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Art and Artifact at the Trocadero: Ars Americana and the Primitivist Revolution
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ART AND ARTIFACT AT THE TROCADERO Ars Americana and the Primitivist Revolution ELIZABETH A. WILLIAMS In 1928 an exhibition of pre-Columbian art was held in the Louvre's Pavillon du Marsan. Including almost a thousand objects, mostly from Central and South America, it was the first such exhibit to accent the aesthetic rather than ethnographic interest of such pieces. A catalog (Les arts anciens de l'Amerique) was prepared by the exhibit's organizers, the ':A..mericanist" scholar Alfred Metraux and Georges-Henri Riviere, who on the strength of the show was soon to be hired as curator at the Musee d'Ethnographie du Trocadero. An introduction by Raoul d'Harcourt, coauthor of an acclaimed work on Peruvian ceramics (1924)' praised the exhibit's managers, the authorities who had sponsored it, and the high quality of the pieces shown. Although the catalog elsewhere averred that the exhibit's sole purpose was to illuminate artistic developments, d'Harcourt himself displayed a certain uneasiness : It will be objected in certain quarters that by reason of the frequently ritualistic or purely utilitarian character of the chosen pieces, this exposition falls into the domain of ethnography, and this will be true. But, aside from the fact that from a broad perspective aesthetics belongs to that science, where indeed it occupies a favored position, nothing would appear to be more legitimate than to group objects from the special point of view of their artistic form and decor, taking into account . . . the idea of beauty which is at work in and incorpoElizabeth A. Williams, currently Instructor in the Department of History at the University of Georgia in Athens, is the' author of "Institutional Stalemate: French Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century," Isis (1985). Her current research, funded by a National Science Foundation Scholar's Award, explores further the history of French anthropological theory and institutions in the nineteenth century. 146 ART AND ARTIFACT AT THE TROCADERO 147 rated in them. Such a procedure renders more directly visible the style of an epoch or a region and makes comprehensible the play of neighboring influences . (Arts anciens, x) That d'Harcourt was so hesitant to affirm the aesthetic interest of preColumbian works in 1928 occasions some surprise. Europe's awakening to the beauties of art primitif is generally traced to a much earlier date, either to the changed sensibility in the work of Van Gogh or Gauguin or to the "discovery " of primitive sculpture by Picasso and other avant-garde artists in 1906-7 (Laude 1968; Curtis 1975; Rubin 1984). Moreover, it has recently been argued that in Paris after the first World War there emerged among ethnographers and modernist aesthetes a distinct vision (captured in the construct "ethnographic surrealism") that "destabilized" such traditional categories of high culture as the opposition between art and artifact (Clifford 1981). If so, we might interpret d'Harcourt's hesitation as a late reflection of traditional prejudices against the "primitive arts," or perhaps as an indicator of generational and cultural fissures in French ethnographical circles ("traditionalists " versus "modernists"). But there can be no doubt that he echoed ambivalences long expressed among ethnographers trying to determine the place of ethnographic artifacts in traditional classifications of artistic production . In the nineteenth-century museum, unlike its predecessor the eighteenthcentury cabinet de curiosite, exhibits were expected to reflect some clear rationale : museums of natural history presented instructive exhibits; museums of art presented things of beauty. But the place of ethnographical displays in this scheme of things was not wholly clear. Some ethnographers argued that their materials had nothing of the beautiful about them and that ethnographical collections were intended only to enlighten. Among the most influential was E. F. }omard, curator at the Bibliotheque Royale, who began in the 1820s to urge the creation of a full-dress ethnographical museum in Paris: "there is no question of beauty in these arts . . . but only of objects considered in relation to practical and social utility" (1831:423). That position, however, was inherently problematic. The act of display itself suggested that beauty was somehow involved. Furthermore, many pieces, especially those from sophisticated material cultures like those of preConquest America, fell into already well-established classes of artistic production -statuary, vases, bas-reliefs. Such objects seemed clearly to be born of aesthetic intentions, since they were decorative, formal, stylized, and unmistakably the products of careful labor and technical skill. Moreover, many European observers were susceptible to their aesthetic effects. Peruvian ceramics are the best case in point. Their beauty was...