Article
Sleeping Gods in Surrealist Collections
Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures
(2013)
Abstract
When Antonin Artaud wrote about “the gods that sleep in museums,” he could have been describing André Breton's personal collection, which included the kinds of non-Western works Artaud admired in what were then museums of ethnography. Such objects were plentiful in Breton's study and included shape-shifting animals such as the Haida transformation mask Breton wrote about in 1950, whose features move back and forth from human to animal, recognizing the common spiritual connection between the two in a material representation of the concept of the totem animal embraced by several surrealists—the fish for Breton, the bird for Max Ernst, the horse for Leonora Carrington, the dog for Dorothea Tanning. This article examines how the surrealists’ talismanic animal totems, reflected in their love of non-Western spiritually infused objects, anticipated the current trend in animal studies to expand the human understanding of consciousness in light of animal–human commonalities.
Keywords
- animal-human,
- animal studies,
- Antonin Artaud,
- André Breton,
- collection,
- non-Western objects,
- spiritual,
- totem animals,
- transformation mask
Disciplines
Publication Date
Spring March 14, 2013
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/00397709.2013.762851
Citation Information
Katharine Conley. "Sleeping Gods in Surrealist Collections" Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures Vol. 67 Iss. 1 (2013) p. 6 - 24 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/katharine-conley/5/