2 As Hal Foster subsequently pointed out, the presuppositions of the show were uncompromisingly humanist: “the final criterion is Form, the only context Art, the primary subject Man.” 3 As an intellectual position this went against the tenor of the times, at least in New York. “Few aspects of modern art are as complex as primitivism, yet few reveal themselves so arrestingly in purely visual terms, simply by the juxtaposition of knowingly selected works of art.” So began Varnedoe in his brief preface to the two-volume catalog. 1 Convictions in hand, they asserted that this resonance was something that visitors to the exhibition could see with their own eyes, and that any ethnographic contextualization of the tribal artifacts would only have got in the way. The problem can be seen in the subtitle, “Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.” It would have been more true to history to say “Affinity of the Modern for the Tribal,” but William Rubin, the chief architect of the show, and his collaborator Kirk Varnedoe, having started out with that more modest idea eventually decided to stand their ground on the more ambitious notion of a two-way affinity.
The Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art was notoriously controversial ( fig.