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The reason, Rubin argues, was that modernism used primitivism when it needed to, and not before. A Fang mask or a Kota funerary effigy would have been useless to an impressionist, whose ambition was to render perceptual reality as faithfully as possible. But the drift of fauvism and especially cubism was toward the conceptual: and here the idea of representing, say, a face as a flat plane with knoblike eyes and a cylindrical funnel of a mouth was infinitely suggestive. Certainly it was convenient for Picasso to rejig the human face in terms of bladelike noses and scarification lines, a I'Africaine. But cubism was not, as has naively been said in the past, "set off" by the "discovery" of tribal art; the perception of one reinforced the perception of the other. Sometimes the most striking "family" likenesses appear between works that have no possible connection. A case in point is Russian Constructivist Sculptor Vladimir Baranoff-Rossine's Symphony No. 1, 1913, a figure done in swoops and slats of painted wood that one would swear—if there were not clear evidence that he had I never seen it — was based on an openwork Baga bird headI dress from Guinea in the Musee de 1'Homme in Paris.
The African works did not need to be masterpieces of their own style. The face of Matisse's Portrait of Madame Matisse, 1913, possibly one of the dozen greatest portraits of the 20th century, was based on a mediocre Fang mask from Gabon. Sometimes, though, a modernist work would take off from an African object of the first rank. Such was the case with Picasso's bronze of Marie-Therese Walter, 1931, whose erotically swollen blimp of a nose is based on an effigy he owned of the fertility goddess Nimba from the Baga. The sight of these two sculptures confronting each other is as much a spectacle of parity as a Rubens beside its prototype, a Titian.
"Everything I need to know about Africa is in these objects," Picasso declared.
Neither he nor any of his contemporaries cared much about the social background or specific religious meanings of the work — and probably the more lowbrow avantgardists, like Maurice de Vlaminck, mentally reduced it all to mission ary-stew, bone-in-the-nose cliche. Not even Brancusi, whose borrowings of African motifs were of the most exalted refinement (as in Madame L.R., 1914-18, whose domed "head" comes from a Hongwe reliquary figure), had an "anthropological" interest in his sources. To him they were pure form.
Yet all artists, and Picasso most of all, were enthralled by the associative power of the fetish. The otherness of tribal art was infinitely compelling, and remains so today: practically no Western sculpture in the 20th century has the sheer iconic majesty of the wooden goddess from the Caroline Islands lent to MOMA from Auckland, New Zealand, or the creepy terribilita of the British Museum's figure of the Austral Islands' god A'a, one of Pi casso's favorites. The main value of primitive art to modernism was not formal but quasi-magical. It gave the artist what academism could not: shamanistic power, a sense of the numinous. Muttering the spell, even in macaronic form, still provoked a delicious shudder of possibility: