primitive

primitive. Term used with various meanings in the history and criticism of the arts. In its widest sense it is applied to art of societies outside the great Western, Near Eastern, and oriental civilizations, even though much of it was produced by highly sophisticated peoples. Pre-Columbian art, North American Indian art, African art south of the Sahara, and Oceanic art are the main areas embraced by the term. Originally the term was derogatory or patronizing, as such art generally seemed uncouth or savage to Western eyes, but it is now used as a label of convenience, without any implied value judgement. By extension it has been applied to other fields of art that appear unsophisticated relative to some particular standard. It was once widely used, for example, of pre-Renaissance European painting, particularly of the Italian and Netherlandish schools (as in the expression ‘the Flemish primitives’); the Renaissance had established the idea of painting as the imitation of nature that dominated Western art for centuries, so paintings from earlier periods were long found wanting in the representational skills that had become accepted as the norm. This usage of the word ‘primitive’ is now much less common and no longer has derogatory implications.

In the context of modern art, the term ‘primitivism’ has been employed to refer to the use by Western artists of forms or imagery derived from the art of so-called primitive peoples, or more broadly to describe an approach in which the artist seeks to express or celebrate elemental forces by using unconventional procedures or techniques that bypass the methods normally associated with the trained painter or sculptor. In the broader sense, the term ‘primitivism’ has been used to embrace such diverse phenomena as child art, naive art (which is sometimes known as primitive art), the art of the mentally ill (see Art Brut), and Graffiti art. These varied forms of art are linked to each other and to the art of ‘primitive’ peoples by a belief that such ‘innocent’ expression can have a freshness and emotional honesty often lacking in mainstream Western art.

For centuries, the art of ‘primitive’ peoples was known in the West mainly as colonial booty, and it attracted interest either for its curiosity value or (if made of precious materials) for its monetary worth (in 1520 Dürer enthused about Aztec treasures sent to the Emperor Charles V (see Habsburg) from ‘the new land of gold’). Although the idea of the ‘noble savage’ untainted by European civilization had a vogue in the 18th century, it was not until the 1890s that primitivism made a significant impact on Western art—in the work of Gauguin, who tried to escape ‘the disease of civilization’ among the natives of Tahiti. From about 1905 many other avant-garde artists followed his example in cultivating primitive art as a source of inspiration, finding in it a vitality and sincerity that they thought had been polished out of Western art. Usually they followed Gauguin in spirit rather than body, although Nolde and Pechstein, for example, visited Oceania. Many artists in Paris collected African masks (which could be bought very cheaply in curio shops), among them Derain, Matisse, Picasso, and Vlaminck, and their influence is particularly clear in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting that stands as the fountainhead of Cubism. Other artists studied primitive art in museums— Henry Moore, for example, was impressed by the powerful blocklike forms of Mayan sculpture he saw in the British Museum.

Such visual ‘appropriation’ of the culture of ‘primitive’ peoples has sometimes been interpreted as a kind of exploitation, akin to the exploitation of native labour or resources by colonial powers. However, certain modern artists seem to have approached primitive art in a spirit that was far from cynical or opportunist. For example, in 1931 the Paris Surrealists used tribal art in their exhibition ‘The Truth about the Colonies’, which was a protest against a recently opened official exhibition celebrating French colonialism.