Page 50 - Studio International - February 1970

Art of the THIS IS THE PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED TEXT

OF AN ESSAY PRINTED IN SPANISH IN `AMBOS
South Seas MUNDOS', JUNE 1946, AS 'LAS FORMAS PLASTICAS
DEL PACIFICO'. THE ESSAY REFERS TO AN
EXHIBITION TITLED 'ARTS OF THE SOUTH SEAS',
HELD AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW
YORK, IN 1946. THE WORKS REPRODUCED
Barnett Newman HERE WERE SHOWN IN THAT EXHIBITION

Primitive art has become for artists the up to date with its recent exhibition of art of the jungle; if Mexican art can be said to
romantic dream of our time. Each art epoch, objects from the Oceanic Islands of the South contain a terror of power,3 then it can be said
like each historic age, has its romantic dream Pacific. With this exhibition, it is now clear that despite its wide range, the distinguishing
of the past, since artists, no less than historians, that even Surrealism which has always given character of Oceanic art, the quality that
yearn for the great works of some other time, the impression of being on the periphery if not gives us a clue to its difference from all other
never for the achievements of their own time. outside the curve of the modern plastic art traditions, is its sense of magic. It is magic
The Impressionists, it is well known, had their revolutionary wave, is no exception to the based on terror, but unlike the African terror
dream in the Japanese print. They doted over romanticism of our time, that it had its before nature this is a terror before nature's
this art of the Orient just as, centuries earlier, romance in the art of the South Seas. meaning, the terror involved in a search for
the Byzantines, anxious to create a sacred art This has been the most comprehensive display answers to nature's mysterious forces.
around the Christ legend, had their romance of this art ever assembled and is perhaps the All life is full of terror. The reason primitive
in the religious grandeur of India and China. first aesthetic presentation of this material, art is so close to the modern mind is that we,
Until the Impressionists broke the spell, making it an event of international im- living in times of the greatest terror the world
Europe's emotional life had been dominated, portance.2 It is interesting that except for the has known, are in a position to appreciate the
for centuries, by that grandiose dream, the pieces brought from Australia to represent the acute sensibility primitive man had for it.
Renaissance.' The Renaissance itself, found art of its aborigines, the four hundred items Yet though all men live in terror, it is the
its dream in Classical Greece. And for the collected have all come from American science objects of terror that contain within themselves
Greeks, the Egyptian pyramid stood as a museums. It has taken a war to make the those elements of cultural interpretation that
standard of absolute beauty, the symbol of American people tragically aware of this permit the differentiation of its various sub-
all their aesthetic hopes. region as a cultural realm, until now known jective expressions. Modern man is his own
In our time Picasso may have dreamed of a as some exotic paradise mortgaged to the terror. To the African and to the Mexican,
half dozen Utopias but his primary dream— travel agencies. it was the jungle. To the South Sea Islander,
the one that gave him his voice—was Negro The scope of South Sea art is so vast (the it could not have been a like terror before an
sculpture. This does not mean that his art label Oceanic compresses twenty cultures) immobile nature, but a terror before forces,
arose from it. But Picasso did try to achieve that it would be incomplete to try a detailed the mysterious forces of nature, the un-
the artistic ideals he thought he understood to analysis of it here, just as it would be in- predictable sea and the whirlwind. In
exist in this primitive art tradition. Likewise sufficient to treat the history of Western Oceania, terror is indefinable flux rather than
Matisse found his nostalgic world in the great European art in a phrase. South Sea art tangible image. The sea and the wind, unlike
decorative traditions of primitive Persia. The ranges from the ornate, rococo decorative the static forest and the jungle approach
non-objectivists from Kandinsky to Mondrian styles of the New Zealand Maoris, to the metaphysical acts. Whether benign or cata-
yearned for the purism of primitive design. functional simplicity of the Islands of Micro- strophic, they arise out of the mystery of
The Expressionists seized the idiom of modern nesia; from the expressionistic, semi-realistic space. The terror they engender is not then, a
art, rooted as this idiom is in an interpretation art of Easter Island to the imaginative terror before an inscrutable nature but one
of the meaning of primitive art, to express a symbolism of New Ireland carvings; from that arises before abstract forces. The
personal art, from within, just as El Greco the metaphysical drawings of the Australian Oceanic artist, in his attempt at an explana-
used the then existing Venetian dream to Bushmen to the abstract art of the New tion of his world, found himself involved in an
express his own personal vision. Modern Guinea Papuans. epistemology of intangibles. By coping with
sculpture likewise has its romance in primitive Yet if it is permissible to isolate the disting- them, he developed a pictorial art that con-
traditions; Brancusi in the pre-historic and the uishing character of an art tradition, if it is tained an extravagant drama, one might say
Negro, Henry Moore in Pre-Columbian permissible, for example, to describe Western a theatre, of magic.4
Mexican sculpture, Lipchitz in a succession European art as an art of the voluptuous; if The exhibition in New York was so arranged
of primitive styles. it can be said that the distinguishing character that each grouping showed a fraternity with
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has of Negro African art is that it is an art of the several facets of our modern art move-
brought this inter-relationship between terror, terror before nature as the idea of ments. The functionalism of Micronesian
modern art and the art of primitive peoples nature made itself manifest to them in terms objects mirror our own modern functional
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