Robert Goldwater (1907–1973) was an art historian, scholar of African art, and the director of the Museum of Primitive Art from 1957 to 1963. During his graduate studies, Goldwater, who was one of the first scholars to study modern art at Harvard, wrote his dissertation on modern art and primitivism. In 1938, a revised version of Goldwater’s dissertation was published in book form as Primitivism in Modern Art. In 1957, Goldwater became a professor at New York University, published a book on the French painter Paul Gauguin, and became the director of the Museum of Primitive Art, which was founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller to house his art collection.
The works of Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) represented an alternative to the dominion of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Tamayo was born to Zapotec parents, and after their death, he went to live with his aunt in Mexico City where he helped with her fruit stand and eventually began to study fine arts. In 1921, Tamayo was hired by José Vasconcelos, the secretary of public education under Álvaro Obregón, to work in the Department of Ethnographic Drawings. Shortly thereafter he was promoted to head the department. Tamayo generally avoided straightforward political content in his work, and was more interested in traditional Mexican culture, and in exploring international aesthetic styles. Tamayo’s paintings were inspired by Pre-Columbian and popular Mexican art. His work is also renowned for its use of rich and varied color.