The Collection of Primitive Artifacts in Modern Art Museums
Walking into the dramatic first-floor gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, visitors are confronted with the towering bis poles collected by Michael Rockefeller on his concluding expedition to New Guinea. Rockefeller disappeared on that trip in 1961 at the age of 23, reported drowned at ocean under mysterious circumstances that accept led to speculation that he may take been eaten by cannibals.
The intricately carved poles are on display in the fly of the Met that bears his proper noun. The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing houses a drove of non-Western art obtained by Rockefeller's male parent, New York governor, multimillionaire and subsequent Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.
The history of the Met's pioneering 1969 decision to comprise "archaic art" into its art collection is the field of study of an upcoming book by Nancy Lutkehaus, professor of anthropology and political science at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
A controversial decision
"The Met Goes Archaic: Postwar America, Cultural Politics, and the Creation of the Rockefeller Fly of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art" argues that this determination illuminates the human relationship betwixt art and post-World War 2, postcolonial politics, 20th-century American cosmopolitanism and a changing ideology of a more racially diverse identity.
"When an encyclopedic museum like the Met finally decides to incorporate non-Western fine art, information technology is making a argument saying this art is as important as Greek statues and the Impressionists," Lutkehaus said. "It's broadening its catechism in terms of what is considered to be art, and that has a cultural impact in terms of a argument well-nigh a broader recognition, a more than multicultural, more racially and ethnically various national identity."
The Met's conclusion to brandish these artifacts equally fine fine art was a controversial one, she said.
It was a major economic decision.
Nancy Lutkehaus
"It was also a major economical decision because the trustees had to commit to a new wing and funds for curators to continue to collect.
"The Met didn't agree to learn this material until 1969, which was quite late given that Picasso and artists in Europe had been fascinated with not-Western art for years. My projection talks about what that shift meant and why information technology happened at this particular period of time."
Lutkehaus links this shift to changing politics afterwards Earth War II, GIs returning from the Pacific, the beginning of the ceremonious rights movement, and various events in Harlem and other parts of the United States.
She is using the papers of Nelson Rockefeller and other key individuals, museum archives and interviews to analyze the social, political and cultural context in which the Met's lath of trustees made its determination.
Art as a political and cultural vehicle
Her projection grew out of an earlier thought about the display of non-Western art and the transformation of artifacts into fine art.
Nancy Lutkehaus, professor of anthropology and political science (Photo/Peter Zhaoyu Zhou)
"I was interested in how the aforementioned object could exist considered an artifact in the Natural History Museum and a few decades later becomes an object of fine fine art," she said.
The project besides has a personal genesis for Lutkehaus, connecting both to her earlier research as an anthropologist in New Guinea and her knowledge of its indigenous fine art, and to the Met, where her mentor Douglas Newton, so director of the former Museum of Primitive Art, became the chair of the Met's new Section of Archaic Art (now the Section of the Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas).
Lutkehaus' volume examines Nelson Rockefeller's reasons for collecting not-Western art and tells the story of how the Met's Rockefeller Wing, which was created to house his collection, was established.
Nelson Rockefeller was very interested in the role that art could play in cultural politics.
Nancy Lutkehaus
"Nelson Rockefeller was very interested in the role that art could play in cultural politics," Lutkehaus said.
"When he became president of the Museum of Modern Art, he created an Inter-American Council and used it to bring Latin American artists to the U.S. and to send American art to Latin America. He was concerned during Give-and-take State of war II about fascism overtaking Latin America, so he used art and the Museum of Modern Fine art as a vehicle for intercultural substitution to create a counterforce to fascist interests in S America."
Museums, politics, cultural and national identity
Lutkehaus was recently awarded a fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies for excellence in enquiry in the humanities and related social sciences.
"In add-on to having this wonderful yr to write, it's an affirmation to me of other people's involvement in this research — that information technology is seen as a valuable contribution to the humanities and to scholarship," she said.
Lutkehaus hopes her book will inspire readers to wait more advisedly at the relationship between museums, politics, and cultural and national identity.
"When you lot look at an showroom in a museum, there is a whole history on how it got in that location in the first identify and the choices that were made on how and where it is displayed and these are historically different at dissimilar periods of time."
More stories almost: Anthropology, Fine Arts, Museums, Politics
Source: https://news.usc.edu/85369/how-when-and-why-primitive-art-was-added-to-the-metropolitan-museum-of-arts-fine-art-collection/
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