The Real Meets the Imagined: Northwest Coast Art, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Surrealists
- Event Date: Thursday, March 31, 2005
- Time: 7:30 pm (CST)
- Location: Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
- Cost: Free Admission
A Talk by Marie Mauzé
George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Professor (UIUC
)
Senior Researcher, CNRS, Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, Paris
From the early 1920's on, French surrealists showed an elective sensibility toward Northwest Coast art. The great moment of real discovery of this art in Europe, however, occurred as a result of the exile to New York of many prominent European artists and intellectuals fleeing German occupation during World War II. This is the period when the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the surrealist André Breton and their friends developed in the course of various cultural activities an emotional rather than an aesthetic attitude toward Northwest Coast art, which expressed the surrealists' poetic vision of the world.