Herbert Read "History of Sculpture" p.56 - Google Docs

Most of the exotic influences I have described are ‘primitive’ in the sense defined by Van Gogh - they proceed from works that are the expression of feeling and instinct - simple, serene, devoid of all intellectual sophistry. Other exotic influences on the development of modern art have been more complex, simply because they come from a phase of a past civilization that is itself more complex. There is, after all, a difference of both style and quality between African Negro sculpture
and Egyptian sculpture
, a still greater difference between Negro sculpture and Greek sculpture of the geometric period.
Etruscan sculpture also belongs to a relatively sophisticated civilization
and Mexican sculpture of the kind that affects our sensibility may belong to the decadence of that highly complex civilization.

Very few modern artists have sought in exotic art a simplicity ‘as beautiful as the Work of Millet’. Rather they have been attracted by its remoteness and its mystery, even its complexity. This is certainly true of Far Eastern art, the extremely refined expression of a metaphysical outlook that has nothing in common with the art of Africa or Tahiti. We know Very little of the religion and philosophy of the Incas Mayas, but again it was complex rather than simple, fearful rather than serene. Even when we do come to the primitive art of our own Christian civilisation, to Romanesque
or Gothic art
(both fundamental influences on Picasso and Henry Moore), we are in the presence of spiritual qualities that have quite a different metaphysical significance. But two qualities perhaps all these exotic arts have in common - their remoteness in time and the symbolic nature of their representations. Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs - the elements of a new iconography.

Read, H 1964 “ A Concise History of Modern Sculpture” p.56