Ethnography and the Surrealist Lens: Photographer Roger Parry and André Malraux’s Le Musée Imaginaire
Location
Science Center, A155
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
4-24-2015 4:00 PM
End Date
4-24-2015 5:30 PM
Abstract
My research examines the photographs of sculpture in Le Musée Imaginaire (1947), a text by André Malraux, in the context of the surrealists’ fascination with the nonwestern “other.” Many have written on Malraux’s well-known book of art theory. Yet Roger Parry, the artist who photographed many of the nonwestern sculptures central to Malraux’s text, has been largely overlooked by scholars. Using discourses on photography and surrealism, images of ethnographic objects in avant-garde journals, and studies of Malraux, this paper argues that Parry’s photography lends the eastern objects in Le Musée Imaginaire a western, modernist aesthetic—one that complicates Malraux’s universalizing vision for the world’s art.
Recommended Citation
Cohen, Mallory, "Ethnography and the Surrealist Lens: Photographer Roger Parry and André Malraux’s Le Musée Imaginaire" (04/24/15). Senior Symposium. 51.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/seniorsymp/2015/presentations/51
Major
Art History
Advisor(s)
Bonnie Cheng, Art History
Project Mentor(s)
Sarah Hamill, Art History
April 2015
Ethnography and the Surrealist Lens: Photographer Roger Parry and André Malraux’s Le Musée Imaginaire
Science Center, A155
My research examines the photographs of sculpture in Le Musée Imaginaire (1947), a text by André Malraux, in the context of the surrealists’ fascination with the nonwestern “other.” Many have written on Malraux’s well-known book of art theory. Yet Roger Parry, the artist who photographed many of the nonwestern sculptures central to Malraux’s text, has been largely overlooked by scholars. Using discourses on photography and surrealism, images of ethnographic objects in avant-garde journals, and studies of Malraux, this paper argues that Parry’s photography lends the eastern objects in Le Musée Imaginaire a western, modernist aesthetic—one that complicates Malraux’s universalizing vision for the world’s art.
Notes
Session 3, Panel 16 - Making Modernism: Music/Text/Image
Moderator: Jared Hartt, Associate Professor of Music Theory