Primitive Negro Sculpture

Paul Guillaume (1891-1934), the famous Parisian art collector and dealer was, in 1914, one of the first in Europe to display African sculpture as art. Thomas Munro (1897-1974) was an American philosopher of art, professor of art history, and curator of education at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Munro argues that, far from being “hideous little idols” carried home by traders and missionaries, African sculptures were “fashioned with consummate skill to achieve effects that Europeans had not been able to see or appreciate.” Guillaume and some of France’s young artists, among them Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, and Modigliani, saw something different—well organized forms in the service of imagination, emotion, and mysticism—and were inspired. African sculpture became the “heart of Modernism.” Guillaume sold part of his collection of African sculpture to Alfred C. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation, in Merion, Pennsylvania. It opened in 1925, the first institution to put such works on permanent display. Barnes immediately instigated and supported the preparation of this book, which appeared the following year.