THE HISTORY OF ART HISTORY:  PRE-COLUMBIAN AND ETHNIC ARTS

Globally, the civilizations addressed in the previous chapter belong to a vast continuum stretching from East Asia to Egypt and North Africa. Geopolitically, they are linked, directly or indirectly, with Europe, though different from it. From time immemorial, caravans have crossed the vast deserts and mountain ranges and ships have circulated in the Mediterranean, as well as in the Red Sea-Indian Ocean zone, carrying people and goods from one part of this enormous complex to another.ⁱ

The societies that produced the art discussed in this chapter lie at a greater remove from Europe, becoming accessible to it at later dates.  Even later came Western art-historical analysis.  On balance, a greater effort is required to understand these societies on their own terms. Reflecting this physical and psychic distance, conventional wisdom tends to relegate them to a less prestigious sphere, one outside the privileged circle of "high culture." Although this exclusion has been contested for the Mesoamerican and Andean societies, as well as for some West African ones (notably Benin), and may actually be invidious for the rest, it has shaped the historiographical record. 
Another distinguishing feature is that these peoples were not literate. But this too is not an absolute separation: texts in the Maya and other ancient Mexican scripts have been deciphered and are in the process of being translated, West African kingdoms kept records in Arabic script, and most modern ethnic ("tribal") peoples use writing. 
It is also said that the anonymity of the artists is a distinguishing feature. Again, though, medieval European and Asian Indian art is largely anonymous, while an increasing number of ethnic artists are known by name, or, if the name is not known, can be identified as having a distinctive personal style. 
Other criteria are socioeconomic. A kind of demographic index has been suggested: "small-scale societies." Their lack of elaborate technology is also commonly cited.  Yet this lack is no longer a negative feature in the eyes of ecologically minded critics of modern industrialism.

This variety of characteristics, all disputed or qualified to some degree, clouds the question of nomenclature. "Savage" is clearly inappropriate, and "primitive" and "tribal" are suspect. What is perhaps the most suitable term of all has not gained currency: "ethnoarts." The plural form of this word suggests that each manifestation has its own distinctive character, but that they all still share--at least for the convenience of our classification--an overall umbrella identity.

In one sense the relative lack of literacy and the anonymity do matter. They mean that the sort of documentary sources abundantly available elsewhere--say, for the study of an Indian temple or a Chinese landscape painting--are lacking. The scholar is forced back on two resources: careful scrutiny of stylistic features and systematic sifting of the archaeological data. These two methods may be fruitfully combined. In practice, though, they have tended to become polarized, identified with the entrenched interests of the two major groups investigating the ethnic arts--the art historians and the anthropologists/archaeologists. This rivalry has sometimes provoked bitter disputes, creating a contentious atmosphere that must be overcome if a unified vision of these arts is to be achieved.

The Primitive Conundrum

Earlier generations freely resorted to the term "primitive" as a way of characterizing the indigenous art and culture of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. (In the Americas some excepted the more advanced cultures of Mesoamerica and the Andean region, which were assigned to the category of "civilization," or at least approximated to it.) The difficulty with the word primitive is that it suggests a rigid evolutionary schema that relegates large numbers of human societies, of enormous intrinsic interest, to a status of "arrested development." In addition, the word brings with it a connotative aura redolent of dark passions, unbridled eroticism, and savagery in general.ⁱⁱ

Since the 1960s the pejorative freighting of the primitive label has caused some to shun it, while others employ the word only with reservations. Some, like William Rubin of New York's Museum of Modern Art, have essayed a kind of ironic distancing by placing the offending word in quotation marks and spelling Primitivism always with a capital, but these steps do not seem adequate. Force of habit combined with lack of consensus about proposed substitutes impede efforts to retire the expression from service. The word "tribal," though less pejorative, is not an adequate replacement, for the concept of the tribe--from Latin tribus, originally a division of the Roman people--carries Western connotations that may not be appropriate for the societies so labeled. For this reason the adjective "ethnic" seems better--or perhaps just the least bad. It may be that the peoples gathered under the umbrella of this term (or of its competitors) are simply too various to be designated by any single word.

Whatever improvements in nomenclature the future may have in store, the word primitive has had a long run, so that some observations on its historical semantics are in order. Although the term primitive is usually employed as an adjective, as in "primitive religion" or (popularly) "primitive plumbing," it also serves as a noun. "Primitives" come, so it seems, in two varieties: 1) individuals residing in ethnic groups held captive by immemorial bonds of custom, and 2) denizens of our own society believed to have "reverted" to simpler, rougher habits of behavior. 
Etymologically, the word stems from the Latin primitivus, itself derived from primus, "first." Thus the root meaning of the expression is "not derived, original, primary." In this vein ecclesiastical historians used to write, approvingly or neutrally, of "primitive Christianity," meaning the faith of the early Church, presumed to be undefiled by later accretions and distortions. As ideas of the evolution of culture began to assume prominence in the eighteenth century, the connotations of the term gradually shifted, so that it came to signify "little evolved, hence crude, rudimentary." Even so, however, associations were not uniformly negative. Authors subscribing to an old tradition going back to the Greeks and Romans held that the wealth of civilized society renders it soft and luxurious, full of self-indulgence and immorality. Compared to the degenerate present, such observers as the Romans Cicero and Juvenal avowed, the past, by virtue of the poverty that kept citizens honest, was a Golden Age. Hence the paradox: less (materially) equates to more (morally). Theories that glorify the less prosperous past in this way are treated by modern historians of ideas under the heading of primitivism.ⁱⁱⁱ Accustomed as we are to the current negative connotations of primitive and its derivatives, this usage of primitivism is at first sight confusing, but it serves to remind us that the state of being primitive was not always so stigmatized as it seems today.

In art the term primitive was originally applied to pre-Renaissance European painting. This usage arose in France in the 1840s, when critics and artists began to speak of the primitive Italian and Flemish schools.^iv As these paintings attracted greater interest, the designation spread to English and other languages. In fact significant formal similarities (stylization, flat fields of color, frontality, and so forth) link these pre-Renaissance European paintings with the ethnic works many nowadays still persist in calling primitive. These analogies facilitated the shift in the term's denotative meaning, after the beginning of the twentieth century, to the art of ethnic peoples. Today, when there is no qualification, this is what we understand by "primitive art." An exception occurs, however, with naive (untrained) European and American artists of the present and recent past, such as Henri Rousseau and Anna Mary Robertson ("Grandma") Moses, who are sometimes termed primitives.

The enthusiasm European avant-garde artists felt first for African art (fauves and cubists) and then for Oceanic art (expressionists and surrealists) signaled an important shift in taste. Yet this seeming affinity with ethnic arts functioned primarily, it now seems clear, as a device to further the ends of evolving European art itself.  Regrettably, the new approach did not attest any profound rapport with the spirit that had presided over the creation of the exotic works themselves. In fact, most of the artists seem to have uncritically endorsed contemporary stereotypes about indigenous peoples. Limited as its scope was, though, the encounter of "savage" and European did help to dissolve the cloud of opprobrium that had gathered over the ethnic works, languishing as they were in cluttered museums of ethnography.

There was also the lure of primitive life itself. The French painter Paul Gauguin's quest leading to his residence in the South Pacific is well known.^v Writers also helped to propagate interest in the primitive. The San Francisco author Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909) stemmed from the genteel tradition of American writing. Yet he discovered an earthly paradise in Hawaii. In South-Sea Idyls (1873) and The Island of Tranquil Delights (1904) Stoddard recorded the solace he found there for the "sufferings I had endured, for the indelible scars I bore in form and feature, these the unmistakable evidences of civilization" in comradeship with native youths. The writer's gay sensibility played a significant role in this appreciation.

Stoddard's seemingly unproblematic sojourns in the Pacific realm reflect what is sometimes termed "soft primitivism"; others were more attracted to a dangerous vision of hard primitivism. In his early days as a writer in London's arty Bloomsbury set, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) encountered enthusiasts for primitive sculpture--the piece described in Women in Love (1920) is from the "West Pacific"--to which he gave an ambivalent response. His dislike of modern civilization, however, continued to draw him to its primitive counterpart, which he felt could restore wholeness and health to our damaged psyches. This regeneration was, he felt, not for the faint of heart, for it entailed great risks as one journeyed into a threatening world of passions. Towards the end of his life Lawrence resided in New Mexico, but located a primitive world of dark forces in Mexico itself, as seen in his disturbing novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). Here a European woman finds fulfillment in union with a powerful, pure-blooded Indian who revives the Aztec religion. Together with Aldous Huxley, Antonin Artaud, and other authors in this vein, D. H. Lawrence spread the idea that contact with exotic peoples and their art was therapeutic; in this way neurotic moderns could begin to shed the crippling armor of civilization and strip themselves down to the basic core of the senses--to which primitives allegedly have always remained true.

Somewhat confusingly, these life-style preferences are termed "primitivism," the same word that is used for the appearance of ethnic motifs and influences in avant-garde visual art--usually created by individuals who felt no attraction to "returning" to the idealized world of nature advocated by the literary primitivists.

Ancient Mexico, which fascinated D. H. Lawrence, belongs to the pre-Columbian realm, many of whose manifestations were not regarded as primitive. Tales of Aztec sacrifices and other horrors, however, helped the popular mind to assimilate the Americas in toto to the primitive.

I. PRE-COLUMBIAN ART

             During the Middle Ages no one in Europe had the slightest suspicion that the civilizations we term pre-Columbian existed. The expedition under the command of Christopher Columbus had sailed west in the hope of reaching Asia directly by sea. The underlying geographical misapprehension lingers when we speak of the "American Indians" and the "West Indies." The disclosure of a vast intervening barrier--the Americas--not originally supposed to have existed engendered various coping strategies: there were continuing efforts to fit the newly discovered societies into accepted patterns. For a long time observers of the art and architecture of the Americas were inclined to attribute these impressive achievements to direct importation from the Old World.  In fact, one of the most enduring myths held that the creators of indigenous American civilization were remnants of the Lost Ten Tribes of the Old Testament.^vi This belief betrays the common human tendency to understand the unfamiliar by invoking the familiar.

Modern archaeology and art history have revealed as never before the remarkable accomplishments of the original inhabitants of Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) and of the Andean lands (Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, together with parts of Colombia, Chile, and Argentina). Remoteness and strangulation by jungle growth made many sites inaccessible.  There was also a tendency to neglect of older civilizations, a neglect that began even before the Spaniards arrived. To cite but two examples, later cultures knew little of the earlier achievements of the societies we call Olmec and Tiahuanaco.

Columbus, whose memory has recently sustained abuse, was in fact not insensitive to the peoples he encountered. Speaking of one island in the eastern Bahamas, he says that the young men were "well made with handsome bodies and faces." The houses of the village were clean and well ordered. Finally, they had sculptures: "I do not know whether they regard these as beautiful or for worship."^vii The conquerors of Tenochtitlan, the splendid Aztec capital where Mexico City now stands, compared it favorably with Spanish cities. In addition to gold and silver objects which were melted down, the Spanish sent objects back to Europe for their fine workmanship. Contemporary chroniclers like Bernardino de Sahagún and Garcilaso de la Vega ("El Inca") sought to record as much as they could of the splendor of the conquered Amerindians.

On the other hand, an enormous number of works of art were destroyed by Christian fanatics in the belief that they would prolong native paganism if they were allowed to survive. In the Yucatan, Diego de Landa's  bonfires of books, many apparently illustrated, inflicted grievous losses to posterity. In the eighteenth century, the rise of the European prejudice that held that the Americas were quintessentially inferior further hindered understanding.^viii

Pioneers

As the epoch of Iberian domination in Latin America drew to a close, Northern European travelers filtered in. Probably the most important was the German geographer and polymath Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who had the privilege of inspecting a colossal statue of the goddess Coatlicue, which was dug up for him to see - and promptly reburied. The coming of independence brought little advantage to the Indians, as the creoles who took over from the Spanish administration sought to emphasize their European heritage. In Mexico this trend reached its height under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), whose ministers sought to lure European immigrants to settle in the country in order to "improve its racial stock."

The ruins in the jungles of Mexico and Central America attracted an increasing number of visitors in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, some travelers purveyed legends such as the notion that the people who built the monuments were Old World Immigrants unrelated to the present "primitive" inhabitants. This idea that civilization in the Americas was imported reached a particular height of absurdity in the architectural historian Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), whose distinguished medieval scholarship was no help to him in unfamiliar territory. The urge to attribute spectacular ancient native ruins to the influence of peoples long familiar to European historians had previously been known in the Old World, where the influence of Greece, or alternatively of Egypt, was considered pervasive. Still, not all the early travelers were influenced by such preconceived notions. John Lloyd Stephens, Guillermo Dupaix, and their colleagues, though amateur archaeologists by modern standards, were cultivated individuals responding to the quality and scale of what they found. The imposing monumentality of the material at the sites made them implicitly classifiable as the products of civilization.

The discoveries required careful pondering back home. In Germany Franz Kugler, working only from illustrated books, made the first attempt to integrate the Americas into a world history of art.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century North American scholars took the lead. Many were first inspired by the Indian remains in their own country, as was notably the case with Herbert Spinden (1879-1967), and then lured by the more spectacular sites that proliferated south of the border. The emergence of a specifically art-historical approach was signaled by the work of George Kubler  (1912-1996)) at Yale.^ix It is usual to contrast the archaeologists, characterized by their factual, empirical, often statistical approach, with the art historians who have an aesthetic orientation.^x However, both impulses may interact in the same individual.

Mesoamerican Study Matures

With the Mexican revolution (1910-20) a new pride in the country's pre-Hispanic heritage arose. As seen in the striking work of the muralists, Mexican art had a great revival.  In many ways the work of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros reverts to pre-Columbian themes and forms. The idea of the Cosmic Race--the union of Indian and Hispanic strains--and indigenismo ("nativism") have been powerful ingredients in shaping the modern Mexican identity. Influenced by world trends towards collectivism and socialism, interpretation of ancient Mexican art long tended to emphasize anonymity, community, and egalitarianism. Gradually a more accurate sense of the hierarchical character of pre-Hispanic society emerged with the identification of great kings and their elite companions. Mexican archaeology advanced as a joint enterprise of Mexican and North American scholars.^xi

The national revival privileged the Mexica people, better known as the Aztecs, whose capital was Tenochtitlan in the valley of Mexico. After the Mexican Revolution, Aztec motifs appeared on the currency and on public monuments. Subject to changing interpretations, the Aztec heritage became a central component of Mexican national identity.^xii Many remains were excavated in and around Mexico City; the finest of these are displayed in context at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in the capital.

Swathed in the jungles of Yucatan, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, the Maya cities proved an irresistible challenge.^xiii They were also, as anyone who has visited them nowadays can attest, unquestionably impressive, indeed majestic. Initially, the evidence, focusing on ceremonial sites, seemed to suggest that the Maya rulers were gentle priest-kings, devoted to astronomy and ritual observances. It became the fashion to refer to the Maya as the Greeks of Mesoamerica, and the Aztecs as the Romans. As in the case of the Jesuits in imperial China, archaeologists, with the lay public following their lead, idealized an exotic culture, a romance made easier by the fact that the heyday of the Maya had ended over a millennium ago.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, two undertakings changed this idyllic picture. More extensive excavations revealed that the Maya sites had been more than religious centers: they had also housed a considerable population given to crafts, trade, and the usual run of secular pursuits. Even more remarkable results flowed from the successful decipherment of the Maya script, due to the insight of a Russian scholar Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov who in 1952 proposed that the glyphs represented a mixture of full-word signs combined with signs representing the sounds of syllables. For a long time the Mayanist establishment, headed by the formidable J. Eric S. Thompson, refused to accept the results. Recently, however, a flood of confirmation has come, enabling the identification of named individuals, not just kings but other persons, together with their dates.^xiv It has become clear that Maya scribes and artists enjoyed high status, some even ranking as royal princes.

The new discoveries had a darker side. It transpired that the "gentle priest-kings" actually launched wars and practiced bloody rites at home.^xv Some relief carvings were now for the first time interpreted to reveal episodes of ritual blood letting, and Maya art became more interesting, but at the cost of a loss of perceived innocence. This story shows that here, as in some other instances, the harsh indictments of some of today's critics of Eurocentrism are at best half truths. The earlier archaeologists had misunderstood Maya culture, to be sure, but they had done so by casting it in a more favorable light than it deserved--and not by demeaning it as the litany of those who assail "orientalism" typically alleges.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Miguel Covarrubias and other scholars spoke up for a third major player, preceding both the Maya and the Aztecs--the Olmecs. Flourishing between ca. 800 B.C. and 200 CE in the steamy lowlands of Mexico's Gulf coast, the Olmecs invented a number of key features of Mesopotamian culture, including pyramids and typical features of sculptural iconography. The Olmecs came to be regarded as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica. Yet during the 1980s some archaeologists expressed doubts about the Olmecs, claiming that the phenomenon was not a unitary one, and that other regions had played a significant, independent role during the Formative Period.^xvi While it must be conceded that the name Olmec is arbitrary, there seems little doubt about the importance of the pioneering culture to which that name has been given.

Unlike other non-Western arts, pre-Columbian Mexico has had only a selective influence on modern art outside the region itself. The British sculptor Henry Moore, who was influenced by the Maya chacmool (reclining figure), is a major exception.^xvii In the southwest of the United States Frank Lloyd Wright and others were spurred to create a variant of American architecture sometimes known as Maya Deco.^xviii

Andean Research

Hiram Bingham's spectacular 1911 discovery of the "lost city" of Machu Picchu in Peru focused the spotlight on the Incas. Yet before the American explorer arrived, tenacious archaeologists such as Max Uhle and Julio C. Tello had been seeking to make sense of Peru's past. Uhle worked out a convincing chronology for Andean prehistory, while Tello excelled in excavations, including that of the great cemetery of Paracas. Gradually it was revealed that the Andean region had seen a plethora of cultures civilizations, including those of the Moche, with their great coastal city of Chanchan, and the Chimu, best known for their pottery.^xix

As in Mexico, North American archaeologists played an increasing role, a commitment that peaked in the 1940s when war-torn Europe was inaccessible. The indigenous peoples of the Andes did not possess writing, but only the mysterious quipus, aids to memory made of knotted cords. For this reason researchers could not rely on glyphs, as they have come increasingly to do in Mesoamerica, so that interpretation of subject matter, iconography, was a matter of patient labor, piecing together clues from varied sources.

The absence of written sources proved a particular challenge for Andean chronology. Dating was chiefly dependent on finds of pottery, abundant and durable, and these were arranged in sequences determined by stratification and typological classification. After World War II radiocarbon and other scientific methods of determining date came into use. There still remained the problem of developing an overall chronological scheme, harmonizing the results from the many sites. In his 1957 survey of Peruvian archaeology J. Alden Mason faithfully conveys the welter of terms that had come into circulation, which included "Formative," "Florescent," "Fusion," "Cultist," "Militarist," "Expansionist," "Urbanist," "Experimenter," and "Imperialist."^xx Of course no scholar attempted to use all these terms; rather they were employed in overlapping and equivalent ways, which were nonetheless confusing. Writing at about the same time, Geoffrey H. S. Bushnell wrote first simply of the early hunters and farmers, and then adopted the scheme dominant in Mesoamerican studies, the threefold sequence of Formative, Classic, and Post-Classic.^xxi This triad, sometimes substituting Pre-Classic for Formative, enjoys general support for the high cultures of pre-Hispanic America. Some have felt that the scheme (which bears evidence of influence from the European triad archaic-classic-baroque) places too much normative weight on the middle period, the Classic. Some Andeanists prefer the term "Horizon" to designate the Classic era, and in general for epochs when the region was unified, as less value-laden.

North America

Many specialists in Mesoamerican and Andean culture accept--or at least do not deny too loudly--the conventional distinction between the societies they study (with their complex social organizations and impressive monumental remains) and the indigenous societies in the rest of the Americas. This distinction is, however, relative rather than absolute. Excavations and chance finds in Central America and northern Columbia have revealed work not totally dissimilar from the achievements of their better known neighbors to the north and south.

As much archaeological endeavor has been carried forward by scholars based in the United States, it not surprising that some of the work should be directed towards the prehistory of North America itself.^xxii In fact it was Thomas Jefferson, later third president of the United States, who conducted the first stratigraphic excavation of a small mound by the Rawanna River in 1782.^xxiii Four years earlier, at the other extremity of the continent, artists in the expedition of Captain James Cook had recorded living customs of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest--in what is now Washington State and British Columbia.^xxiv These depictions provide valuable evidence for the earlier state of the fascinating culture of this region, later to be studied in great detail by Franz Boas and others, and extended further back in time by archaeological discoveries.^xxv

Nineteenth-century World's Fairs included exhibits of exotic cultures. It was not surprising that the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 should feature native Americans and their culture. For some these displays merely confirmed their belief that indigenous peoples stood low on the evolutionary scale. Others, however, acquired a new resolve to understand them on their own terms. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw a vigorous effort to collect the "material culture" of native Americans, transferring them to museums located for the most part in the eastern United States, far from their places of production. It is a great historical irony that these efforts at collection, preservation, and display took place at the very time at which the traditional cultures of the American Indians were reeling under the most devastating attacks at the hands of whites. Private purchasing of Indian "curios" also greatly increased, and astute dealers were able to promote the popularity of certain types of pieces. Increasing demand caused Indian craftspeople to adjust their production to things that would sell.
As result of these shaping forces, the romantic notion of purely traditional, "pristine" art, uncontaminated by European civilization, became even more mythical than it had before.

According to Ira Jacklin, three major "models" dominated the study of native American art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "The first was the evolutionary approach (ca. 1880-1905) ... which addressed questions of origins and development of designs. The second, the historical-diffusionary approach (ca. 1895-1915), focused on the linkage between form and meaning and the spread of motifs and styles across cultural boundaries." A third, psychological approach (ca. 1910-35) turned to "issues of cultural change, the integration of culture, and the role of the individual."^xxvi

Born in Germany, Franz Boas (1858-1942) was a pivotal figure in the maturation of American anthropology. He also took a great interest in art, fostering models two and three just noted. He was particularly interested in objects from the Northwest Coast, where he had done fieldwork. He fought against the demeaning "evolutionist" displays of the Museum of Natural History in New York City and arranged to have them redone. His own thinking can be traced from an 1897 essay to his book on Primitive Art thirty years later.^xxvii Drawing on nineteenth-century theories (such as those of Gottfried Semper) of the technical imperatives of design in early humanity, Boas emphasized the adaptation of animal and other motifs to a given field. Gradually, he became more aware of the relation of art to the group mentality and of the contribution of individual artists. However, he was not able to developed the vocabulary to express his insights and the contribution of his writings was mainly factual and iconographical. Boas' influence also radiated from his pupils. In fact, such scholars as Herman Haeberlin and Ruth Bunzel went beyond the master in their sensitive exploration of the contribution of the individual native American artist.

In 1879-80 Frank Cushing and Adolph Bandelier arrived in the Southwest, beginning a long series of fruitful studies in a region which, with its monumental pueblos and decorated pottery, has rightly taken its place at the forefront of American Indian accomplishment.^xxviii One manifestation of the this interest, which pertains to modern art and literature, was the establishment of art colonies in Taos and elsewhere in New Mexico. It was in the Southwest, too, that dendrochronology, derived from comparative observation of tree rings, was developed in the 1930s; subsequently this became a tool of world archaeology. This, and other techniques, have permitted the construction of an exceptionally secure chronology in the area. In the Pecos region, for example, archaeologists distinguish--in a period of over 2000 years--three separate phases of the Basketmaker culture, and five of the Pueblo culture. Significantly, Pueblo 5, starting about 1600, lasts right into the present.

Comprehensive exhibitions helped to spur appreciation in the art world. In 1931 New York's Grand Central art galleries hosted the "Exhibition of Tribal Arts" organized by the artist John Sloan and the novelist-anthropologist Oliver La Farge. Another large gathering of Indian arts and crafts appeared at the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exhibition in 1939. These events were surpassed by the great landmark in the public perception of American Indian work as art: the comprehensive loan exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941.^xxix With war raging in Europe, it seemed a good time to pay more attention to things closer to home, and the Museum's cachet, together with a brilliant installation by René d'Harnoncourt ensured the success of this huge show.

As early as the 1920s Parisian surrealists had shown interest in the art objects of the Eskimo and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest Coast. During the 1940s Wolfgang Paalen, Adolph Gottlieb and other modern artists acknowledged the aesthetic qualities of American Indian art, frequently incorporating these themes in their works.

In fact much research on American Indian, or native American (as some prefer), societies correlates studies of past records and evidence with field work in still flourishing Indian communities.^xxx Many artifacts have been collected directly from the makers (sometimes by dubious means) and placed in museums. The most notable of these, the Museum of the American Indian, is being reorganized with new facilities in New York City and Washington, D.C. These plans have engendered controversy, not least because of the justifiable wish of native Americans to have a say in them. All this discussion, however, is helping to foster a more informed interest in American Indian art.

As the twentieth century morphed into the twenty-first interest in the complex present and impressive past of the indigenous Americas has grown rapidly among North Americas and Europeans. The more discerning travelers required printed matter to flesh out their impressions. Scholars whose training was archaeological and anthropological often decorated their popular writings with striking works of art. In their own academic work, however, they turned more and more to demanding austere techniques of analysis difficult for the general public to follow. One of the procedures characteristic of this trend is settlement archaeology. Here careful inspection of remains of several kinds have enabled advances in the study of pre-Hispanic agriculture in the New World.^xxxi Lack of most domestic animals called for special techniques, often labor-intensive, of cultivation. These imperatives resulted in particular patterns of gardens and orchards, and of cultivated fields at varying distances from the settlements proper. In the built environment studies of human remains and inferences regarding population densities are yielding a new subdiscipline called paleodemography.^xxxii All this may seem of little direct interest to the art historian, though it does set the scene in which art production functioned. In the case of the houses examined by paleodemography there is a direct gain in better understanding of ordinary domestic architecture both north and south of the Rio Grande--as distinct from the temples and ceremonial structures usually emphasized by pre-Columbian architectural historians.

Technical as these publications are, they link up with a major reason for studying these societies. Those influenced by the ecology movement are fascinated by the fact that many earlier cultures had a cleaner technology than ours, but one that was adequate for their needs. The sense of alienation from nature and the senses creates a longing for the purity that is perceived as residing in the artifacts of ethnic societies. In the United States it is understandable that much of this interest should be directed to the achievements of native Americans.

II. ETHNIC CULTURES AND THEIR ART

The Age of Exploration inaugurated by Columbus's voyages sought to bring the riches of eastern and southern Asia within Europe's grasp. Once their character was recognized, the intervening land masses of North and South America, with their wealthy, highly organized in Mesoamerica and the Andes, also proved to hold powerful attractions. However, the less advanced peoples of Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa were long perceived as simply an obstacle. Towards the end of the eighteenth century major new voyages, especially those of James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville, changed the picture, so that some European interpreters began to idealize the South Sea islanders as noble savages, living a life in accord with nature. Cooks's travels in particular were documented by a series of records made by European artists. Although the art objects depicted at first drew little interest, later they proved of great value in reconstructing the history of ethnic arts of the Pacific.^xxxiii While voyagers roamed freely about the seas, until the latter part of the nineteenth century, only the coastal areas of Africa were known.

Early Approaches to Ethnic Arts

Beginning in the early nineteenth century a number of museums and public collections were formed in which "ethnographic" objects could be found. Although some collections had started to form before, in the opinion of Robert Goldwater the decisive period was the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when the nuclei of the holdings displayed in Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, London, and Rome were formed.^xxxiv Exhibitions and World's Fairs, with their cornucopias of products of the colonies, also played a role. The 1878 Paris Exhibition stimulated the creation of a separate ethnographic museum there, the Trocadéro. In 1897 a Brussels Exhibition was the occasion for a display of art works from the Belgian Congo, which led to the founding of a special Museum dedicated to these works in the suburb of Tervuren.

Study of the art was at first limited to two-dimensional patterns on surfaces; sculpture was ignored. This interest in surface ornament reflected the crisis in European applied arts that became evident after the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, where the quality of industrial production was found wanting. Following the theories of the German architect Gottfried Semper, interest focused on the technical aspects of the beginnings of art, including tattooing and basket weaving. In this light an effort was made to show how motifs migrated from one medium to another, say from textiles to pottery. Although the notion of the static and unchanging character of "primitive" art--which must always remain primitive to merit the name--persisted, the concept of the adaptation of a pattern from one technique to another (sometimes termed skeuomorphism) implied that development of some sort must have occurred. This conceptual conflict between stasis and change was to surface more prominently later.

A common comparison linked primitive art with the art of children. This parallel rested in part on a precept then widely credited by some scientists, namely that "ontology recapitulates phylogeny."^xxxv In this view, which embryology and comparative paleontology seemed to support, the development of the individual exhibits a series of stages that repeat those of humanity as a whole. It follows, then, that the art of children will reflect mental patterns similar to those of primitive peoples, who were living in "the childhood of art."

As the prehistoric cave paintings of France and Spain became better known, actual specimens of chronologically early stages became available, but these were for long neglected because their naturalistic character did not fit the idea that early art must be geometric, formalistic, and "distorted."

Today, art historians share the study of ethnic arts with anthropologists. In their field work, anthropologists observe how objects are used, collecting information from native informants about their meaning. After they return to the tranquility of their offices and classrooms, anthropologists formulate more comprehensive theories about the art and its place in society. The initial anthropological efforts to come to grips with these problems were disappointing. Sir Edward Tyler (1832-1917), first professor of anthropology at Oxford University, is representative. His discussions of art in his major work Primitive Culture (1871) are brief and episodic. Tyler is chiefly concerned with art as a technical matter and does not grasp how it might contribute to his central problem of "determining the relation of the mental condition of savages to that of civilized man."^xxxvi Other ethnologists of the period followed a similar materialist approach, occasionally awarding points to their subjects for having approximated to realism. In his Grammar of Ornament (1868) the aesthetic reformer Owen Jones takes a more positive view; the ornamental patterns of primitives are, he avers, childlike but they have a freshness from which we could well learn.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close "Darwinian theories ... strongly influenced the study of primitive ornament; the development of art was treated as part of natural evolution, and savage art was considered its lowest."^xxxvii The title of Alfred Haddon's Evolution in Art (London, 1895) speaks for itself. Trained as a biologist, Haddon invoked an aspect of evolutionary theory then much in vogue: degeneration. He held that the abstract tendencies of primitive art were the result of a sequence of copying in which the original naturalistic qualities were gradually obscured by more general patterns.

Despite some currents of sympathy, the writers of this phase had great difficulty relinquishing the assumption of the inferiority of ethnic and prehistoric art. Their obsession with surface ornament kept them from seeing African and Oceanic carvings as sculptures. Inaccessible to these early observers were the two great discoveries of the twentieth century: that these objects could be infused with aesthetic quality of a high order and that they could be bearers of meaning.

Intervention of Artists and Critics.

The opportunity to take the aesthetic accomplishment of "nature peoples" more seriously appeared with the interest of European avant-garde artists who perceived valuable formal and ideological qualities in these objects, which they sought to assimilate, at least partially, in their own work. These possibilities were distantly anticipated by the Nazarenes and pre-Raphaelites who had looked to "archaic" European art as their inspiration. However, the new trend arising at the end of the nineteenth century, involving as it did the exaltation of the art of "savages," was more radical. It is generally acknowledged that the great pioneer here was the symbolist painter Paul Gauguin. His acquaintance with the peasant traditions of Brittany undoubtedly helped to prime him for more radical primitivist forays. Working sometimes with photographs, he studied Egyptian, Aztec, Cambodian, and Indonesian works. Reminiscences of compositional devices from these traditions inform the paintings, prints, and sculptures of his last period, set in the South Pacific where he resided and incorporate actual objects as well as scenes he saw there. The remarkable effect of these Gauguin paintings derives from the fact that they combine the idyllic notion of the South Seas as the earthly paradise with a sense of the mysterious menace of occult forces incarnated in the brooding figures of native sculptures and the superstitious practices of the natives.

The aesthetic merits of African sculpture were discovered in Paris beginning about 1905 by the Fauves who took from it only a generalized sense of bold patterning and intensity of feeling. In the case of Picasso, however, the African figures, which affected him after a first encounter with archaic Iberian heads, seemed to offer the solution to formal problems. Accordingly, the role of the exotic art was much more central. In turn this interest in the formal qualities of African works helped collectors and art historians to posit that they might even present accomplishments unknown to the European tradition.

At the same time a group of German Expressionist artists centered in Dresden focused not only on African but Oceanic art.^xxxviii Two members of the Brücke group, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, actually traveled to the German colony of New Guinea for inspiration. Although nationalists were enraged at their apparent wish to defile the purity of their art, these expressionists were more interested in the intensity of the works than any specific formal or iconographic features. Indeed they participated in the imperialist sentiments of the time. Other artists, including those of the Blaue Reiter and the Surrealists, as well as Paul Klee and Alberto Giacometti also interested themselves in primitive works. The insights of the artists in turn inspired scholars. In 1911 Wilhelm Worringer, who was acquainted with the beginnings of expressionism, contrasted the art of abstraction with that of the art of empathy (classical art), thus linking primitive, Gothic and modern art under the banner of abstraction. Carl Einstein, a friend of Picasso's Paris dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, held that our difficulty in understanding African art was precisely what made it great.^xxxix We are only just beginning to appreciate these works; when we do, we will see that far from being inferior they set a standard by which all others must be measured. The formalist critic Roger Fry who popularized the term Post-Impressionism in his great London exhibition of 1910-11, proceeded with more caution, but still found outstanding plastic values in African sculpture. To be sure, Fry had a difficult time reconciling his still colonialist distaste for the society that produced the works with the admiration he felt for their formal excellence. The first synthesis was offered by Herbert Kühn in his Die Kunst der Primitiven (Munich, 1920). This work deals in some detail with palaeolithic art, the rock pictures of North America, works of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages in Europe, and the art of Africa. The writer attempts to classify the art into two great families, one produced by food gatherers and the other by sedentary agrarians.

In the interwar period admiration for African works kept company with general enthusiasm for "Negro culture," which combined genuine sympathy with patronizing stereotypes of the "natural sense of rhythm" variety.^xl In this vein Euro-Americans have too readily fallen into a self-serving smugness of congratulating themselves for their generosity and perceptiveness. Indeed, their admiration may be a form of pedestal theory, in which apparent admiration conceals containment by relegation to a special category. For a long time only "pure" works were admired; recent ones that showed the influence of acculturation were often rejected. Moreover, anthropologists complained that the formalist approach typified by Fry, Eckart von Sydow and others neglected the meaning and function of the works. Others objected to the effacement of the differences among African cultures in particular which are very diverse.

Some further reflection is needed on the longing to obtain "pure" works, despite the fact the ethnic pieces are typically collected in situations of contact. This longing is accompanied by a disdain for works made for tourists: "airport art." Only works made for ritual use and not for sale are desired, This is odd, because once acquired they are immediately transposed into an aesthetic realm. Removal from context sanitizes the pieces, airbrushing out the setting of vital, yet to our eyes almost chaotic jumble in which many of them originally dwelt.

Complexity and Controversy.

Many of the reservations that had come to be felt about the modernist interpretation of works of primitive art came to a head in the controversy that swirled around a major exhibition held at New York's Museum of Modern Art in the winter of 1984: "'Primitivism' in Twentieth Century Art."^xli This exhibition was intended to reexamine the connection between advanced European art of the first half of the twentieth century and ethnic arts, especially of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Marshaling formidable scholarship (and formidable funding), the organizers showed that many facile comparisons between European works and ethnic pieces that supposedly inspired them were invalid because the artists could not have known the pieces in question. This critical reexamination of commonly accepted legends about the catalytic role of particular pieces deployed one of the genuine strengths of art history as a critical discipline.

However, the organizers did not stop there. They wished to retain the older idea of a deep accord between the aims of advanced European art in the opening decades of the present century and ethnic arts. To accomplish this the exhibition proffered a dubious notion of "affinity" which seemed to make any linkage acceptable that occurred to the observer, based ostensibly not simply on formal similarities but on analogies of spirit. Improbably, it was claimed that the affinities "measure the depth of Picasso's grasp of the informing principles of ethnic sculpture, and reflect his profound identity of spirit with the tribal peoples." How was this depth of grasp achieved? Sometimes the organizers seemed to believe in some archetypal deep structure that links the two kinds of art. When one looks for exemplification of this on the formal level--in the actual appearance of the two categories of art--it comes down to degrees of abstraction and "conceptual" arrangement. These links simply amount to saying that the works do not conform to the norms of Western naturalistic art from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries--a rather unremarkable assertion.

With enormous assurance, the Museum of Modern Art offered its exhibition and its catalog  as a major achievement that would consolidate our view of a key aspect of modern art. Yet the organizers were not prepared for the storm of criticism, polemical but often acutely reasoned, that greeted their efforts.^xlii

Ethnologists and others who had been laboring hard to establish the original context of the ethnic works objected that this approach trivialized them. Moreover, it was noted that the works were collected and admired in an era of high imperialism. To conceal this cultural context--a context generated by our own culture--seemed to smack of neocolonialism. In fact the controversy proved to be a harbinger of the culture wars that were brewing over the subject of multiculturalism, and its application to the humanities. In these discussions not only were the assumptions used to promote "appreciation" of ethnic art challenged, but also the often dubious methods whereby they had been acquired and transported to their present homes in museums and collections. Also critiqued were methods of display, which it was felt extended the process of deracination to which the works had been subjected.^xliii This and other controversies are generating a salutary turbulence in the seemingly placid world of museums, but no clear solutions have been reached.

Older studies of "Negro sculpture" were informed by a sense of overall unifying features, such as abstraction, expressivity, plastic values, and so forth. More recent studies have revealed the enormous variety of styles. This diversity is not mere variation for variation's sake, but anchored in their functionality: the relation to religious systems and their rituals, court ceremonial, and daily life.

Art historians have become increasingly aware of the need to make use of information assembled by ethnographers, much of it collected in an earlier period when the indigenous societies were less permeated by Western influences. Particularly significant in this regard is the career of the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule (1898-1956). Supported by the French government and by private donations, Griaule organized and conducted in 1931-33 a research team that traveled across Africa from Dakar in Senegal to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. The expedition brought back several thousand objects to be deposited in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. In 1947 Griaule spent thirty-three days in dialogue with a sage of the Dogon (West Africa) named Ogotommêli.^xliv This encounter generated the outlines of a complex Dogon sophie or science of correspondences linking the microcosm with the macrocosm, the body with the universe. The system of thought revealed is comparable to that of the Greek pre-Socratics. Over the years, various criticisms have been leveled at Griaule's methods of eliciting information, which were sometimes insensitive and overconfident.^xlv There is no doubt, however, that a careful evaluation of his findings (together with those of such associates as Michel Leiris, Germaine Dieterlen, Denise Calame-Griaule, and Dominique Zahan) can yield vital information for the interpretation of African art works.

Not surprisingly, African art has elicited growing interest among African-Americans in the United States. In Flash of the Spirit Robert Farris Thompson has delineated significant features of the art forms of the Yoruba, Kongo Dahomean, Mande, and Ejhegam groups, and then sought to show their influence in the African diaspora of the Americas.^xlvi In making these connections Thompson applied to the visual arts an approach earlier pioneered in the sphere of folklore and language by the Boasian anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits. He also intended, not without success, to give a signal to contemporary African American artists to rediscover motifs and themes in the art of the other continent. Other theorists and artists contributed to this movement, which has developed a special vitality of its own.^xlvii Moreover, some of these connections have reached a broader public through the Afrocentric educational movement of the 1980s and 90s, though this involves ancient Egypt as well. In Africa itself, today's artists negotiate across a broad spectrum of options ranging from variations on traditional themes to the latest styles practiced in New York, Paris, and Tokyo.^xlviii

Today, study of African art is conducted by scholars stemming from Africa, Europe, and North America.^xlix As these endeavors continue to mature they may offer methodological lessons for European art historiography.^l Because of the types of information at their disposal, Africanists have tended to place less emphasis on chronology and authorship, seeking other ways to contextualize the works they study. Positively, they have emphasized field work--intensive contact with living artists in their own societies. Their practice may offer models for the study of contemporary art in the metropolises of the West.

As African American artists cultivated links with the art of Africa, other American artists were seeking to enrich their vision through immersion in prehistoric art.^li The earthworks revealed by archaeology on the North American continent, the Nazca lines of Peru, and the megalithic monuments of Western Europe have exerted a spell. In all this the ecology and New Age movements played major supporting roles, encouraging the belief that earlier generations had experienced a greater harmony between humanity and nature and had exercised this in their own art. With the passage of time, these trends have come to be regarded more critically, as by Lynne Cooke: "This idealizing of societies (often more fictional than actual) in which communal values united the inhabitants, in which there was no body/mind split, and in which a harmonious organic oneness with the natural world pertained, resulted in work that often was nostalgic, escapist and Utopian. . . . [A]rtists placed great store on elementary sign languages and archetypal imagery such as concentric circles, spirals, meanders, zig-zag and labyrinthine patterns which, it was claimed, are still meaningful today even if their sources and symbolic content cannot be actually elucidated."^lii

However this may be, scholarship continued along its own paths. In many studies of ethnic arts, the element of development over time has become increasingly important. Both formalists and anthropologists have tended to ignore diachronic approaches. The admirer of formal qualities assumes that all pieces from a given society "of the good period" are basically the same; the anthropologist posits continuity in his or her study of the iconography and cultural conditioning factors. Yet archaeology has descried some long sequences, as in Nigeria and the American Southwest; in both cases excavations have afforded vistas centuries before what might have been expected. These studies, and others with a shorter time span, demonstrate that ethnic arts do undergo changes.

Another recent interest is helping to usher in a more nuanced approach: the identification of individual masters. In all likelihood, we would have more names of masters if field investigators had simply asked and recorded the names! Even so, lack of names is not crippling, for connoisseurship can establish meaningful groups, bestowing on the reconstructed personality "names of necessity" chosen by the researcher--following a procedure long accepted in the study of ancient Greek painted vases.

Conclusion.

At the start of the third millennium an increasing, almost overwhelming profusion of information about art is becoming available. This proliferation also characterizes the study of "primitive" art, showing, once again, how misleading are the connotations of simplicity inherent in the old label. Of course, not all the data is new, but the fresh information demands correlation with the old. Properly interpreted, even evidence obtained within the categories of dated nineteenth-century theories of the evolution of human culture may prove valuable.

A number of persistent dualities seem to be retarding the emergence of a unified approach to this field. One stems from the very different disciplinary foundations of anthropology and art history. Anthropologists complain that art historians seem to work with "timeless," almost Platonic concepts such as form and quality, while art historians believe that it is precisely the exclusion of such criteria that makes the anthropological approach to ethnic art incomplete. These disciplinary loyalties echo in the lingering differentiation between the object as artifact and the object as art, a distinction that is still ratified in the two major homes for the objects: museums of ethnography and natural history, on the one hand, and art museums, whether encyclopedic or specialized, on the other. Then there is the contrast between particularism and universality. Very few objects of ethnic art have benefited from the kind of sustained examination, say, Leonardo's Last Supper or Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (which itself has a large "primitive" component) have evoked. Why is this so? Many anthropologists believe that the very umbrella category--whether termed primitive, tribal, or ethnic art--is at fault. They would argue that instead of a unity we have instead some 6000 individual societies, each with its own cosmology, kinship system, oral literature--and art. Another dichotomy is between the supposedly pure art that is uncontaminated by Western influences and the less-prized "contact art." Here anthropologists bear some share of the blame, for their concern has usually been with ethnic cultures in their pure state. The need to gather undistorted data about ethnic cultures threatened by outside influences is one that all can endorse, but it subtly undergirds the pure/impure distinction in the study of art.

In short, what is needed is a broad yet supple approach to all these arts--one that views them as an ensemble, scanting none, while also being attentive to the particular qualities that inform them. This is a tall order, and one that will not be quickly fulfilled.

i Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Of course, not all the contacts lay in the regions named. It is now known that as early as ca. 1000 CE the Vikings had settlements in North America; however, these left no permanent cultural impress on either the Europeans at home or the native American Indians they encountered abroad.

ii Some of these connotations are explored in Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989; and Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

iii The classic work is Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935. See also the articles by George Boas and A. Owen Aldridge in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, New York: Scribner's, 1973, pp. 577-605.

iv The 1843 edition of a book by J.-A.-F. de Montor, reproducing paintings from his collection of Italian works before the time of Raphael, is entitled Peintres primitifs. The expression was taken up by the romantic painter Delacroix and many others. See "Primitif, -ive," Trésor de la langue française, vol. 13, Paris: Gallimard, 1988, pp. 1193-96. More generally, see Frances S, Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. and E. H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitives: Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art, London: Phaidon, 2002.

v For a positive view, see Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk, Paradise Reviewed: An Interpretation of Gauguin's Polynesian Symbolism, Ann Arbor: UHI Research Press, 1983; a negative one, Peter Brooks, "Gauguin's Tahitian Body," Yale Journal of Criticism, 3:2 (1990), 51-90.

vi Robert Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

vii George Kubler, Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 42. This book's useful sketches ("biographical soundings") of the careers of some seventy explorers, chroniclers, and researchers provide much of the information in the following paragraphs. See also Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology, London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.

viii Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900, trans.  Jeremy Moyle, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.

ix Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler, ed. Thomas F. Reese, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. See also Cecelia F. Klein, "The Relation of Mesoamerican Art History to Archaeology in the United States," in Alana Cordy-Collins, ed., Pre-Columbian Art History; Selected Readings, Palo Alto, Calif.: Peek Publications, 1982, pp. 1-6.

x Useful for its concentration on art as such is Janet Catherine Berlo, The Art of Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica: An Annotated Bibliography, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985.

xi Ignacio Bernal, A History of Mexican Archaeology: The Vanished Civilizations of Middle America, London: Thames and Hudson, 1980.

xii Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971.

xiii Norman Hammond, "Lords of the Jungle: A Prosopography of Maya Archaeology," in Richard M. Leventhal and Alan L. Kolata, eds., Civilization in the Ancient Americas: Essays in Honor of Gordon R. Willey, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983, pp. 3-32; Gordon Randolph Willey, Essays in Maya Archaeology, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.

xiv Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992; Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

xv Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art, New York: George Braziller, 1986.

xvi See Robert J. Sharer and David C. Grove, Regional Perspectives on the Olmec, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

xvii Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art, New York: Abrams, 1993, pp.93-135.

xviii Marjorie Ingle, Maya Revival Style, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

xix See the new synthesis by Michael E. Moseley, The Incas and Their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.

xx The Ancient Civilizations of Peru, London: Penguin Books, pp. 14-18.

xxi Peru (Ancient Peoples and Places), London: Thames and Hudson, 1957, rev. ed., 1963.

xxii Brian M. Fagan, Ancient North America: The Archaeology of a Continent, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991. For the early studies, see the lively account of Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization, New York: Free Press, 1994.

xxiii Willey and Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology, pp. 36-38. For this aspect of Jefferson's life, see Karl Lehmann, Thomas Jefferson: American Humanist, new ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

xxiv For the context, see John Frazier Henry, Early Marine Artists of the Pacific Northwest Coast, 1741-1841, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984, pp. 62-94. The Cook material is presented comprehensively in Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Smith's Voyages, 3 vols., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985-87.

xxv Aldona Jonaitis, "Creations of Mystics and Philosophers: The White Man's Perceptions of Northwest Coast Indian Art from the 1930s to the Present," American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 5 (1981), 1-48; idem, Art of the Northern Tlingit, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986, pp. 3-13.

xxvi Ira Jacklin, "'The Artist Himself': The Salish Basketry Monograph and the Beginnings of the Boasian Paradigm," in Janet Catherine Berlo, ed., The Early Years of Native American Art History, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992, p. 136.

xxvii Franz Boas, "The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast," Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 9 (1897), 123-76; Primitive Art, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927 (repr. New York: Dover, 1955).

xxviii Linda S. Cordell, Prehistory of the Southwest, Orlando: Academic Press, 1984. A model art-historical account of one body of work is J. J. Brody, Anasazi and Pueblo Painting, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991.

xxix The catalogue is Frederic H. Douglas and René d'Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941 (repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969). On this event, see the perceptive account by W. Jackson Rushing, "Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern: René d'Harnoncourt and the 'Indian Art of the United States,'" in Berlo, ed., Early Years, 191-236.

xxx An indication of the progress of research can be obtained by comparing the volumes of the Handbook of the North American Indians, Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978- (to be completed in 20 vols.) with such earlier major works as Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Bulletin 78 of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution), 1925; and John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States (Bulletin 137 of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution), 1946.

xxxi Thomas W. Killion, ed., Gardens of Prehistory: The Archaeology of Settlement Agriculture in Greater Mesoamerica, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992.

xxxii See, e.g., Rebecca Storey, Life and Death in the Ancient City of Teotihuacan: A Modern Paleodemographic Synthesis, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992.

xxxiii Joppien and Smith, Art; Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985; and idem, Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

xxxiv Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 5. See also the "Summary Chronology of Museums and Exhibitions," pp. 315-19.

xxxv For a somewhat intemperate attack on this notion, see Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.

xxxvi Goldwater, Primitivism, pp. 16-17.

xxxvii Goldwater, Primitivism, p. 25.

xxxviii Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

xxxix Negerplastik, Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1915.

xl Patricia Leighton, "The White Peril and L'Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism," Art Bulletin 72 (1990), 609-30.

xli See the lavish catalogue in two volumes: William Rubin, ed., "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984.

xlii Among the most incisive pieces were Y.-A. Bois, "La Pensée sauvage," Art in America, April 1985, 178-188; James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," Art in America, April 1985, 164-77 and 215 (reprinted in his The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, 189-214); and Thomas McEvilley, "Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief, Artforum, November 1984), 54-60 (followed by a debate in "Letters," Artforum, February 1985, 42-51).

xliii Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington: Smithsonian Instiution Press, 1991.

xliv Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas, London: Oxford University Press, 1965. For Ogotommêli in relation to African philosophy, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 126-27.

xlv Clifford, Predicament of Culture, pp. 55-91.

xlvi Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, New York: Random House, 1983.

xlvii [Dallas Museum of Art], Black Art: Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art, New York: Abrams, 1990.

xlviii Susan Vogel, ed., Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art, New York: Center for African Art, 1991; Jean Kennedy, New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1992.

xlix For recent advances and reorientations, see Daniel P. Biebuyck, ""African Art Studies since 1957: Achievements and Directions," African Studies Review, 26 (1983), 99-118; Karen Barber, "Popular Arts in Africa," African Studies Review, 30 (1987), 1-78, 113-32; Monni Adams, "African Visual Arts from an Art Historical Perspective," African Studies Review, 32 (1989), 55-103; Paula Ben-Amos, "African Visual Arts from a Social Perspective," African Studies Review, 32 (1989), 1-54; and African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990.

l Suzanne Preston Blier, "Truth and Seeing: Magic, Custom, and Fetish in Art History," in Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O'Barr, eds., Africa and the Disciplines: The Contribution of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 139-66.

li Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, New York: Pantheon, 1983.

lii "Primitivist Revivals in Recent Art," in Susan Miller, ed., The Myth of Primitivism: Perspectives on Art, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 140.