MANA FROM HARVARD

ONE of the world's great repositories of primitive art is Harvard's Peabody Museum--where few people except students of anthropology ever set foot. Just across the Charles River, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts plays host to hundreds of visitors each day, but it has had no primitive art to show them. Last week the two museums joined forces under an agreement whereby Boston's Fine Arts will exhibit Harvard's primitive treasures, celebrated their new partnership with a massive exhibition of masterpieces of primitive art, with the Peabody's best supplemented by loans from private collectors and many other museums.

Melanesian tom-toms, Benin bronzes, a footstool in the shape of a kneeling woman, a dog-shaped bowl, and African, American Indian and South Sea Island idols by the score comprised a wild little dream world within the Fine Arts' staid galleries of European pictures. Most exciting finds were the small gold ornaments from pre-Columbian

Central America, that were discovered by a Peabody Museum expedition (see, color). Like the vast majority of items on display, they 'could not be called "beautiful" in any ordinary sense of the term. But, as Fine Arts Director Perry Rathbone pointed out in the exhibition catalogue, "beauty has become only one province of art's

kingdom."

Collector-Photographer (LIFE) Eliot Elisofon, who organized the show, put his finger on what the primitive artists were after: not beauty so much as life. In fact, says Elisofon, some of the objects "were believed to be alive by their makers. An important belief of the Polynesians was in mana, an impersonal supernatural power. Sculptures contained mana." Such modern sculptors as Lipchitz, Gonzalez, David Smith and Brancusi are not far from this idea, and for mana they, too, sacrifice resemblance. "The primitive artist and the modern one," says Elisofon, "both produce more of what they feel than of what they see."

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