Art: Collector’s Primitive

The humbling message of a good piece of primitive art is that some long-ago savage possessed sensibilities and skills that a modern artist, making art instead of magic, can top only at his best. Since the artists of Paris first called new attention to this old art, near the turn of the century, primitive art has had a growing fascination in Europe and the U.S. Yet experts still put the number of first-rate U.S. collections at fewer than 25. One such collection went on display last week at Manhattan’s Rockefeller-founded Museum of Primitive Art—and proved a superb demonstration of what a man who is not himself an artist can do when he falls in love with an art form.

Raymond Wielgus, the son of a Chicago furniture manufacturer, has been fascinated by carving ever since childhood. After he graduated in art from the University of Illinois, he went to work making master models for machine-made furniture. Six years ago, he bought his first piece of primitive art, because he “wanted to own something old.” The piece was a Mexican urn and cost him $100. It set him to reading about primitive art—and one of his first conclusions was that his urn was a fake.

Since then, Wielgus has gathered more than 100 authentic pieces from Africa, Central and South America, the Arctic and the South Seas. Their estimated ages range from 1000 B.C. to the 19th century. There are glaring ritual masks, delicate canoe figureheads, ornate fly whisks and chieftains’ necklaces. A fetish from the Congo bristles with nails that were driven into it to transmit pain to a human foe. A tiny ivory Eskimo looks as if it might have been carved by Henry Moore; a clay Mexican bowl from the days before Christ bears the withered countenance of a fierce old crone; a majestic “ancestral figure” from New Ireland (near New Guinea) possesses the beard of a man and the breasts of a woman. One of the rarest pieces is an oil dish from the Fiji Islands: it looks like a modern sculpture of a punch-drunk goon.

Almost without exception, all the items in the show are beautiful in themselves, but the effect on the eye is not all that has concerned Wielgus. “It’s all right to say you like something,” says he, “but this doesn’t go far enough. You must know what a piece is all about, and you must study and learn that for yourself. A piece gains value not only for its esthetic qualities. It gains also by use—it must have been used and show signs of use to indicate that it was part of life and that it was loved. Of course my emotions are involved in my collection. That’s where most collectors fall down: their emotions are not.”