Primitivism

views updated

PRIMITIVISM

During the first decade of the twentieth century, primitivism became a cultural rage in Europe and influenced much of the avant-garde cultural production in the following decades. Its genealogy goes back to the concept of the "noble savage," which saw its first heyday during the eighteenth century when modernity and its antithesis evolved simultaneously. The concept of primitivism evokes the notion of the inferior primitive and savage, conveying both a sense of simplicity analogous to primitive lifestyle and technology as well as a life based on instincts, irrationality, and violence. But primitivism as a cultural construct conjures also the opposite: a belief in the superiority of the trouble-free and enviable primitive existence, a polar opposite to that under the corruption of modernity. It is this latter belief in the life of the "noble savage" that has made primitivism a mainstream worldview in art and literature since the beginning of the twentieth century.

This belief in humanity's natural goodness—evident in the contrast between a simple natural life and the deprivation of civilization—coexisted perilously close to the notion of the primitive and the savage as inferior. The romantic images of the Pacific islanders were coterminus with popular images of cannibals; Romanticism and racism both took the savage as their ultimate subject matter. Cannibalism and human sacrifice were common in European depiction of the native savage at least since the Renaissance and they would remain part of the mythologies of the savage. Historically, images of savages were also invoked closer to home; first represented by the peasants and later among the urban poor ("the nomadic races") who endured the expansion of the Industrial Revolution. Primitives was a closely related term, though during the nineteenth century it referred in art to Italian and northern schools (to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Flemish primitives) who were viewed as the infancy of modernity, and alternatively the term was used to describe antiquity in the sense of the early primitive Christian Church. The terms primitive and savage became more interchangeable early in the twentieth century.

The European search for the exotic led continuously during the nineteenth century to expanding explorations. Although not geographically linear, the orient, India, and China provided successive aesthetic foci for the alien and the exotic. Familiarity necessitated change and a continuous journeying—real and imaginary—that led to the prominence of Japonisme as a fashion in the last third of the nineteenth century. But when the influence of Japan became too pervasive (James Abbott McNeill Whistler [1834–1903], Edgar Degas [1834–1917], Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec [1864–1901], and Paul Gauguin [1848–1903] were just a few of the most prominent artists who depicted Japanese motifs), further explorations became necessary. The relatively rapid commodification of Japonisme induced the sophisticated explorer as well as the emerging avant-garde artists to shift their endeavor to discover a new source of primeval inspiration farther afield. This led to the South Seas and Africa. It was during the highest stage of imperialism

late in the century that the duality of the primitive and the savage reached a crescendo enabling both the repression of non-Europeans, primarily in Africa, while employing the same images to liberate the imperialist agents and mind from the constraints of Victorian civilization.

Although primitivism evokes an appearance of reality that is mostly projected on societies in the Pacific and Africa, it does not refer to any external specific empirical phenomena but is rather a western constructed perception of the "other" representing an artistic creative movement. Primitivism, as a perpetual search for the exotic, never conveyed a particular style or aesthetic preference, nor a preference for the simple and peaceful or the savage and violent. Styles and subjects intertwined, and were best characterized by their opposition to modernity. This search for the exotic was closely related to imperialism and anthropology. Neither explicitly embraced primitivism, but each dominated and changed in distinct ways the world it considered primitive.

Beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century, the primitivist exchange intensified and expanded to include objects, people, and ideas. Europe was importing exotic objects—artifacts sent from military and scientific expeditions, travel engravings and photographs—and exporting colonial agents—including missionaries, explorers, and anthropologists—and providing an imaginary space into which the Victorian mind might escape. Three Europeans who illustrate this confusion of the seduction of imperialism entangled with racism and malice toward "the savage" were David Livingstone (1813–1873), Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), and Joseph Conrad (1857–1924). Livingstone, a missionary and an explorer who was seeking converts, desired an end to the slave trade, and hoped to penetrate Africa further than any previous European. He became a most popular national figure and perhaps the benevolent face of British imperialism. Distinctly more controversial was Burton, whose adventures, curiosity, racism, sexual proclivities, and even knowledge were mediated through engagement with the "other." An antecedent of the twentieth-century primitivists, Burton combined anthropology, science, religion, power, and sex to be everything the Victorians pretended they never were. His life, in hindsight, shows the extent of continuity between the Victorian period and modernism. This connection was even more pronounced in the work of Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness (1899) has become synonymous with the violence of imperialism. It is not insignificant that the book remained controversial, viewed by some as a classic foundational tale of the primitivist rejection of modernity, while others (most notably, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe) see it as the embodiment of European racism.

Much of the primitivist exchange took place in Europe itself, where most Europeans enjoyed the glamorous imperial domination through the various World Fairs that imported the world as a theme park, including "treasures," "artifacts," and flesh and blood "primitive" people and "villages." In addition to entertainment, the fairs provided justification for civilizing the globe out there, while providing raw material for exposing the contradictions of modernity. Social theorists pondered the limits of rationality (Max Weber [1864–1920]), solidarity (Emile Durkheim [1858–1917]), or how attractive primitive irrationality could be to a modern society (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl [1857–1939]). Anthropology projected a scientific discourse that postulated the polarized idea of "primitive" as a place of exoticism, eroticism, and virility.

It was in the shift from the social and political to the cultural and artistic that primitivism as we know it most contributed to modernism. If primitivism had an annus mirabilis, it must have been 1907, when Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which would prove to be a watershed in modern culture. Earlier artists, most famously Gauguin, eclectically combined "primitive" inspiration from medieval Europe to Polynesian Islands, as his images of the South Pacific fused conventions of French decadent art and colonialism. In Paris, beginning with the Fauves (the wild beasts), the best known of whom were André Derain (1880–1954) and Maurice Vlaminck (1876–1958), "wildness" became the rage. But it was Picasso's depiction of five naked prostitutes in a brothel, and the fusion of classical Greek influence with African masks, that most dramatically exhibited modernity as sexual savagery and launched "Cubism"—the epitome of the libertarian impulses of the European avant-garde ranging from sexual mores to form and content in art.

The Cubist African mask of modernism culminated the modernist revolution of beauty and art: primitive, simple, and even ugly became valorized high culture. The degree to which Gauguin, Picasso, and artists of their generation were influenced by anthropology and tribal art is significant to the dilemma of creativity and appropriation in modernism. While the issue will likely continue to be debated, there is no doubt that the exuberance of artistic primitivism led to a deeper scholarly interest in the subject. Primitives as the ultimate outsiders have always been represented by others in a distorted way. Often these misrepresentations are viewed as racist and exploitive. On other occasions, however, the depictions turn out to be inspiring and expansive, and to enrich human experiences. Primitivism as a component of modernism is precisely such an instance. Over time the "correctness" and "legitimacy" of these images have varied. While few will wish to argue that Burton's descriptions of Africa are acceptable in the twenty-first century, even fewer will contest Picasso's legitimacy to "distort" his subjects and to apply motives out of context.

Primitivism made it to center stage with the most evocative production of Igor Stravinsky's Rites of Spring (1913) staged by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with its star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The combination of irrational "primitive" harmonic dissonances and explicit sexuality sent even the Parisian audience into frenzy that verged on a riot. The commotion began at once, and the audience, though accustomed to all of the components—disharmony, sexuality, primitivism—was seemingly shocked by the combination. The anxiety of primitivism would be replaced by aestheticization later on in the century, but not before the real savagery was about to unfold the following year, as the violence of modern warfare engulfed the continent.