Volume 12 of the journal 291 (February 1916) featured a Kota reliquary sculpture on its cover, as well as a text by De Zayas on African art's significance for modernism—more specifically, for abstraction and Cubism. A prolific theorist and essayist, De Zayas developed over nearly two decades a study titled The Evolution of Form. Inspired by evolutionist anthropology, its goal was to demonstrate "scientifically" the role of the primitive as a source of inspiration. While De Zayas's approach has been criticized for its racist overtones, his theory underlines the radical nature of the early twentieth-century avant-garde: in a period of acute racism, many artists saw in African art progress, not regression.
