Word: tribalized
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...
...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...