The origins of art around 1900

Crossing the dense forests of central Brazil in 1887–88, Karl von den Steinen became a firsthand witness to what he was convinced was the archaic origin of art. In the published report of his expedition along the upper Xingu River, the German ethnologist recounted how his party’s canoe approached a sand beach, which their indigenous escorts had already passed before them. To their surprise, the crew saw two fishes drawn there in the sand. Steinen’s informant, a young Bakairi man named Antonio, identified them as matrinxã, a local species of freshwater fish (fig. 1). “We stopped there and went fishing,” writes Steinen, “and lo, we caught matrinxã! It was as good as if the word had been written there, as if deliberately inviting Antonio as well to try his luck there.” For the ethnologist, this moment signified nothing less than a primal scene from the very dawn of human culture. Through it he could relive, as in a flash, the “distant course of the evolution of Xingu art” and, indeed, of art in general. “Among the natural peoples [Naturvölker],” he extrapolated, “drawing is used like a gesture to communicate something and not in order to reproduce graceful forms; and based on the personal impression I gained from the immediacy of explanatory drawing, I believe that it is older than ornamental, artistic drawing.” He thus surmised that drawing in the sand, which after all requires no tools, must have emerged as the first recourse when gesture or vocal mimicry no longer sufficed to communicate. For Steinen’s metropolitan readers, this communicational theory of art put forward a potent new account of