In 1984, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its exhibition “ ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” the reception was generally favorable. Then came Thomas McEvilley’s shattering review in Artforum magazine.

Appearing a month after the exhibition opened, the review meticulously, logically and thoroughly demolished its basic, unstated assumption: that the indigenous arts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Oceania and the Americas were of value primarily as source materials for Western modernism.

But Mr. McEvilley, who died on March 2 at 73, wasn’t done yet. In powerfully accessible language, he extended the charge of reductive thinking to the museum itself, and to Western art scholarship and criticism as a whole.

The show’s curators, William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, tried to rebut his attack in letters to Artforum. Mr. McEvilley came back with even more persuasively damning arguments.