Surrealist vanguardists André Breton, Joan Miró and Max Ernst were just mad about maro — decorative barkcloths from New Guinea's Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay. Houston audiences can join the ranks of 20th-century art stalwarts as these rare objects, along with a group of highly stylized, abstracted wooden sculptures, are revealed in an exhibition at the Menil Collection that opened this week.

Not surprisingly, these significant indigenous objects were among the first works snatched up in the 1920s by the nascent art collectors, John and Dominique de Menil.

But let's backtrack a little. It's important to note that these objects weren't recently brought to Western museums by contemporary anthropologists.

In fact, this genre was nearly lost to the waters of the modern-day Indonesian province of Papua, located on the western portion of New Guinea. That near-catastrophe was performed by puritanical missionaries who stopped by the island's shores in the 1500s. Centuries later, the Dutch Etna Expedition retrieved a few stray works. Still, it wasn't until the 1920s that interest in the region began to build steam.

Enter two 20th-century Renaissance men: Swiss explorer, ethnologist, photographer and collector Paul Wirz and French adventurer, art dealer, photographer and author Jacques Viot. Both figures can be credited for bringing the art of Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay to the masses — and to the attention of active Surrealist circles in 1930s Paris.

Viewers of the Menil exhibition can connect the dots between the imagery and patterns present in the New Guinean art and the canvases and sculptures by Ernst and Breton on display in the museum's permanent galleries of Surrealist art. Notes curator Virginia-Lee Webb in the exhibition's catalogue, it was Ernst who introduced Viot to John and Dominique de Menil.

When Parisian gallery owner Pierre Loeb commissioned Viot to journey to New Guinea to purchase sculptures and maro from local artists, the adventurer returned with a slew of pieces that would soon populate galleries in Paris and New York. Collectors went mad — the de Menils purchased three maro and three Sentani sculptures. Several of Viot's finds arrived at New York's Museum of Primitive Art in a monumental 1953 exhibition.

Since then, public discourse on the art of the region had all but gone silent — until now. Ancestors of the Lake unites for the first time remarkable works from Lake Sentani and Humboldt Bay alongside photographs by Viot and Wirz and newly discovered stills by Man Ray.

The Menil Collection is the exhibition's only stop on American soil before it heads to the University of East Anglia. Dadi Wirz — the son of Swiss explorer Paul Wirz — spoke at the Menil Friday night. D.W. recounted his journeys to Lake Sentani as part a rare glimpse upon classic East meets West exploration.

Ancestors of the Lake is on View through Aug. 28.