Born in 1935, Aube is André Breton and Jacqueline Lamba's daughter. Oona Elléouët is her daughter and therefore André Breton's grand-daughter. A great discoverer of talents, and a friend of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the artist André Breton regularly collected art works from Oceania and north America (masks from New-Ireland or Kachina Hopi dolls of Arizona for example).
His first acquisition was a small wooden sculpture from Easter Island, a part of the world which occupies a singular place on the Surrealist map. «Easter Island! Few names have aroused as many dreams» he wrote in The Magic Art (Edition of the Amis du Club français du Livre, 1957).
While Oceanian pieces, by their «primal innocence» inseparable from an extreme ritual and formal complexity, inspired him to pen strange poems loaded with mystery, the arts of north America aroused reflexions that were more general in scope. Thus, during his exile in America, during the war, he studied with immense precision the transformation masks from the north-Wwst Pacific coast, which would later become the subject of an important text (Note on the transformation masks from the north-west Pacific Coast, Editions of Herne, Paris, 1961). André Breton's collection was dispersed during auction at the Hôtel Drouot between 1st to 18th April 2003 and it was the occasion for a memorable sale. The musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac volunteered to acquire an exceptional articulated mask through preemption during this sale. At the end of the sale, Aube Breton-Elléouët and Oona Elléouët donated it generously to the Museum.
