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| Emil Nolde, Autumn Sea, 1910 |
The discovery of the "expressive" power of African and other non-Western "primitive" art by European artists starting in the late 19th century was an encounter with an art that could conjure up the numinous dimension that modernity had banished from both European life and art.
The radical otherness of what Rudolf Otto called the Wholly Other, absent in contemporary Christian religiosity, was rediscovered in the alien forms of non-Western sacred art.
What Nietzsche mistook for the death of God was merely the transformation of the Christian God into a deus otiosus. Gauguin had to go to Brittany to find a corner of Europe where the memory of this formerly living God could still inspire visions.
In the arts of Africa and Oceania, European artists discovered fetishes still charged with supernatural power produced by people who remained in ecstatic contact with their spirits and gods. Contact with these shamanic artifacts, in turn, enabled European artists to recover visionary capability. And for a brief moment they were able to enrich a decrepit European culture with fresh visions of heaven and hell.
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| George Grosz, The Funeral (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza), 1917-18 |