Jacques Viot (1898-1973) Jacques Viot (1898-1973) Philippe Bourgoin Close to the Surrealists, Jacques Viot was alternately an adventurer, poet, broker, writer, photographer, mystery writer (under the pseudonym Benoît Vince) and talented screenwriter. Nothing had predestined this son of an upper middle class Nantes family for such a tumultuous life. In 1916, during the First World War, he was drafted into an artillery regiment in Vannes as a gunner second class. After the war, he enrolled at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Paris (HEC) and worked for an insurance firm in Nantes. When he returned to Paris in 1920, he joined the Surrealist group. During this difficult period, he worked for the Journal Littéraire and wrote his Poèmes de guerre. Jean Cocteau and Tristan Tzara noticed his work, and it was through them that Viot met gallery owner Pierre Loeb, who founded Galerie Pierre in 1924 and hired him as his secretary. Loeb was one of the leading gallery owners of the first third of the twentieth century. He played an important role in the championing of certain visual arts movements and he had an active interest in tribal art. Jacques Viot on the island of Koeroedoe. © Coll. Patrice Allain. All rights reserved. At the time, Viot had a studio next to others that were occupied by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Jean Arp and Paul Éluard, and he became acquainted with Joan Miró, to whom he ceded his space shortly afterwards. In 1925, Viot organized the first major exhibition devoted to the Catalan painter’s work, and in the same year, he also co-organized the very first Surrealist exhibition at Galerie Pierre. The Oceanic collection Loeb had built up (and sometimes sold works from) was certainly one of the most important of the period. At his home, on the second floor just above his gallery, Loeb became a kind of influencer ahead of his time, and often gathered together his many artist and collector friends, who thus had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the arts of the Pacific. In 1926, the Galerie Surréaliste, directed by Roland Tual and supported by André Breton, opened its doors. Viot seems to have been left out of this project, and his relations with Breton and his friends suffered as a result. Shortly afterwards, a fatal breakup occurred and his financial troubles began to pile up, to the point where he decided it would be best for him to disappear, as a warrant had been issued for his arrest. He was discovered in Tahiti, where he had been working as a court clerk using an assumed and fraudulent identity. Now facing prosecution, he was obliged to return to France, which he ultimately did, but not without having gone on an extended journey that took him through Asia first. Viot, along with Éluard, were the only two members of the Surrealist group to undertake the adventure of traveling to Oceania. On his return to France in 1928, Viot suggested to Loeb that he organize an expedition to Dutch New Guinea, a region whose sculptures were very popular with Surrealist artists at the time. In 1929, Loeb financed Viot’s trip, particularly to explore the Lake Sentani area. He entered into a contract with Viot, under whose terms he agreed to purchase objects that would be shipped to him. Lake Sentani is located inland and to the west of nearby Humboldt Bay, on the north coast of the island of New Guinea, in what is now the Indonesian province of West Papua. Following in the footsteps of ethnologist Paul Wirz (1892-1955), who had visited the region in 1921 through 1926, Viot discovered that the populations had, for the most part, come under the control of missionaries and that a large portion of the traditional objects had alreadỳ disappeared. Despite this, and probably after gaining the trust of the local people, Viot succeeded in putting together a spectacular collection of Lake Sentani objects, including at least eighteen figurative sculptures and posts salvaged out of the lake. Their exact function remains obscure, and consequently the meaning of the representations on them does as well. He collected two drums, a series of smaller figures and utilitarian korwar objects (probably more than a hundred, judging by the numbering of the labels affixed to the objects), on the islands of Kurudu and Yapen in the northeast portion of Geelvink Bay, which he thus saved from certain auto-da-fé. He also acquired one of the few known masks from the area (only five are known in collections), and a substantial set of paintings on tapa cloth (beaten bark) called maro, made by women and probably at Viot’s request. Natives presenting various objects near the village of Amboï (Geelvink Bay). © Coll. Patrice Allain. All rights reserved. In the course of his travels, Viot also obtained extensive and very important photographic documentation of the local people. He was, for instance, the author of the only known photograph, taken in Sorong, of a masked dance in the region. The collection of this mask and the commentaries on its history and provenance that he later published provide important information on the existence of masking traditions in the region that are otherwise nearly completely undocumented. Beginning in 1930, Viot’s discoveries were exhibited in Paris and New York. A group of the maro paintings were presented to the public for the first time at the Galerie de la Renaissance on rue Royale in Paris in 1930, as part of an exhibition devoted exclusively to Oceanic art. They were noticed there by François Poncetton (1875-1950), curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and by gallery owner André Portier (1886-1963), who then reproduced eleven of them in their well-known Décoration Océanienne folio album of plates (A. Calavas, Paris, 1931 (although no date is given), pl. 19 to 28). In 1933, Georges Henri Rivière, then deputy director of the Musée du Trocadéro, devoted a briefly shown exhibition titled Tapas de la Nouvelle Guinée Hollandaise (Tapas of Dutch New Guinea) to the maro that Viot had collected. Sixty-six tapa cloths, a beater and two statues from Lake Sentani were exhibited. In a review published in Art et Décoration (Les moros de Tobati et de la Nouvelle-Guinée, t. LXII, pp. 286-288), by author Pierre-Louis Duchartre (1894-1983), the latter mentions that the show met with a lukewarm reception from the press. The following year, in November 1934, Loeb and Ratton convinced Pierre Matisse (1900-1989) to organize an exhibition of Oceanic art in his New York gallery. The brochure that accompanied the exhibition lists forty-four objects and sculptures. Curiously, no mention is made of the eight maro paintings seen in the three photos in the gallery’s archives (The Morgan Library & Museum, New York), although the introduction, written by Georges Henri Rivière, does refer to “bark cloths from the Pacific islands”. Rivière and journalist Pierre Malo (1902-1962) were the only ones to make references to modern art, the former in the above mentioned introduction and the latter in an article titled Au musée ethnographique du Trocadéro. Tapas de la Nouvelle-Guinée hollandaise (At the Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum. Tapas Cloths of Dutch New Guinea) (L'Homme Libre, April 4, 1933, p. 2) in which he wrote: “By the variety of their decorations and the brilliance of their colors, these drawings often recall the capricious ingenuity of certain modern artists”. Rivière and Malo rightly described what these tapa paintings really evoked and not just what Western eyes wanted to see. The maro, which combine animal (fish, birds and insects) and plant representations, reduced to their essential elements, are, in some manner, something halfway between writing and abstract figuration. If the artists of this period, like Moesman, Matisse, Miró, and Ernst, were so interested in them, it was not just because of their own proximity to Loeb, the Surrealist group or the connections between Viot and some of them, but because they found the maro truly fascinating and compelling, and saw in them materializations of the revelation of a “magical state”, and of a vision of that which is beyond̀ what the eye can perceive. Miró owned a maro that his friend Viot had given him. While a direct imprint of this art form may not be evident in Miró’s works, art critic and publisher Christian Zervos (1889-1970) very cogently describes the 1925-1926 period, which saw a radical change in the Catalan painter’s work: “This was followed by the total disappearance of objects in the canvases Miró painted in 1926, which were replaced by masses of color inhabited by pure sketches, extracts of forms fixed by signs, a whole ideography made believable by the powerful gift of poetic suggestion (Joan Miró, Cahiers d'Art, 1-4, 1934, p. 14)”. Natives holding the Le Lys sculpture. © Coll. Patrice Allain. All rights reserved. Max Ernst also owned a maro (National Gallery of Australia, NGA 85.1870). It had been given to him by Viot and he kept it until his death in 1976. It can be seen on the wall of his studio in a photo taken by Josef Breitenbach in 1937 and now in the Max Ernst Museum collection in Brühl des LVR, Germany. A korwar neckrest can also be seen on the desk that Ernst is seen leaning on. During his stay in Zurich, on the occasion of the Was ist Surrealismus (What is Surrealism) exhibition at the Kunsthaus (Zurich, 1934), he stayed in the village of Maloja with Alberto Giacometti, where the sculptor owned a chalet. On his return to Paris, Ernst began experimenting with sculpture. The famous Lake Sentani double figure known as Le Lys, which he greatly admired, (National Gallery of Australia, NGA 74.214) and which was photographed by Man Ray in 1933, has a clear formal affinity with his work Les asperges de la lune (1935), one of the nine major pieces he began to work on after his stay in Switzerland. After his adventure in New Guinea, Viot published a novel called Déposition de blanc (Librairie Stock, Paris, 1932), in which he violently satirized colonial mores. From 1933 onwards, he gradually turned to film. He was a secretive and reserved character, so one tends to forget that he was a very well-known screenwriter in the period immediately following the war and participated in the production of Les Beaux Jours (1935), by Marc Allégret, Le jour se lève (1939), by Marcel Carné, and Orfeu Negro, by Marcel Camus, which received the Palme d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959.
