The 1927 Spoon Woman goes beyond the applied use of the modish style nègre that was influencing everything from Art Deco furniture to Léger's theatrical curtains in the mid-1920s and which Giacometti had employed in his The Couple the year before.11 The decorative application of tribalizing detail to a stylized, planar background is the formal strategy of what might be called Black Deco; it is this one finds in The Couple, giving the work its generalized character of the Africo-primitive in the absence of any specific sculptural source.12 But moving toward a much deeper level of structural assimilation of African carved objects, Spoon Woman acknowledges the metaphor frequently put in place by Dan grain scoops, in which the bowl of the implement is likened to the lower part of the female seen as a receptacle, or pouch, or cavity.13 Giacometti may have seen these spoons in the years before 1927. Six spoons from Paul Guillaume's collection were included in the massive exhibition of African and Oceanic art at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the winter of 1923-24.14 By taking the metaphor and inverting it, so that "a spoon is like a woman" becomes "a woman is like a spoon," Giacometti was able to intensify the idea, and to universalize it by generalizing the forms of the sometimes naturalistic African carvings toward a more prismatic abstraction. In forcing on the Dan model the image of the woman who is almost nothing but womb, Giacometti assimilated the formal elegance of the African object to the more brutish conception of stone-age fertility Venuses.15
With this celebration of the primal function of woman seen through a primitivized formal logic, Giacometti had assumed the most vanguard of positions. He found himself in concert with the aggressive anti-Western stance of the visual avant-garde, given verbal form by, for example, Georges Henri Rivière, soon to be the assistant director of the Trocadéro, when he published a panegyric to archeology—"parricidal daughter of humanism"—in the initial volume of Cahiers d'art.16 Opening with the bald statement that the miracle of Greek art had run its course, Rivière went on to say that if Louis Aragon and Jean Lurçat were now to go to Spain, unlike their fathers, their most urgent goal would not be the Prado, but the caves of Altamira. Spoon Woman, contemporary with this statement, is also its confirmation.
But Spoon Woman is something else as well. It is what another wing of the intellectual vanguard would view as "soft" primitivism, a primitivism gone formal and therefore gutless. Indeed, to associate Spoon Woman with Cahiers d'art is to place it within the context of a formalizing conception of the primitive that we hear, for example, behind the praise Christian Zervos bestowed on Brancusi as the most successful sculptor of the postwar period. Since the great influx of black culture, Zervos wrote in 1929. "Brancusi has explored all the vistas that the Negros have opened up to him, and which . . . permitted him to achieve pure form... . "17 Spoon Woman participates in both the sense of scale and the quality of formal reduction that Giacometti achieved, doubtless through knowledge of Brancusi's work.
One year before Giacometti made this sculpture, Paul Guillaume published a book that represented the extreme of the movement to aestheticize primitive art.18 Primitive Negro Sculpture, conceived under the aegis of Albert Barnes, written at the Barnes Foundation, and published in English, acknowledges as its only real precedent an analysis of the formal structure of African art by Roger Fry.19 Because of Guillaume's prominence in the art world the book would undoubtedly have been well known in Paris even before its translation into French, and indeed, one of its illustrations may have reinforced Giacometti's conception of the woman/spoon.
Maintaining that every work of African art can be understood as the solution to a formal problem, Primitive Negro Sculpture presents each of its objects as "a rhythmic, varied sequence of some theme in mass, line, or surface," describing the way the geometrically conceived elements are first articulated and then unified by the plastic genius of the primitive sculptor. But what is insisted upon throughout the text is the continuous presence of a will to art, an aesthetic drive that is understood to be originary, or primal. Preceding all ideas, religious or otherwise, this instinct is the joint possession of children of all races as well as those "children" of the human race: primitive men and women. It is thus the Western child's creative play with paints, clay, and crayons that gives us access to the processes that drive primitive art. In concluding with the certainty that "it is not hard to imagine, then, the continuous development of negro art out of the free, naive play of the aesthetic impulse," Guillaume joins the aestheticizing interests of the art world to the most euphoric position of developmental psychology as that was being enunciated in the late 1920s.20 He places himself in accord with the psychologist G. H. Luquet.

Luquet and "art-for-art's-sake" Primitivism versus Bataille and the radical avant-garde...