ABSTRACT
After Picasso and Vlaminck “discovered” l’art negre (African art) at the turn of the twentieth century, the category “Primitive Art” gradually emerged during the first half of that century: galleries of Modern Art sold it; avant-garde collectors acquired it; it was promoted in major museums’ temporary exhibitions (see Errington 1998; Flam 2003). The “it” came to mean not just African art, but also Oceanic, pre-Columbian, and American Indian. Prototypical Primitive Art was made by “tribal” peoples, at that time living mainly in Europe’s colonies or in the colonized margins of nation-states in the Americas. They were thought to live in a static, repetitive realm of tradition outside history or before it; the hallmark that qualified it as “Authentic” was that it was made for local ritual purposes rather than manufactured to sell. The fiction at the time was that those authentic tribes were virtually untouched by the West, and that they continued their “traditional” ways.
