Modernist Primitivism in 1933: Brassai's "Involuntary Sculptures" in Minotaure

Brassaï's photographs of Involuntary Sculptures in number 3-4 of Minotaure from December 1933 emblematize the journal's focus on ethnographic modernism. His magnification of everyday Western ephemera transforms them into mysterious aesthetic objects comparable in their strangeness to the exotic tribal art brought back from ethnographic expeditions and presented in the pages of the same luxurious journal. Through this implicit comparison, Brassaï problematizes the Western primitivist notion of the tribal fetish and concurrently asks whether there might not be something sacred buried in our most ordinary and familiar everyday objects.