Primitive Splendor at the Met

By ROBERT HUGHES

Totems and idols reign in an elegant new space

The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opens with suitable fanfare to the New York public this week, is certainly the most spectacular permanent exhibition of "primitive" art (though not the best collection of it) that can be seen in any museum anywhere in the world. Never before has white Western culture paid such lavish homage to the black, brown and red cultures that, since 1500, it colonized, cheated, evangelized, enslaved and, not infrequently, destroyed. There are too many bones beneath this monument to enable anyone to contemplate it without deep ambivalence.

The Met's architects, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates, designed nearly an acre of elegant, muted space with such tact that the architecture never overwhelms or interferes with what it displays. Its climax is a slope-walled glass house--a twin to the gallery that houses the Egyptian Temple of Dendur on the other side of the museum--that contains the largest of the wooden figures. Enormous trouble was taken to safeguard the perishable organic materials of tribal art, the hair and wicker and wood and feathers, against the vagaries of New York's climate. Between them, the building and installation cost a total of $18.3 million.

The result is both a masterpiece of museological taste and a tour de force of cultural displacement. The New Hebrides slitgongs and the row of towering, slender Asmat mbis totems, some of them 21 ft. tall, seem to inhabit a world of pure form, primitive Apollonianism heavily inflected by Roger Fry. Even the crust of old blackened blood left by ritual libations on some of the African idols is politely referred to, on the museum's labels, as "sacrificial material."

This section of the Met, which completes the last phase of its expansion, has been a long time coming. It was conceived by the late Nelson Rockefeller as a memorial to his son Michael, who died in 1961 at the age of 23 while collecting artifacts made by the Asmat people of western New Guinea. Young Rockefeller is thought to have drowned at sea; no trace of him was ever found. Though his contribution to anthropology was slight, he brought back quite a lot of Asmat art, and the works of this previously obscure swamp folk have been given an immense memorial prominence.

But of course, the new wing contains a great deal more than Asmat art, or even New Guinea art in general. Nelson Rockefeller was a voracious collector of primitive art as such, and almost everything he owned--the 3,500 or so objects that were the nucleus of his Museum of Primitive Art, along with his smaller private collection--went to the Metropolitan in his son's memory. To this bequest have been added several very choice groups of objects from other sources: the Wunderman collection of Dogon sculpture, ancient Peruvian ceramics from the Nathan Cummings collection, and a number of pre-Columbian objects from the Alice Bache bequest.

The ensemble splits into three broad geographical areas: Africa, the Americas and Oceania (that vast and anthropologically complex area from Easter Island to the Torres Strait, embracing the scattered island cultures of the Pacific as well as Australia and New Guinea). The sweep of the collection reminds one that at almost any time in the world's history up to now, the overwhelming majority of art made for any purpose at all was what we call primitive: that is, in the words of Douglas Newton, curator of the Met's new wing: "Primitive culture has been the major part of human experience."

"Primitive" is a bedeviling word, hard to shake. In the past few decades it has lost most of its racist overtones, but has nonetheless retained an air of condescension. Its most neutral usage, suggested by Newton, is "the art of those peoples who have remained until recent times at an early technological level, who have been oriented toward the use of tools but not machines." The key phrase is "until recent times"--without it, most European culture up to about 1600 could fairly be called primitive. Above all, the word cannot mean crude or inarticulate. Few European medieval ivory carvings are as exquisitely realized, in detail and in the round, as the Met's ivory Bini mask of a Nigerian ruler; and the technical finesse of pre-Columbian gold ornaments, brought back by the conquistadors from South America, astonished Albrecht Duerer in the 16th century as much as it does us today.

The Met's collection, as it now stands, is strong in New Guinea and Melanesian art. And its African material, particularly in the areas of Senufo, Dan and Dogon tribal art, is superb. But the coverage of Australian and (more surprisingly) Northwest American Indian art is sketchy. This may be because the roots of Rockefeller's own taste were set in the culture of European modernism--in the admiration for the primitive that formed the experimental work of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Brancusi.

What influenced such men was, above all, the vestiges and souvenirs of African art, sluiced back into France as mere curiosities by the currents of imperial trade at the turn of the century. To compare such objects with their European responses, at this late date, is to enter a strange chamber of mirrors: we now tend to see African art in terms of cubism; one musical instrument in a glass case at the Met, a Zaire harp, is quite simply a cubist guitar plucked out of Picasso's paint of 1915 and materialized in three dimensions. Primitivism owes its prestige, in the West, to modernism.

But suppose that a hundred years from now, a Chinese student whose cultural ground was five generations of dialectical materialism were asked to give a rendering of the Apocalypse of St. John. Suppose that such a person knew next to nothing about the Christian eschatological belief, had never met a priest, thought all visions were delusions and had never used a metaphor in his life. Such a man would have difficulty with such a text; and we have the same kind of difficulties with primitive art.

It was made for religious purposes that we comprehend dimly at best and can never, in any case, share. In its innumerable forms, it appealed to a moral universe--fairly horrible sometimes, but moral all the same--altogether remote from ours. It presupposes a different way of experiencing the world, society, authority and myth: not just somewhat different, but radically so. Its assumptions about the role art plays in society are sundered from those postulates we normally carry with us. Our only contact with it is on the aesthetic plane--that, and in the enjoyable frissons of strangeness, coupled with the more sophisticated pleasures of art-history comparison.

So we end in the position of enjoying, for disinterested reasons, a whole range of art whose main impulse was not aesthetic at all, but magical. Our pleasure, one may be sure, would have seemed ludicrous to the people who made these objects. What they wanted to evoke was awe, fear and the sense of power--the rawest musculature of the social contract, twitching reflexively before the image. No wonder Nelson Rockefeller liked to collect such things.

--By Robert Hughes

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