Through a detailed analysis of the sources and works the essay reconstructs the emergence of primitivism in modern art in 1906 and the decisive role played by Henri Matisse in this process. The author compares the different reactions of Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, Picasso and the writer Gertrude Stein to the discovery of African tribal sculptures in the Paris of the early years of the 20th century and the effects that it produced. Out of this comes a far more complex picture of the relationship between Fauvism, Cubism and tribal art than the one presented hitherto by art historians, with profound implications on the anthropological and cultural level, as well as the aesthetic one. Matisse played a decisive role in this story, as was acknowledged by Picasso himself, resuming a process of profound interaction with so-called primitive cultures that been initiated at the end of the previous century by Paul Gauguin with his flight from European civilization to Polynesia. Far from adopting the decorative view of exoticism dear to the colonial genre of painting in the early decades of the 20th century, Matisse built a fundamental bridge between the structuring character of archaism in Egyptian and Greek sculpture and the tendency to formal purity found in African tribal sculpture and the art of Oceania. Through his paintings and his sculptures, in a dense web of allusions that privileged the aspiration to a pure and essential form, Matisse definitively undermined the conception of art as "representation" and laid the foundations, before Brancusi and abstractionism, for an art as pure and absolute expression of forms.
