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The most fascinating exhibition in Paris, France a collection of primitive art in artists collections at the Musée de I'Homme, offers parallels with "The Sculpture of Picasso," the show that has just opened with great fanfare at the Museum of Modern Art Simply as a demonstration of taste, particularly among the Surrealists, the Paris event was a revelation of how far the genuinely primitive, in the shape of frightening fetishes and totems. has come to look handsomely decorative. The works that Pablo Ruiz Picasso and Braque collected earlier were more schematic and less potent examples of their kind, but one had the impression that for their owners they opened up a world of such forcefully broken and blunt forms that, in comparison, all later views of the primitive seem a bit housebroken.

There is nothing like a national crisis and the war in Vietnam is a crisis raised to the pitch of horror to make aesthetic pursuits look pitifully insignificant. There is a level on which the dream of a visual order will fade without the capacity to inflect human behavior, in whatever fashion, direct or indirect. The failure of imagination on the part of the public is its blindness to the truths behind socio-political protests or documentary images. Large numbers, particularly of modern people, seem to live fearlessly because they lack imagination. The freedom from anxiety is but the other side of a deeper loss of freedom.

The article presents the author's comments on the practice of art in California. The author says that as simple orientation, one might do worse than note the tendency of recent California art to separate itself into two opposed strains whose bases are far more physiological than stylistic. The author provisionally calls them "Sterilized" and the "Sweaty," though they are at best imprecise categories. Further, there are artists who have practiced both, and one important sculptor who transcends them. Though each camp has philosophical premises, both are most critically engaged with bodily sensations and visceral reactions, to which they have developed a nervous openness.