfred Métraux (Ethnology of Easter Island, Honolulu, 1940, p.265) during the inauguration of a house the images of lizard-men were placed on each side of the door to protect the entrance and were also brandished before the enemy (from the next world) to repulse their attacks. Certainly, some of the smaller examples are pierced on the spine for suspension and may have been attached to dancers during ceremonies. Some show evidence of having been covered with a brown dye that was not renewed during the course of their ceremonial life.

The wood of the present lot was identified as toromiro (Sophora toromiro) by Catherine Orliac following analysis of a wood sample (Botanical Identification of 200 Easter Island Wood Carvings, Conference paper presented at the VIIth International Conference on Easter Island and the Pacific (EIPC), 2007). Toromiro was the most highly prized wood amongst Easter Island artists. At one time it grew in abundance on the island but disappeared in its native habitat in the 1960s.