He took his new passion very seriously, spending hours at the Musée de l'Homme, studying books, visiting primitive art galleries and attending auctions.
The new museum, on the other hand, says the pieces were bought and displayed with the approval of the Nigerian authorities two months before the Louvre's new primitive art galleries were opened this spring.
Today Mr. Swedlow's collection is a rogue's gallery of primitive sweepers and suckers — more than 90 items in all — lining the walls of Aronson's Floor Covering, a rug and floor outlet on West 17th Street that Mr. Swedlow bought in 1965.
In the early nineteen-fifties, he bought the Harry Stone gallery of American primitive art, on Madison Avenue, whose owner, a friend, was ill and could no longer run it.
The resulting image suggests both primitive ritual and a chic art gallery.
Walking by the gallery, which specialized in primitive American art, he decided to look inside.
Roscoe's Italian primitives, now in the Walker Art Gallery, convinced me the Italian Renaissance was a part of Liverpool's moral inheritance.
After attending the School of Visual Arts, where he studied painting and sculpture, he landed a job in a New York shop that made bases for sculptures, mainly works of tribal and primitive art (hence the name of his gallery).
Galleries: SoHo LARRY CALKINS, American Primitive, 594 Broadway, near Houston Street, (212) 966-1530 (through Oct. 28).
Indeed, there will be what he describes as "lots of 20th-century paintings, photographs and so-called primitive art,"at the fair's 52 galleries from France, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and the United States.
