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But it was one thing to draw Polynesian temples or the megaliths of Easter Island, as the Georgian William Hodges or Sydney Parkinson did, and quite another to imitate primitive styles as though their artists were as worthy of homage as Raphael or Ingres, which modernism did. The transition from one to another began with Paul Gauguin.
Gauguin's stay in Tahiti and the Marquesas from 1891 to 1903 is by now one of the soap operas of art history. Yet the curious fact, as Varnedoe points out in a brilliant catalog essay, was that Polynesian art made virtually no impact on his painting; all its primitive elements—the flatness, the sinuous friezelike poses, the outlining—were either there already or deduced from photographs of Javanese, Cambodian and other Oriental material that he took with him. (One should not forget that in the 1880s, Frenchmen were still talking about Japanese art as art pri-mitif.) When he did quote Tahitian art, Gauguin played fast and loose with it, basing (in There Is the Marae, 1892) a Tahitian fence on the design of a tiny Marquesan earplug. In his Tahiti, primitivism was cousin to Baudelaire's paganism and Delacroix's orientalism—a celebration of what Gauguin called "uncertain luxe barbare d'autre-fois" (a certain barbaric luxury of older times). It rested on sensuality and nostalgia. It was Paradise Depraved.
Gauguin talked and wrote incessantly about being a primitive man—a condition he identified with that of an artist, a mind instinctively coupled to spirits, ancestors and myths. This defined his importance to modernist primitivism. But his work treated tribalism as spectacle, like the imported "native" villages and trophy walls featured in French colonial exhibitions.
From the 1880s onward, there was certainly no lack of African and Oceanic tribal art on public view. There was also plenty to be bought—though much of it, including some of the masks and figures that influenced Derain, Matisse and Picasso, was poor stuff made, even then, in Africa for the souvenir-and-curio market.
So why did the avant-garde not start imitating it before about 1905?