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.

PRIMITIVE

The term "primitive" (sometimes "primeval" or "primal") is close to "archaic," but should be distinguished from the latter in that "primitive" refers not to origins but rather to an anthropological or historical description of cultural phenomena (myths, religions, legends) or modes of thinking that remain unconscious in modern, civilized humans.

Freud's interest in the primitive was manifested as early as "A Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1950c [1895]), where he cited Charles Darwin. Thereafter, this notion is always found at the interface between, on the one hand, Freud's preoccupation with biological evolution and phylogenesis and, on the other, his hypotheses on the formation of social groups, as presented in particular in Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a) and Moses and Monotheism (1939a [1934-1938]).

In Freud's hypothesis, as outlined in "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" (1912d), "primitive" people, although they too live in a civilization remote from archaic times, are the equivalent of the childhood of "civilized" people. Thus everything about them is relevant to the study of humanity as a whole. Among salient examples of Freud's use of the term in his work are references to primitive religions and primitive sexual rites of worship (letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated January 24, 1897) and to primitive languages in which, as in dreams, there is no such thing as negation or contradiction (1900a), or in which a word is even systematically used with opposite meanings to express ambivalence (1910e).

In fact, thought itself, at these primitive stages, possesses original characteristics—such as conceptions of death, mechanisms of projection, and sexualized thought—as are found in magical beliefs or animism (1912-1913a). Freud hypothesized that social organization is initially patriarchal (the primal horde), then matriarchal (the divinization of woman as mother and the grouping of brothers into totemic clans), and finally once again patriarchal and patrilineal, with a unique God replacing the primal father. This conception constitutes a model for viewing collective life in general in its different, ever unstable configurations. The notion of the primitive always appears at the boundaries of myth, legend, and history, which are characteristic of the primitive style of writing history (1909d).

The primal scene (when a child is first emotionally aware of his parents copulating) also condenses certain epistemological questions that can be raised about the primitive, particularly concerning the reality of what the small child has seen or heard in connection with the parents' sexual relations.

The notion of the primitive occupies a central place in Freud's thought. It is the equivalent, at the collective level, to the infantile at the individual level. This aspect of Freud's work provides the outlines for fruitful interaction between anthropology and psychoanalysis.

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor

See also: Abel, Carl; Act, passage to the; Animistic thought; Cultural transmission; Darwin, Darwinism, and Psychoanalysis; Ethics; Infantile omnipotence; Knowledge or research, instinct for; Magical thinking; Myth of origins; Oceanic feeling; Organic repression; Phylogenesis; Prehistory; Primal, the; Projection; Psychoanalysis of Fire, The ; Symbol.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1950c [1895]). A project for a scientific psychology. SE, 1: 281-387.

——. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4: 1-338; 5: 339-625.

——. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. SE, 10: 151-318.

——. (1910e). The antithetical meaning of primal words. SE, 11: 153-161.

——. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. SE, 11: 177-190.

——. (1912-1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1-161.

——. (1939a [1934-1938]). Moses and monotheism: Three essays. SE, 23: 1-137.

——. (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

prim·i·tive / ˈprimətiv/ • adj. 1. relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something: primitive mammals a name corrupted from primitive German. ∎  relating to or denoting a preliterate, nonindustrial society or culture characterized by simple social and economic organization: primitive people. ∎  having a quality or style that offers an extremely basic level of comfort, convenience, or efficiency: the accommodations at the camp were a bit primitive. ∎  (of behavior, thought, or emotion) apparently originating in unconscious needs or desires and unaffected by objective reasoning: the primitive responses we share with many animals. ∎  of or denoting a simple, direct style of art that deliberately rejects sophisticated artistic techniques. 2. not developed or derived from anything else: the primitive material of the universe. ∎  Linguistics denoting a word, base, or root from which another is historically derived. ∎ Linguistics denoting an irreducible form. ∎  Math. (of an algebraic or geometric expression) from which another is derived, or which is not itself derived from another. 3. Biol. (of a part or structure) in the first or early stage of formation or growth; rudimentary. See also primitive streak. • n. 1. a person belonging to a preliterate, nonindustrial society or culture. 2. a pre-Renaissance painter. ∎  a modern painter who imitates the pre-Renaissance style. ∎  an artist employing a simple, naive style that deliberately rejects subtlety or conventional techniques. ∎  a painting by a primitive artist, or an object in a primitive style. 3. Linguistics a word, base, or root from which another is historically derived. ∎ Linguistics an irreducible form. ∎  Math. an algebraic or geometric expression from which another is derived; a curve of which another is the polar or reciprocal. ∎  Comput. a simple operation or procedure of a limited set from which complex operations or procedures may be constructed, esp. a simple geometric shape that may be generated in computer graphics by such an operation or procedure. DERIVATIVES: prim·i·tive·ly adv. prim·i·tive·ness n. prim·i·tiv·i·ty / ˌpriməˈtivətē/ n.

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. By extension it has been applied to other fields of art that appear unsophisticated relative to some particular standard. Thus the term was once widely used of pre-Renaissance European painting, particularly of the Italian and Netherlandish schools, but this usage (as in the expression ‘the Flemish primitives’) is now much less common and no longer has derogatory implications. The term ‘primitive’ is also used more or less as a synonym for naive.

In the context of modern art the term ‘primitivism’ refers to the use by Western artists of forms or imagery derived from the art of so-called primitive peoples (in the first sense mentioned above), especially those who had been colonized by Western countries. For centuries such art was valued mainly for its ethnographic interest or (in the case of articles made from precious materials) for its monetary worth. However, in the 1890s Gauguin had tried to escape ‘the disease of civilization’ among the natives of Tahiti, and in the next generation many 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 collected African works, notably Picasso, and their influence is clear in his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Other artists studied primitive art in museums— Henry Moore, for example, was impressed by the powerful block-like forms of Mayan sculpture he saw in the British Museum.

primitive. Type of architecture mnemonic of the very beginning, the earliest, original, crude, or fundamental. Suggested by roughness and squatness (as in the primitive Doric from Paestum with its exaggerated entasis), it was a feature of advanced late-C18 Neo-Classicism.

Bibliography

J. Curl (1992);
Vidler (1990)

primitive
1. Not capable of being broken down into simpler form; nondivisible. The term is used for example with reference to actions requested by a process via supervisor calls, especially the use of P and V operations (see semaphore).

2. A primitive operation, action, element, etc. See also graphics primitive.

primitive XIV. — (O)F. primitif, -ive, or L. prīmitīvus first or earliest of its kind, f. prīmitus in the first place, f. prīmus first, PRIME2; see -IVE.

primitive (evol.) Preserving the character states of an ancestral stage. The term may be used of a character (as a synonym of plesiomorphic) or, occasionally, of a whole organism.

primitive Applied to a character (as a synonym of ‘plesiomorphic’) or, occasionally, of a whole organism, that preserves the character states of an ancestral stage.

primitive (evol.) Preserving the character states of an ancestral stage. The term may be used of a character (as a synonym of plesiomorph) or, occasionally, of a whole organism.

primitive Applied to a character (as a synonym of ‘plesiomorphic’) or, occasionally, to a whole organism that preserves the character state of an ancestral stage.