Primitivism

• 1. Introduction

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  Primitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealization that shaped some of the most celebrated and contested works in the Western artistic canon. At its core, it is a search: a desire to recover something that modern civilization seems to have buried. But what artists said they were searching for, and what they were actually doing, turned out to be two very different things.

  The question at the heart of Primitivism is deceptively simple. Can a painter trained in Paris, a composer raised in St. Petersburg, or a sculptor schooled in the European tradition truly reach across centuries and cultures to find a more honest, more powerful way of making art? And if they can, what does it mean that the cultures they borrowed from had no say in the matter?

  Primitivism touches Western philosophy, visual art, music, colonial history, and movements of anti-colonial resistance. Its legacy runs through the Tahitian paintings of Paul Gauguin, the 1913 riot that greeted Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and the founding of the Negritude movement in the 1930s. It also runs through a troubling concept: the "noble savage," a stereotype that colonialists used to justify white colonial rule over non-white peoples in Asia, Africa, and Australasia.

• 2. Philosophy and Origins

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  Giambattista Vico, an Italian intellectual writing during the Age of Enlightenment, argued that primitive non-Europeans were more attuned to Nature's aesthetic inspirations for poetry than the arts of civilized, modern man. From that vantage point, Vico compared the artistic merits of Homer's epic poetry and the Bible against modern literature written in vernacular language. His was a cultural argument, not merely an aesthetic one.

  Primitivism as a philosophical program divides into two modes. Chronological primitivism proposes the moral superiority of a primitive way of life, often represented by the myth of a golden age of pre-societal harmony with Nature. Cultural primitivism, by contrast, focuses on the practices and expressions of living societies judged as less modern by Western standards.

  In 1795, the scholar Friedrich August Wolf published his Prolegomena to Homer, identifying the language of Homer's poetry and the language of the Bible as examples of folk art communicated and transmitted through oral tradition. Wolf's ideas, alongside Vico's, were later developed by Johann Gottfried Herder at the beginning of the 19th century. Despite their influence in literary circles, both thinkers only slightly shaped the visual arts of their era.

  The 19th century brought a more concrete turn. The emergence of historicism, which meant judging and evaluating different eras according to their own criteria, produced new schools of visual art devoted to historical fidelity of setting and costume. The Nazarene movement in Germany drew inspiration from the primitive school of Italian devotional painting, specifically the work produced before Raphael and before the discovery of oil painting. Where academic painting used dark glazes and idealized forms, the Nazarenes turned to clear outlines, bright colors, and much detail. The Pre-Raphaelites followed a parallel path, inspired by the critical writings of John Ruskin, who admired painters such as Sandro Botticelli and urged artists to paint outdoors.

• 3. Gauguin and Tahiti

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  Paul Gauguin departed urban Europe and went to live in the French colony of Tahiti, where he adopted what he described as a primitive style of life far removed from urban France. His paintings from those years, including Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), Parau na te Varua ino (1892), Anna the Javanerin (1893), Te Tamari No Atua (1896), and Cruel Tales (1902), make clear that his search for the primitive was also a search for sexual freedom from the Christian constrictions of private life in Europe.

  Gauguin presented his paintings as a celebration of Tahitian society and as a defense of Tahiti against French colonialism. The paintings Tahitian Pastoral (1892) and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-1898) drew explicit connections between Primitivism and the pastoral tradition, which idealizes rural life as morally superior to city life.

  From the postcolonial perspective of the 20th century, feminist art critics argued that Gauguin's taking of adolescent mistresses voids his claim to anti-colonialism. His sexual freedom, they argued, derived from the male gaze of the colonist. Gauguin's primitivism is now understood as part of what critics described as a "dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power, both colonial and patriarchal," which French colonialists had invented about Tahiti and the Tahitians. These fantasies were made in an effort to essentialize notions of primitiveness by reducing non-European peoples to colonial subordinates.

  Two posthumous, retrospective exhibitions of Gauguin's works in Paris, one at the Salon d'Automne in 1903 and another in 1906, drew the attention of Maurice de Vlaminck, Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

• 4. Music and The Rite of Spring

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  Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, premiered in 1913, is primitivist program music on the subject of Paganism, specifically the rite of human sacrifice in pre-Christian Russia. Stravinsky deliberately set aside the aesthetic and technical restraints of Western musical composition, employing harsh consonance and dissonance along with loud, repetitive rhythms as a form of what might be called Dionysian spontaneity within musical modernism.

  The critic Malcolm Cook noted that The Rite of Spring, with its folk-music motifs and the infamous 1913 Paris riot that greeted its premiere, engaged with Primitivism in both form and practice, even while remaining within the technical praxes of Western classical music.

  Primitivism in music was not confined to Europe. Australia's John Antill is known for his major primitive work Corroboree. According to Campbell, Corroboree holds significance for broader discussions of musical primitivism because much of the musicological discourse in classical music assumes that certain musical gestures inherently signify primitivism, or blends primitivism into the broader concept of musical exoticism. Corroboree takes a different approach, highlighting representational primitivism by linking the ballet's prominent musical elements to historical ideas from the 18th through the 20th centuries about the earliest phases of human musical evolution.

• 5. Picasso and African Art

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  Following the wave of interest generated by Gauguin's Tahitian paintings, a group of artists in the 1905-1906 period began studying the arts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. Pablo Picasso studied Iberian sculpture, African sculpture, and African traditional masks, alongside historical works such as the Mannerist paintings of El Greco. From that sustained study, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907 and went on to invent Cubism.

  The spoils of European colonialism had made these objects available to Western artists. Colonial powers had brought the art of colonized peoples to European museums and galleries, where the works were encountered by artists searching for alternatives to the conventions of Renaissance art. What the colonized peoples whose art was taken thought of this appropriation was not a question Western artists typically asked.

  The 1984 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York brought these tensions into public focus. The director, William Rubin, built on Roger Fry's earlier London exhibition by displaying modern works of art directly juxtaposed to the non-Western objects that inspired them. Rubin stated that he was not so much interested in the pieces of "tribal" art in themselves but instead wanted to focus on the ways in which modern artists "discovered" this art. Scholar Jean-Hubert Martin argued that Rubin's approach effectively gave the tribal art objects the status of not much more than footnotes or addenda to the Modernist avant-garde.

• 6. Anti-Colonial Responses

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  Begun in the 1930s by francophone artists and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the Negritude movement was readily adopted throughout continental Africa and by the African diaspora. Where Western primitivism romanticized non-European cultures from the outside, the artists of Negritude turned primitivism into a tool of resistance, idealizing pre-colonial Africa to challenge the logic of Western colonialism.

  Wifredo Lam, the Cuban artist associated with Picasso and the surrealists in Paris during the 1930s, exemplifies this reversal. On returning to Cuba in 1941, Lam created dynamic tableaux that integrated human beings, animals, and Nature. In The Jungle, painted in 1943, Lam's polymorphism produces a fantastical jungle scene featuring African motifs among stalks of sugar cane. The painting connects the neo-African idealism of Negritude to the history of plantation slavery and the production of table sugar, a connection that Western primitivism never made.

  The processes of decolonization fused with what scholars called the reverse teleology of Primitivism, producing native works of art distinct from primitivist artworks by Western artists. Where Western primitivism reproduced colonial stereotypes as though they were true, anti-colonial primitivism used similar formal moves to critique those very stereotypes while yearning for the pre-colonial way of life. The difference lay in who was doing the idealizing and at whose expense.

• 7. Neo-Primitivism in Russia

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  Neo-primitivism was a Russian art movement named after a 31-page pamphlet called Neo-primitivizm, written by Aleksandr Shevchenko. Proposed as a new style of modern painting, it fused elements of Cezanne, Cubism, and Futurism with traditional Russian folk art conventions and motifs, notably the Russian icon and the lubok. Neo-primitivism replaced the symbolist art of the Blue Rose movement, whose tendency to look backward was seen as having passed its creative zenith.

  One conceptualization of neo-primitivism describes it as anti-primitivist Primitivism, because it questions the Eurocentric universalism that underlies earlier primitivist movements. From that angle, neo-primitivism presents itself as a contemporary version that repudiates previous primitivist discourses rather than extending them.

  Russian artists associated with the movement include Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Marc Chagall, Kasimir Malevich, Ilya Mashkov, Pavel Filonov, David Burliuk, and Igor Stravinsky. Several of these artists were former members of the Blue Rose group who brought their symbolist training into contact with the new movement's bolder vocabulary of color and form.

• 8. Exhibitions and Reckoning

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  In November 1910, Roger Fry organized the exhibition titled Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London. The show displayed works by Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent Van Gogh, among others. Fry intended to demonstrate how French art had developed over the past three decades, but the response from London art critics was hostility. Some called Fry "mad" and "crazy" for publicly displaying such artwork. American scholar Marianna Torgovnick later termed the exhibition the "debut" of primitivism on the London art scene.

  The 2017 exhibition Picasso Primitif, mounted by the Musee du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in collaboration with the Musee National Picasso - Paris, sought to invite a dialogue between the works of Picasso and those of non-Western artists, as its director Yves Le Fur stated. The goal was to reveal the similar issues those artists had to address, including nudity, sexuality, impulses, and loss, through parallel formal solutions.

  In 2018, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts mounted From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-Face Picasso, Past and Present, adapted and expanded from Picasso Primitif. Curator Nathalie Bondil brought in 300 works and documents from the Paris museums. Bondil found ways to respond to the problems with how Le Fur had juxtaposed Picasso's work to non-Western objects. She asked directly: how can a Picasso and an anonymous mask be exhibited in the same plane? That question, first made urgent by colonialism and unresolved by a century of museum exhibitions, remains the central challenge Primitivism leaves to the present day.