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“Primitivism,” MoMA, 1984 The curator of the exhibition stated that “Primitivism is an aspect of the history of modern art, not of tribal art,” determined to “understand the Primitive sculptures in terms of the Western context in which modern artists ‘discovered’ them.” Primitive Art impacted artists like Picasso and Giacometti, in providing a key to a dramatic sculptural volume that had been characteristic of someone they both admired - Michelangelo. Accommodating violence and obsession within a rational framework, was another impact of Primitive Art. Sculptures that possess something beyond reason and control had an effect on Victor Brauner and Picasso.

“The exhibition argues against the widely held view that Primitive art changed the course of modern art. The changes in modern art at issue were already under way when vanguard artists first became aware of tribal art, Mr. Rubin says. In fact, disgust with the trappings of society and longing for an art that is more direct and essential than inherited artistic and cultural values has been part of Western art, in one form or another, at least since the Industrial Revolution. The Neo-Classicism of Jacques-Louis David, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, all shared the primitivist determination to strip the fat off reality and arrive at a more basic and pure artistic expression. The discovery of tribal art gave this drive a raw, physical potential that was appropriate to the violence and upheaval of this century. By now, the resistance to conventions and preference for the raw over the cooked that led Gauguin to Tahiti and directed Picasso, the Fauves and the German Expressionists to tribal art have been so thoroughly ritualized into the posture of revolt that is automatically assumed by just about every Western adolescent, that it may be necessary to remind ourselves just how jarring early 20th-century primitivism was.”

“When objects are presented in such a way that they are seen in the context of other objects, as the modern works are here, only the very best will not appear second- rate and derivative.”

