Return of the Native

By ROBERT HUGHES

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.

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?

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:

What if this works? This, in essence, was the purpose underlying the uses made of primitive art by surrealism, expressionism, abstract expressionism and their various sequels. It may be sublimated into anxiety, as in the tautly mysterious early work of Giacometti; or transposed into flyaway humor, as in Klee; or semi-industrialized, as in the fulsome productions of late Dubuffet; or, by a host of minor artists, boorishly rehashed as a sign of "sincerity." But it never quite goes away -- for who wants to face the tedium of a wholly secular culture?