by Carl Hoffman
As the guests nibbled on canapés and sipped their wine, Nelson reminded them that his new museum was “the first . . . of its kind in the world”—the first museum dedicated exclusively to primitive art. While a frigid wind swept up Fifth Avenue outside, d’Harnoncourt and Luce marveled at the beauty of form and line and listened to Nelson speak. Museums of history and ethnology, he said, had long shown objects like the ones here, but he reminded his guests that they’d always done so to document their studies of indigenous cultures. “It is our purpose to supplement their achievement,” he said with Rockefellerian assurance. “We do not want to establish primitive art as a separate kind of category, but rather to integrate it, with all its missing variety, into what is already known to the arts of man. Our aim will always be to select objects of outstanding beauty whose rare quality is the equal of works shown in other museums of art throughout the world, and to exhibit them so that everyone may enjoy them in the fullest measure.”
IT WAS a bold proclamation, the word choice explicit. Ever since Western explorers had begun conquering the world they had returned with souvenirs, which they displayed in special rooms or curiosity cabinets. A description of one of those cabinets in 1599 lists its contents: “an African charm made of teeth, a felt cloak from Arabia, an Indian stone ax, a charm made of monkey teeth.” To travel is to want to remember and to acquire. It is from the Latin “to recall” that we get the word “souvenir,” as every airport trinket shop knows well; I haven’t yet been on a trip from which I’ve not returned bearing coveted objects. My house is adorned with blowpipes from Borneo and Buddhist charms from Thailand and an opium pipe from China, and you can be sure that every European sailor and his captain from Columbus onward tucked exotic keepsakes into their pockets and the holds of their ships. But that’s just how they were seen—as exotic trinkets. The native people of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania were unformed savages, people without religion, and the objects they created were anything but art. Every seed, leaf, and plant collected on Captain James Cook’s third voyage, for instance, was recorded individually, while most of the human artifacts weren’t listed at all. Ethnographic objects in the collection of Sir Hans Sloane, which formed the basis of the British Museum, were classed merely as “Miscellanies.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, a handful of Western artists became deeply influenced by the primitive. Paul Gauguin’s paintings of naked Tahitians shocked the world. Pablo Picasso began depicting the masks he found in Parisian flea markets, and his cubist figures resembled the rough, exaggerated forms of indigenous African carvings. But artists like Gauguin and Picasso were radicals by their nature. It was one thing for a Western artist to be inspired by “the primitive,” quite another for the primitive objects themselves to be exhibited as works of art equivalent to a da Vinci or a Matisse.
THE STORY OF ART is as much the story of the men and women who collect it, and there were no collectors more important than the Rockefellers. Nelson Rockefeller grew up surrounded by art. His father, John D. Rockefeller Jr., loved porcelain; in fifty years he would spend more than $10 million to amass what some critics called the most important collection of its kind in the world. His mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, had a passion for Asian and French Impressionists, and her and John D. Jr.’s mansion on West Fifty-Fourth Street overflowed with it—along with medieval tapestries and Chinese porcelains and a rotating display of works by French and American modernists. The Rockefeller influence cannot be overstated. Abby’s passion led to the creation of the New York Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1929, nine days after the crash of Wall Street. As a child, Nelson was schooled in art like most boys are schooled in baseball, an education that included trips to the studios of prominent modern artists. When he wrote his mother a note from Dartmouth in 1927 about one of those journeys, she replied: “If you start to cultivate your taste and eye so young, you ought to be very good at it by the time you can afford to collect.”
In 1930 Nelson and his new bride, Mary Todhunter Clark, received a $20,000 wedding gift from John D. and a honeymoon journey around the world that lasted nine months. As would happen with Michael thirty years later, Rockefeller employees paved the way, setting up connections at the highest levels of government wherever they went. In India, Nelson even met with Mahatma Gandhi. On that journey he bought a knife in Sumatra adorned with a sculpted head and human hair, a purchase that began his lifelong love for primitive art. “I started to see art as widely varying expressions of individuals,” he once said, “individuals from all parts of the world and from all ages, with strong feelings and great creative capacities to express their feelings. No longer was my appreciation confined to classical forms of art as taught in our schools and shown in our great museums.” Appointed the second president of the Museum of Modern Art that year, he attempted to persuade the museum to mount an exhibit of primitive art. Nelson was ahead of his time, however, and the trustees rejected the idea.
Twenty years later, Nelson had surpassed his parents. Picasso, Braque, and Léger canvases and Matisse murals hung in his New York apartment. The gardens at the family estate in Pocantico Hills, named Kykuit, twenty-eight miles north of midtown Manhattan, bloomed with Calders, Giacomettis, Noguchis, and even an Aphrodite once thought to be the work of Praxiteles. The inside, said Persico, “had the ambience of a museum after hours. George Washington gazed down from a Gilbert Stuart original, and in an arched window stood a full-sized male nude, the Age of Bronze, Rodin’s first major work. One half expected to see red ropes across the chairs to ward off actual use.” At the Rockefeller summer home in Seal Harbor, Maine, Nelson maintained a separate gallery in a former coal wharf renovated by the architect Philip Johnson, full of contemporary painting and sculpture. Contemporary Latin American art filled his ranch in Venezuela.
In 1955 the Museum of Modern Art held a photographic exhibit called The Family of Man. “Everywhere,” wrote Carl Sandburg in the show’s catalog, “the sun, moon and stars, the climates and weathers, have meanings for people. Though meanings vary, we are all alike in all countries and tribes in trying to read what sky, land and sea say to us. Alike and ever alike we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity lives with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.”
Times were changing. The arts, politics, culture—there was no way to separate them, and what was happening in the world of art reflected what was happening in global politics. People who had existed to be dominated, converted, enslaved, and exploited in far-flung colonies were asserting their right to independence. The British surrendered India in 1947. The Netherlands turned over all of the Indonesian archipelago, except for its half of New Guinea, in 1949. The Belgian Congo became free in 1960, Kenya three years later. As Nelson Rockefeller’s new museum opened, the 1960s were about to explode forth: The civil rights movement. Feminism. Vatican II and the liberalization of the Catholic Church. The Peace Corps. A shift in thinking about those mythical savages was perfectly captured by the timing of the museum’s opening. New York art critic Hilton Kramer’s review of the Museum of Primitive Art’s first exhibition, based almost entirely on Nelson’s collection, reads like a manifesto for the end of colonialism.
“Far more striking than any common denominator of form or craft or cultural origin,” he wrote, “is the staggering abundance of artistic ideas and the vitality which marks the execution of every piece. It shatters even some very sophisticated assumptions about the meaning of what is primitive; for this writer, at least, it shatters the term itself. . . . One is suddenly appalled that rather than telling us anything, it only masks our ignorance. It reminds us of the extent to which our conception of history has locked out some of the most brilliant civilizations. . . . It underscores the imperiousness of our Western sensibilities, and exposes a kind of historical provincialism.”
There is something darker, though, and ironic, about this love of the primitive. Who
knows what inner cravings and demons, passions, and curiosities lay behind a Michelangelo or a Matisse or even a Hockney? Van Gogh killed himself. Picasso had an insatiable sexual appetite. Who cares? We can like the colors. We can admire the form and line. A Western artist’s personal life might inform his painting, but it’s an individual expression to which we may or may not relate, and we can enjoy the painting or sculpture, or not, without caring about or knowing the artist’s intention.
Primitive art, however, is mostly sacred art, the individual artist subsumed in the symbolic language that is instantly understood by the community and the religious power carried within it. For the creators of primitive art there is no separation of form and function. An Asmat shield might be carved to stop an arrow, but the penis protruding from the top, the fruit bat wings or boar tusks etched into it, have spiritual utility and meaning, and the spirit of a known man lives within it. For the Western collector, the Asmat shield is a thing of beauty; for the Asmat, it is a thing of supernatural power. An Asmat might look at a shield and drop with fear. “The ancestor’s spirit lives in the shield,” wrote Tobias Schneebaum, a writer and artist who spent more than five years in Asmat, “and is a presence that endows the living relative not only with fearlessness and courage in the face of all odds, but also with the omnipotence to overpower the enemy and become the victor.”
Nelson Rockefeller recognized the beauty and form of the Sumatran knife that he acquired on his honeymoon. With his refined eye—and to his credit—he saw a work of art. But he was seeing only its surface. A human head, genuine human hair—those indicated something far deeper going on, a meaning vastly different for the Sumatran who’d made it than for Nelson Rockefeller.
As primitive art moved from ethnographic curio to art in and of itself, to be appreciated on a white pedestal under track lighting in a Manhattan townhouse, it was disassociated from its original meaning and purpose. Nelson himself told an interviewer in 1965: “My interest in primitive art is not an intellectual one. It is strictly esthetic. Don’t ask me whether this bowl I am holding is a household implement or a ritual vessel. . . . I could not care less! I enjoy the form, the color, the texture, the shape. I am not in the least interested in the anthropological or the ethnological end of it. That is why I founded the museum: to show that the art of primitive people could be treated on purely esthetic and formal grounds.”
Those who began swarming into the exotic world, however, were not just acquiring inanimate objects, but walking into something else entirely: a potentially dangerous world of spirits who could make them sick or even kill them, of secrets and meanings whose language they didn’t speak, whose symbols they didn’t understand, and where life and death, literally, hung in the balance.
IN SCIENCE FICTION stories there’s often some mad scientist who creates a portal between our world and a distant world through which our epic hero travels. Unexpected things happen when those doors are opened. So it was that evening in 1957. Nelson Rockefeller had thrown open a door to a distant swamp in New Guinea, a world where spirits roamed and there were no boundaries between life and death, between the I and the Other, between man as eater and man as food—a world representing as alternative and parallel a universe to midtown Manhattan as it’s possible to have. Some people (most people probably) are content to look at an Easter Island paddle or a Nigerian mask on a pedestal. Or to look at something their father puts on a pedestal. But not everyone, especially a boy who had a lot to prove to a father with a pair of very big shoes.
Michael Rockefeller was just nineteen years old on that opening night, and it’s easy to imagine the power the event had for him. His powerful father’s pride and joy over the new museum, the strange and exotic beauty and pull of the objects, the cream of New York’s elite admiring them. Across thousands of miles, forces were being unleashed and connecting lines drawn. It’s hard not to wonder if Nelson Rockefeller ever regretted the words he wrote Robert Goldwater, the museum’s director, the next day: “Last night was a really perfect evening—the realization of a dream which all of us have shared. The creation of this new museum and the association with you which it has afforded are the source of infinite pleasure and happiness to me.”
5
December 1957
CANOES FROM THE VILLAGE OF OMADESEP ON THE FARETSJ RIVER.
SEVEN MONTHS AFTER Nelson Rockefeller opened the Museum of Primitive Art, Pip, Dombai, Su, Kokai, Wawar, and Pakai dipped their paddles in the Arafura Sea and stroked long and smooth. Dip and stroke. Dip and stroke. They were united by complex family ties and years of practice, and their paddles moved as one.
Their dugout canoe was barely twelve inches wide and eighteen deep, tipsy and unstable, and yet they rowed in a line standing up, balancing on toughened, splayed feet that had never worn shoes. Their paddles were ten feet long, with narrow, short, oval blades and long handles tapering to sharp points. From the tops of some dangled the white feathers of a sulfur-crested cockatoo, the badge of a successful headhunter. Carved about three-quarters of the way up each of the paddle’s handles, right at eye level, was the small image of a dead relative’s face. With every stroke, each rower saw the face on his paddle and remembered the death of his brother, uncle, cousin. Their canoe had a penis—its bow—carved with an upturned face: a dynamic, beautifully rendered image of a man. The canoe bore his name.
They carried in their canoes lumps of dried sago flour wrapped in banana leaves, bows seven feet long that shot barbed bamboo arrows without fletching, long spears with a multitude of points, and axes with heads of stone and steel. The stone came from the highlands along ancient trading routes, the steel from Dutch missionaries who had begun to filter into Asmat in 1952. In the damp swamps and rivers the rowers had no way to make fire, so they brought it with them: in the stern of each canoe smoldered a few hot coals on a bed of mud.
Dip and stroke. Dip and stroke. And with every stroke the paddles struck the sides of the canoe like a drumbeat. A heartbeat.
They were all from the village of Otsjanep, and soon most of them would be dead.
If they felt any uneasiness, they wouldn’t have shown it. Moving south with them were 118 other men in eleven canoes, all from the neighboring village of Omadesep. Some hamlets in the swamps and rivers had a hundred people, some less, some a few more. But Otsjanep and Omadesep were each more than a thousand people strong. They were big, powerful, deeply traditional communities on parallel rivers just a few miles apart as the crow flies. The men in each village fought together, killed together, protected their wives together—sometimes even traded them for a night. Their lives were so closely bound to village and jeu that they were more single organism than a collection of individuals. But to say they were fearless would be wrong. The Asmat lived in a complex world of spirits kept in balance by elaborate ceremonies and constant reciprocal violence. No death just happened. Even sickness came at the hand of the spirits. Every villager could see them, talk to them. There were spirits in rattan and in the mangrove and sago trees, in the whirlpools, in their own fingers and noses. There was their world, and there was the world of Safan, the realm of the souls and kingdom of the ancestors across the seas. The worlds were equally real, sickness and death kept in check by constant appeasement and scaring of the spirits of their ancestors back to beyond the sea where they belonged, where they could do no harm. The spirits often came at night, and to keep them away the Asmat used the skulls of their ancestors as pillows.
The canoes of Pip, Dombai, Su, Kokai, Wawar, and Pakai and the men from Omadesep were bunched together, slipping over the water almost as though they were part of it, as naturally as men walk along a path. Their canoes, their paddles, their ornaments, everything came from the jungle. Sometimes they rowed in silence, and sometimes they broke into song, each word long and slow, drawn out, dirgelike.
Seabird coming
How are you coming?
You can help keep me company.
“Wo!” shouted Wawar, for emphasis, as the six paddles
drummed on the flanks of the canoe. “Wo!”
We believe you
Everyone believes you
Because you live in the sea.
Where are you coming from?
I will follow you.
They made fun of each other. They joked about women; half their battles concerned them, villages often came to blows over them, and warfare was in part linked to winning their favor. Although an outsider might struggle to see even the mouths of small creeks, they noticed everything. In an unending geography of green sameness that held no seasons, not even divided into rainy and dry, they knew whose sago stands were whose, where the territory for Otsjanep, for instance, ended and that of Omadesep began.
They had a rich oral tradition, which they’d learned as boys sitting at the knees of their fathers in the long, smoky jeu. As hunter-gatherers in this world without seasons, they knew no time. Sometimes they drummed and sang all night and slept most of the day, sometimes they fell asleep at dusk. They paddled their canoes according to the tides. Pakai mentioned the village of Biwar Laut, and they remembered when Biwar had stolen two women from Otsjanep, and they’d killed men in return, the “they” being their fathers, brothers, brothers-in-law, uncles. That had been thirty years ago, but it might have been yesterday. At the mouth of the Jawor River, barely a perceptible cut on the muddy beach, they all shuddered a little, for the Jawor was a powerful place full of spirits.
