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Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in Part V of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Sarah Pickman.
Now largely forgotten, René-Yves Creston (1898-1964) was a French polymath of the mid-twentieth century who captured a slice of Arctic life and culture that existed in the years before World War II. He held numerous positions, both professional and amateur, but always intertwined, and navigated between several institutions, groups of actors, territories, and ideologies. Trained in the arts (first at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, then in Paris), he gradually embarked on a career as an ethnologist, alongside many other activities. In 1933, he found himself embarking on a voyage to the Arctic…
In the 1930s, Creston wanted to accompany Jean-Baptiste Charcot, a leading French polar explorer of the 1920s and 1930s, to the Arctic. To achieve his goal, he embarked on deep-sea fishing, departing from Fécamp, bound for the White Sea, Bear Island, and Spitsbergen, and trained in polar navigation during the voyage. In 1933, he succeeded in getting Charcot to accept him aboard the ship he commanded, the Pourquoi Pas IV? Their destination: Greenland, via the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Charcot was then in the process of setting up the first French polar expeditions in the region, including the major expedition led by French polar ethnologist Paul-Emile Victor, who would spend an entire winter living with an Inuit community in Greenland.
Creston occupied a special place aboard the scientific and logistical vessel. In records from the voyage, he appeared sometimes as an independent artist, sometimes as a “Merchant Navy Painter.” He was also mentioned as a “hydrographer, responsible for surveying the coastline,” particularly that of Blosseville, in France. In short, his status as part of the expedition was unclear: an artist, yes, but also attached to military functions. Finally, his work at that time reveals another of his roles: that of ethnologist, which he would institutionalize upon his return from Greenland. This lack of clarity regarding his status was, however, eminently beneficial to him: he was able to practice his art as he wished. He painted, drew, took notes, and photographed during this long polar mission. He brought back a diverse, rich, and dense body of work, which he took care to promote during the three decades before his death.
Consumed by his mission with Charcot, Creston took advantage of these months at sea, during which he rubbed shoulders with sailors, soldiers, scientists, and “polars” (the name he gave to polar explorers), to collect, observe, and produce assiduously. This work established his reputation on the Parisian artistic and intellectual scene. He emerged as one of the pioneers of polar visual representations, appealing to both a specialist audience and the general public. He painted a panorama of Arctic nature and cultures, drawing on his previous missions, but above all on Charcot’s, and relished the calling card it gave him. A keen observer, Creston depicted a specific Arctic that existed during the 1930s, through the lens of his own background. His paintings depicted the indigenous peoples he encountered, as well as the immensity of the whitewashed coasts of eastern Greenland. His Western, artistic style allowed him to exhibit these works among Parisian high society, where they were viewed as images of a far-off, exotic northern land.
However, beyond these stereotypical elements, Creston brought nuance as well. He drew on his previous missions, which allowed him to discover the harshness of life aboard fishing boats and the difficult conditions faced by sailors and local populations. He thus depicted the changes affecting the Arctic between the two World Wars. There were many upheavals. As can be viewed in his visual work, kayaks and sailing ships alike gave way to steamships. Fishing became exponentially more industrialized. Relations between outsiders and indigenous populations changed. The first long-term, stationary scientific missions were established in this region of the Arctic, heralding new forms of exploitation, and Creston captured aspects of this scientific work in his paintings and drawings. The last commercial whale hunts in this region of the north Atlantic occurred. The last supposedly “virgin spaces” untouched by human presence were documented there. The science devoted to this “white continent” was shared among the great Western nations. Militarization was creeping in, quietly at work even before 1939, with European navies cruising Greenland’s coast. The Arctic was changing, and Creston was documenting it. During the 1930s, he also worked as an ethnographer before taking over the Arctic department at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. He was interested, among other things, in costumes (the subject of his future Ph.D. thesis), maritime ethnology (a sub-field he would help institutionalize in France), and the ethnology of craft techniques, following in the footsteps of Marcel Mauss, particularly with regard to Inuit harpoons.
Almost a century after this mission, this polymathic corpus, now scattered and rarely viewed in a comprehensive manner, appears pioneering in various ways to modern eyes. Above all, however, it is a demonstration of the beginnings of changes that would affect the Arctic from the 1930s onwards, rapidly intensifying after 1945. In hindsight, many continuities in these developments can be observed. This body of work provides more or less accurate images of the starting points of these developments. However, there are some more recent developments that stand in sharp contrast to Creston’s work: namely, how Arctic landscapes have been drastically altered by climate change. Viewed against the intensive global warming of recent decades, Creston’s paintings contribute to the exhibition of a picturesque landscape that now seems relic-like, even already a thing of the past, particularly in terms of snowfall and glaciology. On the ethnological side, local populations have fully embraced modern Western clothing, transportation, and hunting technologies while holding on to some older forms of material culture, and post-colonialism and Indigenous activism is creating highly complex situations within these territories.
Creston’s work had the merit of shaping, in its own way, a unique form of Arctic visual culture based on a wide variety of media. Art critics and scientists who reported on Creston’s activities upon his return from Greenland were unanimous: he was, both qualitatively and quantitatively, one of the first, but also one of the last, to succeed in combining, in a sensitive and accurate manner, ethnology, art, marine and polar views, in a very personal form of boreal representation.
Anatole Danto
Latest posts by Anatole Danto (see all)
- The Unclassifiable Arctic: René-Yves Creston and his Boreal Representations: Ethnology, Art, Marine Studies, and Polar Visuals - November 3, 2025
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