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UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center andRegents of the University of California are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Arts. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.229.158 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:48:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsThe remaining chapters deal with a series of selected modern artists, arranged in general chronological order. The story of their encounter with tribal arts is part of the intellectual tradition of primitivism in Western philosophy and social criticism. Perceptions of "primitive" peoples have swung from the more classicizing one-that they were pure and incorrupt-to the romantic notion that they were childlike, irrational, and ruled by superstition and magic. Such misconstrued ideas about these societies allowed Western intellectuals a point of embarkation for critical appraisals of their own cultural traditions, as did the neoclassical revivals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the Medieval remembrances of the Pre-Raphaelites. While these recalled the superior human values of an ancestral past, the "primitivism" of African societies appealed to the headlong, iconoclastic pitch of modernist thought.Modern artists, intellectually stifled by Western cultural tradition, found these littleknown and mysterious cultures infinitely adaptable. Paul Gauguin, more in tune with his Peruvian ancestry than with nineteenthcentury bourgeois France, sought the raw and vital energies of an idealized "primitive" society, first in the Breton countryside, then in the Caribbean, and finally in Polynesia. Pablo Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon after a visit to the ethnological collections of the Trocadero. The colorful, distorted faces of the Melanesian masks and figures he saw there inspired the demonic prostitutes at the left of the picture, whose faces, according to Rubin, were intended to evoke the horrors of venereal disease. Responding more to sculptural values, early modernist sculptors like Brancusi and Modigliani looked to the directly carved figures of Africa as a way out of the oppressive dead-end traditions based on modeling and casting, exemplified by the French Academie and Rodin. Much later, Henry Moore would fill notebooks with sketches of tribal objects seen in museums, just as nineteenth-century Academie students had sketched plaster casts of classical sculpture.In the heyday of Dada, during the First World War, there were African-inspired "primitive" spectacles at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, where masks, made-up chants, and dancing were staged as aesthetically liberating anti-art. German Expressionists modeled their bohemian lifestyles aft...
