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Some focused only on the historical and folk aspects of these stories, while others went further and found an ethnological and esthetic significance for new forms of art unknown to the general public, though many "redskin" objects, brought back during previous centuries, were already known through royal collections and curiosity cabinets.
At the beginning of the 20th century, artists found in American Indian art a new source of inspiration, attracted as they were to its geometrical forms and vivid colors. The wooden figurines, or kachina dolls, sculpted by the Hopi and Zuni tribes in the American Southwest as gifts for their children, nourished the inspiration of German expressionist painters like August Macke or Emil Nolde. The latter went as far as to include kachina dolls in his compositions, using as a model a doll from the V^lkerkunde in Berlin.
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