2 Editorial When Columbus made landfall on a small island in the Bahamas in October of 1492, he was greeted by friendly and curious Lucayo people, some of whom, according to his journal, wore nose rings fashioned from gold. These objects, which we would value today as Taïno art, looked more like opportunity to him, and extreme measures were undertaken to locate the source of this wealth, a process that ultimately led to the devastation of those who were then the inhabitants of the Americas. Because of the pivotal importance of this first meeting, which also happens to be one of the earliest recorded encounters of Europeans with what we now call tribal art, the firsthand account of it has survived—albeit through copies and abstracts—for more than half a millennium. Although Colombus mentions the artworks he saw and was presented with, including a mask set with gold which was given to him by a chieftain on Hispanola, he expresses little interest in them other than their gold content and how this could relate to finding still more gold. Unfortunately, the fate of this mask is unknown. Subsequent early encounters in the Americas are also well documented. The Aztec emperor MoctezumaII sent gifts to Hernán Cortés’ expeditionary party in the form of quantities of artworks in gold and silver. This proved to be a poor strategic move, since it only served to fuel the Spaniards’ determination to advance. Much of this treasure was in turn sent as tribute to the Spaniards’ own emperor, Charles V, who put it on semipublic display in Brussels (then part of the Holy Roman Empire of which Charles was the ruler) as a tangible expression of his power and the extent of his influence. Here, less than three decades after Columbus’ first landing, we finally have a personal impression of what someone thought of it. Artist Albrecht Dürer visited Brussels in late August of 1520 and recorded his impressions in his travel journal. I saw the things that have been brought to the king from the new land of gold, a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of armor of the people there, and all manner of wondrous weapons of theirs, harness and darts, very strange clothing, beds, and all kinds of wonderful objects of human use, much better worth seeing than prodigies ed: by which he means prevailing speculation. These things were all so precious that they are valued at 100,000 florins. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there. Clearly Dürer was impressed. Indeed, if our astronauts found art on Mars and brought it back to show to us, our impression might be quite comparable. But in Dürer’s case, specifically what was he impressed with? While it is tempting to read this passage as one artist empathetically stunned by the works of fellow artists, Christian Feest—author of the article on the Iroquois in this issue—argued in Primitivism in 20th Century Art (1984) that what Dürer was really going on about was not art that he saw as in line with the current European concept of it, but rather the “sheer value of these things, their sometimes exotic raw materials, and their obvious craftsmanship.” Arguably, it was not until the early twentieth century that tribal art was truly recognized in the West as art. This is an aspect of an upcoming exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris this summer, which will focus on the career of a seminal Parisian tribal art dealer. Charles Ratton, l’Invention des arts “Primitifs” (Charles Ratton: The Invention of “Primitive” Art), which is also the subject of an article and interview in this issue, will look at the development of Western taste for tribal art in the first decades of the twentieth century as it is tied to the efforts of this early and influential art dealer. Tellingly, one of the things that the curators of the exhibition found in the course of their research was that Ratton had a penchant for tribal art objects that had visual affinities with existing Western aesthetics. This formed an effective “gateway,” allowing Europeans and Americans easier visual access to distant objectmaking traditions that had developed entirely apart from Western notions of aesthetics and art. Somewhat like Columbus, we all too often see only what we’re looking for, and the “art” that is frequently our primary perception in these objects is only one aspect of the multifaceted purposes they were created for. If the people who made many of these objects were told that their works were being appreciated simply as art, they’d likely be baffled. Another upcoming exhibition this summer speaks to a different dimension regarding our perception of tribal art. The Château de Vogüé in the Rhone region of southern France will show Chasses Magiques, les Arts Premiers Dialoguent avec la Grotte Chauvet en Ardèche (Magic Hunts – Tribal Art in Dialog with the Chauvet Cave in Ardèche), an exhibition that displays accurate replicas of 31,000-year-old cave paintings alongside traditional works from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. While the curator’s intent is not necessarily to state that these geographically and temporally distant artworks are related, the very fact that they are shown together carries the fallacious implication that non-Western art from traditional societies, which is the result of as many thousands of years of sophisticated development as Western or Asian art of comparable age, is somehow less evolved or, indeed, even “primitive.” What utter nonsense. Jonathan Fogel Our cover shows a nineteenth-century Hungaan pendant in the form of a female figure from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ivory. H: 7.7 cm. Musée du Quai Branly, 73.1997.20.1. © Musée du Quai Branly. Photo: Hugues Dubois. Screened behind is a portrait of art dealer Charles Ratton by Studio Harcourt from the 1930s. Guy Ladrière, Paris. © Musée du Quai Branly. Copy photo: Claude Germain.
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