Burlington primitive: non-European art in The Burlington Magazine before 1930

Abstract

HIDDEN IN THE ADVERTISING pages of the first issue of THE BURLINGTON magazine is a tiny image of a hex-tiki pendant from Aotearoa, New Zealand, among an array of greenstone settler 'charms' (Fig.23). A year later, in 1904, Spink & Son, speciaUsts in rare coins and medals, advertised for sale a coUection of Ashanti goldweights from Africa, iUustrated with three Une drawings.1 So-caUed tribal art was not iUus trated again, nor mentioned in the pages of the Magazine, until 1917, and then in an article about children's drawings by Roger Fry.2 But this should not come as a great surprise in a Magazine devoted to the fine and decorative arts which, in the Britain of the first two decades of the last century, inevitably meant the cultures of Europe and the 'civiUsa tions' of China, Japan and, increasingly, India. The two earUest appearances of tribal art in the advertising pages of the Magazine must be viewed more generaUy as part of the interest in antiques and fancy goods supposed of its readers by advertisers, which ranged at that time from the much more visible, numerous and consistendy present advertise ments for Chinese (and to a lesser extent Japanese) decora tive art and oriental carpets, to Steinway pianos and Kodak photographic suppUes - aU expensive and aU Unked to the leisurely pursuit of culture. As Fry was to reflect in a much later article, in reference to Byzantine enamels and Coptic textiles, it was precisely the 'coUectible' quaUties of such objects, rather than their aesthetic quaUty that initially allowed artefacts produced outside a perceived Graeco Roman tradition to enter the culture: coUectors, he assert

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.