Published for an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Mystique of Connoisseurship2. The Universality Principle3. The Night Side of Man4. Anonymity and Timelessness5. Power Plays6. Objets d'Art and Ethnographic Artifacts7. From Signature to Pedigree8. A Case in PointAfterwordNotesReferences CitedIllustration Credits Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This now classic study maps the profound effect of primitive art on modern, as well as the primitivizing strain in modern art itself. Robert Goldwater describes how and why works by primitive artists attracted modern painters and sculptors, and he delineates the differences between what is truly primitive or archaic and what intentionally embodies such elements. His analysis distinguishes the romanticism of Gauguin; an emotional primitivism exemplified by the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups in Germany; the intellectual primitivism of Picasso and Modigliani; and a “primitivism of the subconscious” in Miró, Klee, and Dali. Two of Goldwater's related essays—“Judgments of Primitive Art, 1905–1965” and “Art History and Anthropology”—have been added for this new paperback edition.

In this acclaimed book, Torgovnick explores the obsessions, fears, and longings that have produced Western views of the primitive. Crossing an extraordinary range of fields (anthropology, psychology, literature, art, and popular culture),Gone Primitivewill engage not just specialists but anyone who has ever worn Native American jewelry, thrilled to Indiana Jones, or considered buying an African mask. "A superb book; and--in a way that goes beyond what being good as a book usually implies--it is a kind of gift to its own culture, a guide to the perplexed. It is lucid, usually fair, laced with a certain feminist mockery and animated by some surprising sympathies."--Arthur C. Danto, New York Times Book Review "An impassioned exploration of the deep waters beneath Western primitivism. . . . Torgovnick's readings are deliberately, rewardingly provocative."--Scott L. Malcomson,Voice Literary Supplement

This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.