Primitivism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Definitions of the term primitivism have varied historically in their intellectual usage and inflection across the disciplines. In its broadest sense, primitivism is an interest in or study of societies and cultures that have an ostensibly less developed notion of technological, intellectual, or social progress. Primitive societies defined thus are those that have not progressed to a state of technological advancement and are therefore perceived as antecedent to the industrialized economies of the West. While more recent definitions of primitivism in literature, visual arts, and anthropology have emphasized the temporal relationship between primitive societies and modernity, discourses on “otherness” are discernible in the Plato’s Republic and in Homer’s description of the Cyclops in The Odyssey.

As an intellectual practice or school of thought, primitivism can be broken down into two main strands of inquiry—firstly, that of the empirical study of primitive societies. This approach typified nineteenth-century anthropology, in which empirical study was carried out to chronologically ascribe customs and social structures of “primitive” societies in an evolutionary relationship to Western notions of modernity. Secondly, there is the study of cultural primitivism, which can be traced to Enlightenment philosophical interests in the ideas of nature versus reason seen most notably in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1749) [Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts ] and his idea of the noble savage in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755) and later in Denis Diderot’s Supplément au voyage au voyage de Bougainville (1772). In French literature, René Chateaubriand’s two novellas, Atala, ou les amours des deux sauvages dans le désert (1801) and Réné (1802) continued to explore this post-Enlightenment fascination with non-European cultures.

In the visual arts, earlier aesthetic explorations of the primitive in the work of artists Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) in the nineteenth century began to develop in conjunction with new directions in the social sciences in the early twentieth century. In Europe this development was seen most clearly in the break from the disinterested intellectual focus of Victorian anthropology into the newer paradigms of cultural relativism of ethnology and ethnography that had been emerging since Franz Boas wrote The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911 (1983) in which he set out a new model of cultural relativism for the anthropological study of non-Western societies. This approach was taken up and developed by later cultural anthropology in Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929).

The formation in 1926 of the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris by ethnologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), and ethnologist Paul Rivet (1876–1958) heralded a new era of ethnographic enquiry into the concept of the primitive in the social sciences. Large-scale interdisciplinary ethnographic projects such as the Mission Dakar Djibouti 1931–1933 brought together writers, artists, sociologists, and anthropologists to work on new conceptualizations of cultural primitivism. In Europe this development of the term primitivism was simultaneous with the emergence of the modernist movement in art and literature and a new aesthetic engagement with a notion of the primitive that found diverse expressions in painting, as in Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), inspired by his contact with African and Oceanic art in the Musée du Trocadéro. This was also found in the modernist avant-garde performances in the dadaist Cabaret Voltaire and in poetry in Blaise Cendrars’s “Prose of the Trans–Siberian” (1913) and Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone” (1913).

This renewed literary interest in primitivism was in part motivated by several texts that explored psychology, society, and religion from new intellectual and cultural perspectives: Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, first published in 1890 (1990), the work of Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (2000 [1913]) and later in Civilization and Its Discontents (2005 [1930]). All in some way influenced some of the major works of European literary modernism such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), and D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926).

Frazer’s study of the primitive roots of religion was the first of its kind to examine religious practices and rituals from a cultural rather than a theological perspective, and this marked a twentieth-century movement away from simple evolutionary binary divisions between notions of “primitive” and “civilized” forms of religious practices to more culturally relativist approaches influenced by the theories of Karl Marx (1818–1883), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and Max Weber (1864–1920).

SEE ALSO Anthropology; Boas, Franz; Cultural Relativism; Culture; Ethnology and Folklore; Malinowski, Bronislaw; Religion

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boas, Franz. 1983. The Mind of Primitive Man. Westport, CT: Greenwood. (Orig. pub. 1911.)

Chateaubriand, René. 1905. Atala, ou les amours des deux sauvages dans le desert. Boston: D. C. Heath. (Orig. pub. 1801.)

Chateaubriand, René 1970. Réné. Geneva: Droz. (Orig. pub. 1802.)

Clifford, James T. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Press.

De Montaigne, Michel. 1979. Des Cannibales. Essais, ed. J. C. Chapman and Frederic Mouret. New York: Atlene.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects. New York: Columbia University Press.

Frazer, James George. 1990. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin’s. (Orig. pub. 1890.)

Freud, Sigmund. 2000. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. (Orig. pub. 1913.)

Freud, Sigmund. 2005. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton. (Orig. pub. 1930.)

Goldwater, Robert. 1986. Primitivism in Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Guillaume, Apollinaire. 1972. Zone. Dublin: Dolmen. (Orig. pub. 1913.)

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: G. Routledge.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1929. The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia: An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage and Family Life among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea. London: G. Routledge.

Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge.

Price, Sally. 2001. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1935. Discours sur les sciences et les arts. Paris: E. Flammarrion. (Orig. pub. 1749.)

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1954. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Paris: Ed. sociales. (Orig. pub. 1755.)

Rubin, William, ed. 1984. “Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Stocking, George W., Jr. 1987. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge.

Thomas, Nicholas. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Torgovnick, Marianna. 1990. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Carole Sweeney

primitivism. A term employed in the context of 20th-century art 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.

The word ‘primitive’ suggests a lack of sophistication relative to some particular standard. It was once widely used, for example, of pre-Renaissance European painting, especially 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. The term ‘primitive art’ is now mainly used to cover the art of societies outside the great Western, Near Eastern, and Asian civilizations, particularly Pre-Columbian art, North American Indian art, African art south of the Sahara, and Oceanic art. Again, the term was once derogatory or patronising, as such art generally seemed uncouth or savage to Western eyes, but it is now used as a label of convenience; as Robert Goldwater wrote in 1955, ‘We all know by now that primitive art is not primitive in any esthetic sense, since we rank its finest achievements with those of the highest of high cultures; nor in any technical sense, since it includes powerful stone carvings and bronze and gold work of great delicacy; and it is often not primitive in any cultural sense, since the societies from which it emerges vary from the simple structures of the interior of New Guinea or the south-western Congo to the complicated feudal organizations of Benin and the civilizations of Central America'.

For centuries, such art 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 Albrecht Dürer enthused about Aztec treasures sent to the Emperor Charles V 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 (MOMA, New York, 1907), the painting that stands as the fountainhead of Cubism. More generally, the simplification and exaggeration of forms seen in much primitive art were influential on the anti-naturalistic trend of avant-garde art in the period of unprecedented experimentation in the decade before the First World War.

Australian aboriginal art has tended to be excluded from broad discussions of primitivism because it was not until after this key period that it became the subject of serious interest: ‘Despite being one of the longest continuous traditions of art in the world, dating back at least fifty millennia, it remained relatively unknown until the second half of the twentieth century’ ( Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art, 1993). Margaret Preston, in the 1920s, was one of the first to consider Aboriginal art as art, rather than ethnographic material, and she was one of the first non-Aboriginals to be influenced by it in her own work.

Western artists saw examples of primitive art not only in their own and other artists' studios, but also in various public collections. Picasso, for example, visited the Musée d'Ethnographie in Paris, the members of Die Brücke frequented the Museum für Völkerkunde in Dresden, and Henry Moore was impressed by the powerful block-like forms of Maya sculpture he saw in the British Museum in London. Moore later said ‘I began to find my own direction, and one thing that helped, I think, was the fact that Mexican sculpture had more excitement for me than negro sculpture. As most of the other sculptors had been moved by negro sculpture, this gave me a feeling that I was striking out on my own.’ In spite of their enthusiasm for such art, few Western artists in the first half of the 20th century had much knowledge of the cultural background of the primitive objects they admired; in line with formalist aesthetics, they believed that visual devices could be transposed from one culture to another without loss of power or meaning. Patrick Heron expressed such an outlook in 1955 when he wrote: ‘The palpable forms, the actual rhythms, the precise manipulations of space—these are the prime realities, the determining factors, the definite features which cause an art to be great or trivial. Even the horror of a stone bowl made for containing twitching human remains, fresh-torn from sacrificial victims, is in a curious way neutralized if the thing is “beautiful”: that is, if it transmits a vital rhythm.’ ( Heron was referring to a Maya ‘Chacmool’ figure, holding an offering bowl, that had inspired Henry Moore.)

Such visual ‘appropriation’ of the culture of ‘primitive’ peoples has sometimes been interpreted as a kind of exploitation, akin to the exploitation or native labour or resources by colonial powers. However, there is evidence that certain modern artists approached primitive art in a spirit that was far from cynical or opportunist. For example, the American art historian Patricia Leighten has argued that there was a close link between Picasso's use of African masks as source material and contemporary anarchist protests against imperialism (‘The White Peril and l'art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism', Art Bulletin, vol. lxxii (1990), pp. 609–30). Similarly, 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 the French colonies. See also NEO-PRIMITIVISM.

primitivism and the cult of ‘the noble savage’ have been closely associated with the 18th cent., though in some aspects they are descended from the classical concept of the Golden Age, and preceded by individual works like Behn's Oroonoko. Primitivism took the form of a revolt against luxury (see Goldsmith's The Deserted Village), against sophistication (see Colman's Inkle and Yarico, Cumberland's The West Indian, Mrs Inchbald's The Child of Nature, Bage's Hermsprong, all works which stress the superiority of a simple education), and, in terms of critical theory, against neo-classicism. (See Hurd; Gray, T.)

Primitivism proposed a belief in man's natural goodness, and in the inevitable corruptions of civilization. Interest in the educational and philosophic theories of Rousseau was accompanied by great enthusiasm for travel writings and for real-life South Sea Islanders, Eskimos, Lapplanders, Negroes, etc. There was also much curiosity about the phenomenon of the ‘wild child’ which found recent versions in Kipling's Mowgli, E. R. Burroughs's Tarzan, and Truffaut's film L'Enfant sauvage. Home-grown primitives were also in demand, and ‘peasant’ poets such as Duck and Yearsley were taken up by eager patrons: the notorious fake primitives Macpherson and Chatterton enjoyed a considerable vogue. They in turn were stimulated by the scholarly researches of Percy and Ritson, who revived an interest in early English poetry. One of the most important figures in the movement was Gray, whose poems The Bard and The Progress of Poesy reflect his own interest in and feelings for the non-classical past. It was in the cause of liberty that writers such as Cowper and T. Day defended the Noble Savage and attacked the slave trade.

The ideas embodied in primitivism were in many ways continued in the Romantic movement, with its stress on nature, freedom (both political and artistic), and the natural man. In recent years writers like Said have taken exception to the Eurocentric implications of the concept of primitivism, and the subject has been redefined in the context of post-colonial studies. See also slavery, the literature of.

primitivism in art, the style of works of self-trained artists who develop their talents in a fanciful and fresh manner, as in the paintings of Henri Rousseau and Grandma Moses . The term primitive has also been used to describe the style of early American naive painters such as Edward Hicks and has been applied to the art of the various Italian and Netherlandish schools produced prior to c.1450. More recently the term has included modern artists who research the past as well as cultures foreign to their own, such as Robert Smithson and Joseph Beuys .

Bibliography: See W. Rubin, ed., Primitivism in 20th-Century Art (1988).

primitivism Russian form of expressionism. It developed between c.1905 and c.1920, and was influenced by Russian folk art, fauvism, and cubism. It was characterized by simplified forms and powerful colour, used principally to depict scenes from working-class life. Malevich worked in the style early in his career; other exponents were Larionov and Gontcharova.

prim·i·tiv·ism / ˈprimətivˌizəm/ • n. 1. a belief in the value of what is simple and unsophisticated, expressed as a philosophy of life or through art or literature. 2. unsophisticated behavior that is unaffected by objective reasoning. DERIVATIVES: prim·i·tiv·ist n. & adj.