Masterpieces of Primitive Art

by Douglas Newton

Book Overview

Hardcover book from the Nelson A Rockefeller Collection (pub) This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394500571
• ISBN13: 9780394500577
• Release Date: April 1978
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 3.37 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful Full-Page Color Reproductions w/Essays by Malraux & Rockefeller

From Front Jacket: "The artistic achievements of the world's primitive societies have never been so fully revealed and superbly portrayed as in this extraordinary volume that celebrates -- and shares with us -- the peerless collection of Nelson A. Rockefeller. Amassed with passion and discrimination through almost 50 years, the Rockefeller Collection encompasses every source of primitive art from Black Africa to the islands of Oceania to Precolumbian America as well as the many Indian cultures of the northern continent. Here are 254 paramount works of art in all their splendor and visual daring. In Lee Boltin's sumptuous color photographs, pictures that are themselves works of art, we discover the astonishing scope of the Rockefeller Collection -- the finely wrought Mayan and Aztec artifacts that amazed the conquistadors; a cloak of feathers as splendid as jewels; mysterious masks fashioned for ceremonial use; statues carved in stone and wood; brilliant textiles; ritual objects of gold, silver, bronze, jade, cloth, shells -- every one a masterpiece displaying an aesthetic sophistication that belies the very notion of 'primitive.' And the book itself offers the layman a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the glories of this art. Magnificently designed and printed, it has been organized into 4 major categories: faces, human figures, animals, and 'abstractions.' The text by Douglas Newton, Chairman of the Department of Primitive Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gives a fascinating history of Western civilization's gradually evolving attitudes toward primitive art -- from the early explorers' voyages of discovery and conquest through the more enlightened scientific observations of Captain Cook... Nelson Rockefeller's own introduction gives us the story of the decades of collecting that resulted in this unsurpassed assemblage of primitive art; Andre Malraux, in a piece written especially for this book and posthumously published here for the first time, sums up the ways in which primitive art has captured the attention of European painters and sculptors since the early years of this century, when these artists were seeking new freedom of form and expression in their own work; and he details the enormous impact of primitive art on the modern imagination."