Robert Goldwater

One of the first art history graduate students in the United States to study modern art, Robert Goldwater brought renewed attention to the relationship between twentieth-century painting and the arts of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania with his first book, Primitivism in Modern Painting (1938), setting the trajectory for scholarship on the subject for decades to come.

In 1939, following the completion of his doctoral degree at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, Goldwater joined the faculty at Queens College; in 1957, he became professor of art history at his alma mater, a position he held until his death. A prolific writer on modern art, Goldwater published Artists on Art from the XIV to the XX Century (1945), one of the first compendiums of artists’ writings, as well as several monographic studies of painters and sculptors, including Rufino Tamayo (1947), Vincent van Gogh (1954), Jacques Lipchitz (1954), and Paul Gauguin (1957). He also undertook thematic investigations of European modernism, publishing Space and Dream (1968) and Symbolism (1979). His two books Modern Art in Your Life (1949), coauthored with scholar René d’Harnoncourt, and What Is Modern Sculpture (1969) reflected his belief in the importance of aesthetic literacy. Each offered the general reader an accessible guide to modern art, emphasizing visual appreciation rather than historical context.

Despite his numerous contributions to the study of European modern art, Goldwater is also remembered for his involvement in the field of African art history. In 1957 he became director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York, founded by Nelson Rockefeller, which was devoted entirely to the arts of the Indigenous cultures of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. He also acted as Rockefeller’s personal art advisor and facilitated numerous key acquisitions for the museum, including the monumental reliquary sculpture by an unidentified artist from Gabon known as “The Great Bieri” (19th century; The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Goldwater also organized two major exhibitions for the institution, Antelopes and Queens (1960) and Senufo Sculpture from West Africa (1964) that set a new precedent for the study and display of African art by focusing on a single ethno-linguistic group rather than an entire continent. Throughout his career, Goldwater sought to understand how indigenous artists created and engaged with objects, despite never traveling to Africa himself. His studies combined extensive fieldwork accounts of other scholars with his own formal analysis, thereby integrating the fields of ethnography and art history. Despite stepping down from his position as director in 1963, Goldwater oversaw the initial relocation of the Museum of Primitive Art collection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a project initiated in 1969 and completed ten years later, after his death.