Who Are You Calling #039;Primitive#039;?

lt;pgt;The Barbier Mueller Museum in Geneva is one of the unsung treasures of Calvin#039;s lakeside city. I have a weakness for Geneva, it speaks to my latent bourgeois aspirations and I find the sense of quiet order that prevails in the city rather appealing. There are times when I almost find myself wanting to live in Geneva and one of those was the other day with the sun warming the time-weathered walls and smooth cobbles of the historic city on the hill.lt;/pgt; lt;pgt;The Barbier Mueller Museum deserves to be better known, but I am secretly rather glad it is not, as I feel that I am a member of a privileged little club of devotees. I first came across it when I was seated next to its co-founder and eponym Monique Barbier Mueller at a dinner given by Vacheron Constantin in the Temple of Dendur in the Met in New York seven or eight years ago.lt;/pgt; lt;pgt;Although not a young woman she has the energy of a person half her age and the intrepid character of someone much less fearful than I am.lt;/pgt; lt;pgt;She was talking about making trips to Africa, which got us onto the subject of African art, and it transpired that her father had started building a collection of it when, in the years following the Great War and the Crash of 1929, he could no longer aff ord the Cézannes and Van Goghs that he and his sister had collected in better times. He moved to Paris, where life was cheaper, and for a while lived in an artist#039;s studio next to Nicolas de Staël.lt;/pgt; lt;divgt;lt;!--0--gt;lt;/divgt; lt;pgt;As a child Monique would accompany him on his Saturday visits to the Marché aux Puces where he would meet dealers in artefacts from quot;primitivequot; cultures – the sort of stuff that inspired Picasso – creating a collection that would form the nucleus of this charming museum in the heart of old Geneva. Thitherto such pieces had been valued for their ethnographic or anthropological interest, but Monique#039;s father clearly perceived them as works of art rather than merely geographically specific curios, and looking at the exhibition quot;Nigerian Arts Revisitedquot;, curated by noted anthropologist Nigel Barley, formerly of the British Museum, it is easy to see what his eye recognised among the flea markets of 1930s Paris.lt;/pgt; lt;pgt;Just how prescient he was becomes clear when it is understood that at the samenbsp;time he was filling his suitcases with trouvailles, some of the earliest ceramic sculptures, made between 800BC and 200AD, were just then being discovered on the Jos Plateau in central Nigeria.lt;/pgt; lt;pgt;Barley has put this show together from the museum#039;s permanent collection of some 4,000 pieces and, as he puts it in his catalogue, quot;What most impresses is the consistently outstanding aesthetic quality of the individual worksquot;, which is why I placed inverted commas around the word primitive earlier. I kept returning to one of the exhibits: called simply quot;cup on an equestrian basequot;, it could have been executed by Giacometti.lt;/pgt; lt;pgt;I have to say I have a weakness for the macabre, so the human skull covered with leathery skin and mounted on a rattan base ticked the sort of box that the Pitt-Rivers in Oxford used to in my youth. Similarly arresting is a headdress mask of a female figure with serpentine coils emerging from her head that recall simultaneously the Medusa and the ridged texture of the horns of African plains game. Classical legend also comes to mind when looking at an exquisite terracotta Janus head with two sensitively worked faces. Created sometime between the 3rd and 9th centuries AD,nbsp;while Europe descended into the Dark Ages, it is the sort of piece that would make much of the work carried out in Europe during this period seem quot;primitivequot;.lt;/pgt; lt;pgt;While frustrating, the difficulty in dating some of these pieces only enhances their mysterious appeal, an allure that this exhibition enhances with the sort of lighting that one might call moody: pieces seem to emerge from the darkness. Lighting is deftly deployed. For instance, the shadows cast by a 2nd or 3rd century AD head of a bearded man bring to mind the figures of Easter Island.lt;/pgt; lt;pgt;Barley recalls how, when visiting the African floor of the British Museum, William Rubin, the late MOMA curator and director, said: quot;Show me African material but, I beg you, tell me absolutely nothing at all about it or you ruin it for me as art.quot; And it is indeed possible to visit this show and simply experience by turns the mystery, delicacy and sheer effect of these pieces.nbsp;lt;/pgt;