Preference for the Primitive

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2025

Preference for the primitive

On the newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What to make of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, dedicated to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and ancient America? Astonishing, frightening, and baffling are three words that come to mind—and that’s more a reflection of the curatorial and architectural decisions that have been made here than of the tribal art on display.

Some 1,800 works from five different continents are newly jumbled together across 40,000 square feet in the rebooted galleries, which reopened on May 31 after a four-year closure and $70 million redo. New “diagonal trajector[ies]” have been “designed to foreground ancestral connections and Indigenous temporalities,” according to the Met’s opening announcement. “[N]ew perspectives on Indigenous concepts of the natural world as well as nuanced perceptions of gender roles” have been “newly framed by Indigenous perspectives.” Meanwhile, new cacophonies of “wall text and digital narratives placed throughout the galleries elevate Indigenous voices, foregrounding the latest developments in interdisciplinary scholarship.” Good luck just keeping track of what region a work is from or even what continent you think you are looking at. Devised by the appropriately named WHY Architecture, in collaboration with Beyer, Blinder, Belle and the Met’s design department, these galleries have been positioned to keep you guessing.

The cultural muddle, now arranged in a labyrinth of gleaming white walls and glass screens, is made all the more confusing in a blinding resplendence, illuminated by reglazed windows onto Central Park, that is visually appealing but programmatically suspect. Aztec, Asmat, Asante: sightlines bleed from one culture into the next. Under the curation of Alisa LaGamma (African art), Joanne Pillsbury (ancient Americas), and Maia Nuku (Oceania), what were once separate sections dedicated to distinct regions are now demarcated with barely a line on the floor.

Installation view of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bridgit Beyer.

This new open-plan design has been proposed to “suggest the unique spatial and relational dynamics of Oceania: horizon lines, the arching dome of the sky, and islands tethered in a vast ocean.” Elsewhere, it’s meant to take “inspiration from ancient American architectural traditions.” Along the ceiling, there are now “horizontal baffles that suggest ribbing to pay homage to one of Africa’s most celebrated structures: the Great Mosque of Jenne in Mali.” Such tossed-off, facile references are the window dressing of an Apple Store aesthetic selling Global South 2.0, with often brutal cultures that were oceans apart from one another—cultures that might as soon have killed, sacrificed, and devoured each other if they could.

With some exceptions, many of these works have been on display at the Met since this wing first opened in 1982. What’s different now are the hundreds of wall labels that surround them, justify them, and defend their continued display. Such justification is not for nothing. Across the park, at the American Museum of Natural History, entire galleries are being boarded up and turned into halls of shame. Generations of schoolchildren may wonder why the AMNH’s models of Eastern Woodland longhouses are suddenly treated as entartete Kunst. As the American Museum of Natural History “embraces new regulations,” reads one explanation plastered onto a hastily erected plywood screen, “these Halls displayed artifacts that may be objects of cultural significance, and the Museum does not have consent to display them.” If a museum can no longer display “objects of cultural significance,” one should wonder what remains beyond the gift shop.

Installation view of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Bridgit Beyer.

Free of the baggage of consensual anthropology, the Metropolitan has faced the opposite conundrum: how to add ethnographic context to its otherwise disconnected displays, often collected merely for their aesthetic attributes (especially as they relate to modern Western art). The resulting pronouncements in the renovated wing make a number of contortions to please contemporary sensibilities, even promoting the violence informing the hall’s artistic expression. Just consider the wall label titled “Generating Vitality in the Asmat World”:

Unlike women who can support life within their own bodies, Asmat men wishing to capture nature’s generative capacities once did so through the act of headhunting. This practice—an important aspect of male ritual prestige before its prohibition in the twentieth century by Dutch colonial authorities—involved pursuing a rival and taking his life. Since the human head contains the most concentrated source of vitality, its capture (and the preservation of the skull in particular) catalyzed future cycles of growth and rebirth for humans, ancestors, and the natural world.

Like the sweetmeats of a carved-up head, there is much to extract from such a statement. In short, before the prohibition of cannibalism in New Guinea by colonial authorities and the arrival of Catholic missionaries, for peoples such as the Asmat, the depth of their creative expression was a direct testament to the ferocity of their bloodlust. Headhunting may indeed have been an “important aspect of male ritual prestige,” but one is left wondering if the victims of the Asmat regret the Dutch arrival in the East Indies. Try justifying anti-colonialism to a shrunken head.

The radical relativism of the ethno-aesthetics on display in the Met’s confounding galleries is the capstone to a long-range project, one that has less to do with prehistoric third-world cultures and more with the obsessions of modern Western taste. Beyond the story of the family of man, these particular galleries are ultimately about the family of Rockefeller.

“Primitive” is a word that has been so thoroughly expunged from any mention in this wing that its absence belies a lingering presence. That’s part of the untold story here, scrubbed from the countless wall labels and disclosures of “provenance”: there would be no Met wing dedicated to the arts of Africa, ancient America, and Oceania without the Rockefellers’ primitivist passions and the tragic intergenerational dynamics that came as a consequence of their zeal.

“The more you prefer the primitive,” wrote the art historian E. H. Gombrich, “the less you can become primitive.” In the modern world, simplicity, subjectivity, even crudity can appeal to sophisticated taste as elite culture looks for deeper truths beneath the polish of refinement. The Rockefellers have certainly taken this view to heart. Over successive generations, the family has shown a distinct preference for the primitive in their cultural philanthropy, from their support for American folk art to the primitivist turn of international modernism. Abby Aldrich Rockfeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., helped establish both Colonial Williamsburg and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1957, her son, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, founded the Museum of Primitive Art in a townhouse on the same block as MOMA as well as their former city residence. Headed up by the wide-ranging art historian Robert Goldwater, inspired by modernism’s primitivist influences and Paris’s Musée du Trocadéro, the Museum of Primitive Art as its name implied sought to elevate the traditional sculpture and textiles of Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania from artifact to the level of high art.

Beginning in the 1960s, through the intermediation of René d’Harnoncourt, then the director of MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller began transferring these primitive works to the Metropolitan. He not only seeded a collection where none existed but also underwrote the construction of the wing to house it. Even today, some one-third of the works in the Met’s primitive collection passed through Rockefeller hands, including many of its most notable pieces, such as a Dogon blacksmith’s Priest with Raised Arms (1300s–1600s), the Eyema byeri (reliquary guardian figure) (1800s–early 1900s) of an Okak-Fang artist, and the Gwandansu figure (1400s–1600s) by a Bamana numuw (blacksmith). Since the term “primitive” has now become outmoded and even deeply regretted, the Met’s wall labels and provenancial literature identify all of these works as merely having passed through “MPA,” never once explaining that the acronym is short for Museum of Primitive Art.

This is but one of the many sleights of hand in the renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—originally known as the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing. Far more significant is the disappearance (then and now) of Michael Clark Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, for whom the wing is named. A “memorial” would suggest a death, but the Met has whitewashed the tragedy of his involvement in these galleries, now merely stating that he was

greatly inspired by the cultures and art of the Pacific and pursued new avenues of inquiry into artistic practice during his travels there. Among the wing’s signature works are the striking Asmat sculptures he researched and collected in southwest New Guinea.

What gets left unsaid is that Michael, a year out of college, disappeared while collecting those very sculptures—trading sachets of tobacco for totemic bis poles, adorned with references to shrunken heads, that now dominate the wing named in his honor. As an added tragedy, Michael may have become the victim of the same cannibalistic culture he was intent on discovering and collecting. Departing from the official Harvard-Peabody Expedition that first brought him to study the Ndani people in the Baliem Valley in the Central Highlands of Western New Guinea in early 1961, he pursued the works of the Asmat in a two-man mission, floating along the coast of New Guinea aboard a catamaran jury-rigged from two canoes. On November 18 of that year, his catamaran capsized in the swift crosscurrents of the mouth of the Eilanden, or Betsj, River. He gathered together a knife and compass and tethered up the boat’s gas tanks as a personal flotation device, determined to make for shore. He was last seen swimming away by his crewmate, the Dutch anthropologist René Wassing, who held onto the wreckage and was recovered the following day, along with Michael’s journals.

Michael C. Rockefeller with Papuan natives in New Guinea, 1961.

Published six years later, the journals speak of Michael’s harrowing infatuation with these cannibals. Facing the specter of his parents’ impending divorce, wishing to please his father, then the governor of New York, by contributing to his Museum of Primitive Art, Michael pursued the Asmat at his own peril. As he wrote in his journal:

What we saw were some imposing remnants of a marvelous past. I suppose not so marvelous from a Christian point of view, for the Asmats were a ferocious headhunting people constantly engaged in inter-village war and raids of varying degrees of deadliness. However, the sculpture that has been and (in some areas) is being produced by Asmat artists is unquestionably some of the greatest to come from a primitive culture . . . .

And equally as remarkable as the art is the fact that the culture which produces it is still intact; some remote areas are still headhunting; and only five years ago almost the whole area was headhunting.

Afinal Rockefeller in this tragedy is Mary Rockefeller Morgan, Michael’s fraternal twin sister. Now eighty-seven years old, she has been a vocal donor to the renovation. Her brother is now absent from the public side of the wing that bears his name—and most likely that’s the point. With new sightlines that connect Nelson’s Priest with Raised Arms with Michael’s bis poles beyond, this wing feels like a private family shrine as never before. While publicly drawing us into its purely expressive wonders, this primitive collection has a private side that tells a very different story.

Fool Britannia

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2025

Fool Britannia

On “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” & the newly reopened Yale Center for British Art.

When the Yale Center for British Art first dropped anchor in 1977 on the far side of New Haven’s Chapel Street, the cultural ocean-liner arrived as one of the last great vessels from the golden age of American museum-making. The center was the product of an unprecedented 1966 gift to Yale by Paul Mellon. A philanthropist, Anglophile, and member of the class of 1929, he gathered together the largest single collection of British art outside of the United Kingdom and gave it to the public trust. Paul Mellon came to the arts of Great Britain as the son of the American industrialist Andrew W. Mellon, who served as ambassador to the Court of St. James, and an English mother, Nora McMullen. Paul Mellon assembled and donated his collection much as his father had done in founding the National Gallery of Art some three decades earlier in Washington, D.C. Like his father, he funded the construction of a building to house his bequests and an endowment to maintain them—ensuring his museum would be free and open to the public in perpetuity, as well as quasi-independent of the university and its other attendant interests.

Tapping the architect Louis I. Kahn to design a sister ship to his Yale University Art Gallery building of 1953, berthed just across Chapel Street, the YCBA came to occupy one of the finest museum buildings of the last half century. Kahn, who died three years before its completion, commanded an alchemic sense for elevating mass. His integration of concrete and steel, white oak and Belgian linen, set his building afloat, while his attention to natural light, channeled through a grid of 224 skylights, illuminated Mellon’s collection in an energizing glow.

Entrance-court skylights, Yale Center for British Art. Photo: Richard Caspole.

Today Mellon’s bequest still makes up 80 percent of the holdings of the Yale Center for British Art—now comprising some 2,000 paintings, 250 sculptures, 20,000 drawings and watercolors, 35,000 prints, 3,000 photographs, and 35,000 rare books and manuscripts, with a particularly notable selection of British art from the 1720s to the 1850s. Recently the center has been rightly attending to the physical plant that houses these treasures through a series of meticulous renovations. In “Conserving Kahn,” the architect George Knight, whose firm has overseen this two-decade-long project, wrote about its challenges for the December 2016 issue of The New Criterion. Textile finishes and artificial lighting, skylight domes and electrical systems have all required special attention to keep Kahn’s building shipshape and Bristol fashion. Now completing its second multiyear closure in under twenty years, the center has again reopened with a reinstallation of its collection and new special exhibitions, including collection shows focused on its holdings of J. M. W. Turner and George Romney.

Mellon’s farsighted beneficence has more than ensured the financial seaworthiness of his institution, now more than a quarter century after his death at age ninety-one in 1999. The institution boasts an annual operating budget of nearly $40 million, mostly sourced from its endowment, which is more than enough to attend to its collection with money to spare for its fastidious upkeep—$16 million for the latest round, to the envy of Yale’s other, relatively poorer cultural redoubts.

Despite its financial buoyancy, or perhaps even because of the independent resources that have kept it afloat like a cork, the Yale Center for British Art has recently seemed adrift. Years of leadership churn with a listless affinity for the England of Gainsborough and Reynolds, Constable and Stubbs has taken its toll. Rather than right the ship, the Yale Center for British Art is now steaming away from the safe harbor of its founding with only increasing contempt for its permanent collection.

In 2020 the YCBA removed its very first acquisition, a portrait of Elihu Yale, from public view in an elaborate ceremony of contemporary cancellation. Attributed to John Verelst (ca. 1675–1734), the painting had been a gift to Yale from Andrew Cavendish, the eleventh Duke of Devonshire, in honor of Mellon’s British initiative. Formerly known as Elihu Yale; William Cavendish, the second Duke of Devonshire; Lord James Cavendish; Mr. Tunstal; and an Enslaved Servant, the work was denounced by the “Elihu Yale Portrait Research Team,” formed by the center’s then-director, for its depiction of its unnamed servant. The team called the painting a “stark reminder of Britain’s entrenchment in the transatlantic slave trade.” The painting was publicly stripped of its historical title and subsequently “referred to here by its accession number, B1970.1.” In place of B1970.1, the YCBA then erected a reinterpreted work by Titus Kaphar called Enough About You (2016), which reimagined the painting with a golden frame around the servant figure and the rest of the canvas as a crumpled lump.

Roof and skylight domes, Yale Center for British Art. Photo: Richard Caspole.

Other paintings in Mellon’s collection met a similar fate of interrogation, denunciation, and public shaming. The YCBA’s latest rehanging, called “In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art,” further strips collection highlights from the main galleries and replaces them with interventions selected for their political identities rather than primarily aesthetic interest. A large 2017 sculpture by the British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, for example, whose work “uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation,” according to the artist’s website, now greets visitors to the permanent collection. Next up in October will be a survey of the British Guyanese artist Hew Locke, a sculptor who works, according to the center, in the “postcolonial baroque.” Meanwhile, paintings such as John Martin’s The Deluge (1834) have been relegated to the Long Gallery, a room that now functions as open storage with two hundred works hung floor to ceiling, their identities only available on a forty-page printout.

Martina Droth, a YCBA curator and its new director as of January, has continued the center’s intersectional inquest by moving on from race to extend the identitarian trinity to class and gender, all now with a celebrity flourish. At the center of these efforts is Droth’s promotion of a self-styled champion of working-class women, and in particular herself—the artist Tracey Emin.

“Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” is the title of the Yale Center for British Art’s flagship reopening exhibition.1 “I loved you until the morning” is likewise how one might feel after visiting today’s Yale Center for British Art. The interventions begin in the building’s Entrance Court. Here the center has commissioned a mirrored neon installation based on Emin’s scribbled handwriting featuring the title of her show. What was once a dappled introduction to the treasures within, with a view to the rooftop skylights and the gallery floors opening onto a lightwell, is now “good for selfies,” as Droth explained at the opening preview. The twenty-four-hour-a-day electric banner, here a quasi–work of art, also does an end run around the building’s prohibition on signage. This is Louis I. Kahn’s Cunard Queen of a museum rebranded as a Carnival fun-ship cruise.

Tracey Emin, You Kept it Coming, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, Private collection. © HV-Studio, courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens.

The carnivalesque atmosphere continues through Emin’s special exhibition, a besotted assembly of nineteen paintings along with sculpture and works on paper spread across the museum’s second-floor gallery. Touring these sketchy compositions of splattered reds and female undercarriage, we can learn how one canvas, I Said No (ca. 2005–15), confronts the artist’s teenage rape. Emin’s stoma, tube, and urostomy bag, a consequence of her bladder-cancer surgery of 2020, get referenced through a dashed-off line and bloody square in And It Was Love (2023). One work reflects an act of cunnilingus by Emin’s ex-boyfriend. In another there is an abortion table. Still another is titled I Wanted You to F*ck the Inside of My Mind (2018). And so on.

A faux-naif in creative matters, especially her own promotion, Emin has been riding a wave of notoriety since the heady days of the Young British Artists in the 1990s. Trained as a painter—one who did, in fact, produce Bonnard-like portraits in her student years—she soon focused on the marketing of her own overexposure to command headlines if not critical acclaim. “It wasn’t like I wanted a career in painting. I wanted to be an artist,” she explains of her turn to shock.

Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent embroidered with the names of her supposed bedmates, entered the collection of Charles Saatchi and toured with the infamous “Sensation” show. My Bed, the 1998 installation that turned the unmade into a Readymade, recreated her slatternly sleeping arrangements as an installation of dirty sheets, condoms, underwear, contraceptives, alcohol bottles, cigarettes, and pills. This “big, giant, seminal piece of work,” as she aptly called it, was exhibited at the Tate but almost incinerated as a biohazard by customs officials when first touring Japan.

Emin returned to painting in 2007, first to represent Britain in an underwhelming display at the Venice Biennale and later as a primary mode of production. Whether working in acrylic or video, embroidery or published writing, Emin has long seemed incapable, or at least unwilling, to make art about anything but herself. For thirty years her body of work has been her body as public defilement—prurient advertisements that could be collected and exchanged in a multitude of media. In her catalogue essay, Martina Droth argues that

Critics, many of them in the popular press, have routinely—and willfully—mistaken her work for unmediated autobiography, accusing her of narcissism, a desire to shock, and an obsession with publicity and fame.

Routinely willfully mistaken? Emin’s self-obsessed oeuvre suggests little otherwise.

Tracey Emin, I Followed You to The End, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, White Cube. © Tracey Emin, courtesy of the artist and White Cube.

Emin’s elective abortion of 1990, for example, has become a recurring talking point. Her elevation of the abortion in her public persona—in one case painting publicly while naked to “exorcise” the episode, in another recording a video of her peregrinations to the abortion clinic—has kept her in the British eye and, she claims, helped to make her career. “I wasn’t going to go all the way through the Royal College of Art,” she says, “get this amazing education, learn to paint, and then be a single mother.” In her catalogue essay, Droth cheers the results:

The prospect of single motherhood, social housing, and poverty . . . led her to seek an abortion. . . . In the mid-1990s Emin began to recognize her pregnancy and abortion as experiences inextricably bound to her self-understanding as an artist. . . . [P]regnancy stood for the end of Emin’s art, and abortion came to mean its survival. . . . [T]he history of painting is a history that includes Emin at all only because she chose not to become a single mother.

For all of the museum world’s cross examination of its collections, it is curious how some mythologies still go unchallenged, such as the role of galleries and collectors in Emin’s commercial self-abasement. Even as the museum consulted with “consent educators” and the gender-studies department to “develop the content warning and programming around the show,” according to the Yale Alumni Magazine, the Yale Center for British Art displays little self-awareness of its own complicity in what is essentially a marketing scheme, now laundered with Ivy League detergent.

Born in Croydon in 1963, Emin today controls an operation that supports studios in London and on the Côte d’Azur along with a thirty-thousand-square-foot painting factory in her coastal hometown of working-class Margate. Her art production has long outpaced her institutional acceptance. The YCBA may believe it has made a bold contemporary statement in mounting Emin’s first American museum show. Yet Emin is the greater beneficiary as her work receives the imprimatur she has long lacked. American audiences have always shown far less interest than English ones in her class-and-gender provocations. A famous British artist who has never quite captured the American consciousness—much like a pop band that cannot crack the U.S. airwaves—she now receives a prized stateside foothold. “It’s important, and it’s good for me, my first museum show in America, to be associated with such a strong educational platform,” Emin frankly states in an interview at the center. “Whatever they might have thought about me previously, they will have to rethink again, ’cause I’ve been invited here.”

Tracey Emin, From the Mountain to the Lake, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, Collection of the artist. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2024.

It could be argued that Emin’s British notoriety alone now warrants a turn at the Yale Center for British Art. There are those who may find interest in her paintings, even if her celebrity presence does more to distract from her own aesthetic merits and that of the other artists on display than enhance them. With a poem by Emin included in a YCBA publication of Turner’s last sketchbook, efforts to align her work with Turner and their connection to Margate are tenuous at best and merely distort our understanding of a painter of two centuries previous.

Ultimately, it is the proximity of this contemporary artist and her commercial operation to the administration of an academic museum that is most alarming. We are informed that “I Loved You Until the Morning” has been “curated by Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, with Tracey Emin and her creative director, Harry Weller.” The involvement of Emin’s galleries—White Cube, Xavier Hufkens, and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill—goes on to receive its own mention in the exhibition catalogue.

There was a time when ceding institutional autonomy to an artist and her handlers, no matter the style, would have been an actionable offense. Clearly, times have changed. Droth treats Emin with all the professional neutrality of a celebrity crush. “Emin has been an active and generous partner in shaping the exhibition,” she boasts, “lending paintings that are precious to her.” Introducing Emin for a conversation at the center, Droth maintains that, “We are here to celebrate a truly amazing artist.” Calling her “one of the leading artistic voices of our time,” Droth in her catalogue essay concludes that Emin “has rewritten that script and put ‘Mad Tracey from Margate,’ as she has described herself, into art’s ‘f*cking epicenter.’”

Emin plays the fool. Meanwhile, the Yale Center for British Art has simply been played.

1. “Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning” opened at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, on March 29 and remains on view through August 10, 2025. ↩

ICYMI: Thoughts on WFB & NPG

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I wrote in with some thoughts on William F. Buckley Jr., occasioned by Barton Swaim's review of books by Sam Tanenhaus and Lawrence Perelman.

In the New York Times, I offered my view of the president's recent actions at the National Portrait Gallery.