Földvári Books

Arts Primitifs: An Illustrated Drouot Sale Catalogue, 1930

[Portier, André]

[Cover Title]: Arts Primitifs. Américain. Africain. Océanien. Salle n° 10. 4–5 Décembre 1930.

[Paris]: Hôtel Drouot, 1930. First edition. Original printed wrappers with typographic cover label. 14 [2] p., and 8 plates of photographic reproductions. Spine worn and partly split, with small loss at foot; covers lightly soiled, with creasing and minor edge wear. Interior generally clean; paper lightly toned, with occasional handling marks. Plates well preserved. Overall in very good condition.

Illustrated Drouot catalogue, issued at the peak of the Paris market for arts primitifs and closely aligned with the collecting horizon of the Surrealist milieu.

Around 1930, the Paris market for arts primitifs reached a high level of visibility, with Hôtel Drouot serving as its principal venue and regular sales bringing together material from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania within a newly defined commercial and classificatory framework. Auction catalogues issued for these sales document the formation of this field at the point when such objects were being repositioned from ethnographic material into works of aesthetic and market value, organized by region, typology, and attribution, and increasingly supported by photographic reproduction. In this process, objects were presented in neutral descriptive terms and circulated as autonomous forms, while their earlier contexts were largely set aside; many had entered the Paris market through colonial, missionary, or commercial channels, yet the auction system tended to obscure these trajectories, leaving prior ownership and circumstances of acquisition only loosely documented or entirely unrecorded.

Within this wider context, the interaction with the artistic milieu was direct. Drouot sales were followed by collectors, dealers, and artists, and catalogues of this type circulated beyond the sale itself as reference material. Members of the Surrealist circle are known to have attended these auctions and preserved such catalogues as working documents; their interest combined formal experimentation with a broader engagement with non-European material. In the same year as the present sale, Charles Ratton and Tristan Tzara organized a major exhibition of African and Oceanic works at the Théâtre Pigalle, and within a few years Breton’s Exposition surréaliste d’objets (1936) would present comparable material alongside European works.

The present catalogue, issued for the Hôtel Drouot sale of 4–5 December 1930, is arranged by geographic sections—pre-Columbian America (Mexican and Peruvian pottery and sculpted stone), Africa (masks, figures, fetishes, textiles), Oceania (including the Marquesas, New Caledonia, and the New Hebrides), and Indonesia—with entries giving material, typology, cultural attribution (e.g. Nahuas, Zapotèques: Oaxaca; Dahomey; Congo; Îles Marquises), and measurements. The catalogue is illustrated with eight black-and-white photographic plates, reproducing 45 objects.

Objects from this sale are now traceable in institutional collections, including a Marquesan figure (maoi mangata), described in the catalogue as a “statuette-fétiche” (lot 376), now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1994.418). Others, however, remain difficult to identify, as the concise, typological descriptions provide only limited grounds for reconstructing provenance.

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Price: €2,000.00