Földvári Books

Arts Primitifs: An Illustrated Drouot Sale Catalogue, 1930

[Portier, André]

[Cover Title]: Afrique. Océanie. Amérique. [Arts Primitifs]. Océanien. Salle n° 10. 29–31 Mai 1930.

[Paris]: Hôtel Drouot, 1930. First edition. Original printed wrappers with photographically illustrated cover label. 16 p., and 1 plate of photographic reproductions. Spine worn and partly split, cover with creasing and minor edge wear. Interior generally clean; paper lightly toned, with occasional handling marks. Plate 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 29–31 May 1930, is arranged by geographic sections—Africa, Oceania, and pre-Columbian America, with a concluding section titled “Asie et Indonésie.” The entries give material, typology, cultural attribution (e.g. Congo français, Côte d’Ivoire, Dahomey, Nouvelle-Calédonie, Java), and measurements, and include, in addition to sculptural material and masks, a broader range of categories such as ivories, metal objects, instruments, textiles, and a small group of books on the arts. The African section is particularly extensive, comprising large groupings of so-called “statues-fétiches,” masks, ivories, and metalwork.

The catalogue is illustrated with black-and-white photographic plates reproducing selected objects from the sale.

Objects from this sale are in some cases traceable in later collections, while others remain difficult to identify, as the concise and typological descriptions provide only limited grounds for reconstructing provenance.

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Price: €2,000.00