Rogers 1 Grace Rogers IDSEM 1924: The Afro-Arab World 24 April 2017 Shallow Reflections: William Rubin, Modern Art and the Aestheticized Primitive Around 1905, Pablo Picasso acquired a West African mask. He had little interest in the mask’s origins but admired its planes and cylinders, and quickly filled his studio with more objects from anonymously exotic people and places. There he would paint Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), credited as the seminal work of modernism, particularly within a trend that suddenly recognized “tribal” objects as powerful “art” in the early twentieth century. By the mid-1980s, the trend had fully taken shape — one could encounter tribal objects in an unusual number of noteworthy locations in New York City. This paper will focus on the period’s most prominent and perhaps most controversial exhibit, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” which sought to explore tribal culture’s influence on modern art through an aesthetic perspective. Displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, the exhibit raises questions about how the modern art period “othered” non-Western culture, particularly via the art institution. This paper argues that the MoMA’s attempt to contextualize tribal culture within modern art depended on an assumed Western superiority in tastemaking — in deciding what could be considered “art,” globally. By purely focusing on the aesthetic, the exhibit relied on a violent erasure of history that locked tribal culture into antiquity, serving primarily to inform a modern Western status. “‘Primitivism’” was curated by William Rubin, the director of painting and sculpture at the MoMA from 1973-1988. It included modern art by Picasso, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, the Dadaists, Surrealists, the