The Museum of Modern Art traces the sources of primitivism
Of all the questions posed by modern art, none are more intriguing than what it took, and why, from tribal culture. From Matisse structuring his Blue Nude of 1907 along the lines of African carving, to Robert Smithson emulating the vast projects of South American archaeology in his Spiral Jetty in Utah 63 years later, the list of "borrowings" is as long and as old as modernism itself. After 1850, the cultures of Africa and Oceania, dissolving under the acids of colonialism, released their myriad fragments—masks, figures, totems, bark cloths, tools, weapons, canoes, ceremonial furniture—into the absorptive West. After 1900, very few major painters or sculptors in Europe or America were untouched by the primitive. Different movements had different agenda: the fauves and cubists, for instance, liked African art, whereas the surrealists annexed the Pacific from New Guinea to Easter Island (myopically ignoring Australia), while the expressionists like Emil Nolde, children of Thanatos, went for mummies and shrunken heads. Such affinities obviously matter, not only to art history but to the broader scope of Western social fantasies. So why and how did they arise?
One would expect such an issue to have been studied to exhaustion. In fact, it has barely been touched. The best text available on it in English, up to now, was published more than 40 years ago by the American art historian Robert Goldwater. Hence the extreme interest of the show that kicks off the Museum of Modern Art's 1984-85 season, " 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern." (Primitivism, for MOMA's purposes, means the use Western artists made of tribal works; it does not denote the art itself, which, from "ethnic art" to the disastrous French "art negre," is bedeviled by a whole vocabulary of more or less racist condescension.) The exhibition is large, though not exhausting—218 tribal objects from Africa, North America and the Pacific playing counterpoint to 147 modern ones. In organizing the show, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, William Rubin, has set out to unravel a knotty subject by bringing all the resources of current scholarship to bear on it while still leaving the viewer exhilarated by the beauty and intensity of the works. About four years in preparation, the exhibition is the cap of Rubin's career—one which, in recent years, produced MOMA's great shows of Picasso and late Cezanne. It involved close detective work in ferreting out not just the general kinds of tribal objects artists were looking at but, in many cases, the art itself; and its catalog, written by a strong team of art historians headed by Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, is detailed and readable, opening a new phase in the study of its subject.
Europe had been interested in tribal culture—particularly that of the Pacific, epitomized by Tahiti, notional abode of the Noble Savage in a harmonious state of nature—since at least the 18th century.