ABSTRACT
Much has been said in recent years about the misrepresentation of non-European cultures in exhibitions and essays about primitivism.2 Less attention has been paid to an underlying cause of this failure, which has to do with an unsatisfactory representation of European art itself-namely the history of modernism. The tendency to define modernism narrowly, from the viewpoint of mainstream French aesthetics, and to represent it as a unitary, revolutionary phenomenon, excluding all conservative and appropriative strategies, has meant that investigations of modernist primitivism are built on a series of false premisses. Because exhibitions like the 1984 show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art, continue to uphold the values of modernism they are unable to examine critically and to dismantle the terms of modernist discourse.
