In the arts of the Western world, Primitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealization that means to recreate the experience of the primitive time, place, and person, either by emulation or by re-creation. In Western philosophy, Primitivism proposes that the people of a primitive society possess a morality and an ethics that are superior to the urban value system of civilized people.
In European art, the aesthetics of primitivism included techniques, motifs, and styles copied from the arts of Asian, African, and Australasian peoples perceived as primitive in relation to the urban civilization of Western Europe. In that light, the painter Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian imagery to his oil paintings was a characteristic borrowing of technique, motif, and style that was important for the development of Modern art (1860s–1970s) in the late 19th century.Atkins, Robert. Artspoke (1993) As a genre of Western art, Primitivism reproduced and perpetuated racist stereotypes, such as the "noble savage", with which colonialists justified white colonial rule over the non-white other in Asia, Africa, and Australasia.See: Marianna Torgovnick. Gone primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Ben Etherington, Literary Primitivism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
Moreover, the term primitivism also identifies the techniques, motifs, and styles of painting that predominated representational painting before the emergence of the Avant-garde; and also identifies the styles of naïve art and of folk art produced by amateur artists, such as Henri Rousseau, who painted for personal pleasure.
Philosophy Primitivism is a utopian style of art that means to represent the physical world of Nature and humanity's original state of nature with two styles: (i) chronological primitivism and (ii) cultural primitivism.Lovejoy, A. O. and Boas, George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935). In Europe, chronological primitivism proposes the moral superiority of a primitive way of life represented by the myth of a golden age of pre-societal harmony with Nature, as depicted in the Pastoral genres of European representational art and poetry.
Notable examples of European cultural primitivism are the music of Igor Stravinsky, the Tahitian paintings of Paul Gauguin, and the African period artworks of Pablo Picasso. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913) is primitivist program music about the subject of Paganism, specifically the rite of human sacrifice in pre-Christian Russia. Foregoing the aesthetic and technical restraints of Western musical composition, in The Rite of Spring the composer employs harsh consonance and dissonance and loud, repetitive rhythms as a mode of Dionysian spontaneity in musical modernism. The critic Malcolm Cook said that "with its folk-music motifs and the infamous 1913 Paris riot securing its avant-garde credentials, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring engaged in Primitivism in both form and practice" while remaining within the technical praxes of Western classical music. The primitivism movement is not just limited 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, as much of the musicological discourse in classical music often assumes certain musical gestures inherently signify primitivism or blends primitivism into the broader concept of musical exoticism. In contrast, Corroboree highlights representational primitivism by linking the ballet's prominent musical elements to historical ideas from the 18th to 20th centuries about the earliest phases of human musical evolution.
17th century During the Age of Enlightenment, intellectuals rhetorically used the idealization of indigenous peoples as political criticism of European culture;Pagden, Anthony. "The Savage Critic: Some European Images of the Primitive", The Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), 32–45. however, as part of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, the Italian intellectual Giambattista Vico said that the lives of primitive non-Europeans were more attuned to Nature's aesthetic inspirations for poetry than the arts of civilized, modern man. From that perspective, Vico compared the artistic merits of the epic poetry of Homer and of the Bible against the modern literature written in vernacular language.
18th century In the Prolegomena to Homer (1795), the scholar Friedrich August Wolf identified the language of Homer's poetry and the language of The Bible as examples of folk art communicated and transmitted by oral tradition. Later, the ideas of Vico and Wolf were developed at the beginning of the 19th century by Johann Gottfried Herder;Berlin, Isaiah. Vico and Herder (New York: Viking, 1976) p. 000. nevertheless, although influential in literature, the ideas of Vico and Wolf slightly influenced the visual arts.Rubin, William, "Modernist Primitivism, 1984," p. 320, in Primitivism: Twentieth Century Art, A Documentary History, Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch, editors.
19th century The emergence of historicism — judging and evaluating different eras according to their historical context and criteria — resulted in new schools of visual art dedicated to historical fidelity of setting and costume, such as the art of Neoclassicism and the Romantic art of the Nazarene movement in Germany who were inspired by the primitive school of Italian devotional paintings, i.e. before Raphael and the discovery of oil painting.
Whereas academic painting (after Raphael) used dark glazes, idealized forms, and suppression of detail, the artists of the Nazarene movement used clear outlines, bright colors, and much detail. The artistic styles of the Nazarene movement were similar to the artistic styles of the Pre-Raphaelites, who were inspired by the critical writings of John Ruskin, who admired the painters before Raphael (e.g. Sandro Botticelli) and recommended that artists paint outdoors.
In the mid-19th century, the photographic camera and non-Euclidean geometry changed the visual arts; photography impelled the development of artistic Realism and non-Euclidean geometry voided the mathematic absolutes of Euclidean geometry, and so challenged the conventional perspective of Renaissance art by suggesting the existence of multiple worlds in which things are different from the human world.Dalrymple Henderson, Linda, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, 19810) p. 000.
Modernist Primitivism
The three-hundred-year Age of Discovery (15th c.–17th c.) exposed western European explorers to the peoples and cultures of Asia and the Americas, of Africa and Australasia, but the explorers' perspective of cultural difference led to colonialism.Diamond, S. In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1974), pp. 215–217. During the Age of Enlightenment, the explorers' encounters with the non-European Other provoked philosophers to question the Mediaeval assumptions about the fixed nature Man, of society, and of Nature, doubted the social-class organization of society and the mental, moral, and intellectual strictures of Christianity, by comparing the civilization of Europe against the way of life of the uncivilized natural man living in harmony with Nature.
In the 18th century, Western artists and intellectuals participated in "the conscious search in history for a more deeply expressive, permanent human nature and cultural structure in contrast to the nascent modern realities", by studying the cultures of the primitive peoples encountered by explorers.Diamond 1974, p. 215. The spoils of European colonialism included the works of art of the colonized natives, which featured primitive styles of expression and execution, especially the absence of linear perspective, a simple outline, the presence of hieroglyphs, distortions of the figure, and the meaning communicated with repeated patterns of ornamentation.Goldwater, Robert, Primitivism in Modern Art, Revised Edition (New York: Vintage, 1967) p. 0000. The African and Australasian cultures provided artists an answer to their "white, Western, and preponderantly male quest" for the ideal of the primitive, "whose very condition of desirability resides in some form of distance and difference."See Solomon-Godeau 1986, p. 314.
Paul Gauguin The painter Paul Gauguin departed urban Europe to reside in the French colony of Tahiti, where he adopted a primitive style of life much unlike the way of life in urban France. Gauguin's search for the primitive was a search for sexual freedom from the Christian constrictions of private life, evident in the paintings Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), Parau na te Varua ino (1892), and Anna the Javanerin (1893), Te Tamari No Atua (1896) and Cruel Tales (1902).
Gauguin's European perspective of Tahiti as a sexual utopia free of the religious sexual prohibitions is in line with the perspective of pastoral art, which idealizes rural life as better than city life. The similarities between Pastoralism and Primitivism are evident in the paintings Tahitian Pastoral (1892) and Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898).About the painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898), the art historian George T.M. Shackelford said: "Although, [Gauguin] downplayed the painting's relationship to the murals of Puvis, on the grounds of procedure and intention, in formal terms he cannot have hoped that his figured landscape — for all its apparent rejection of classical formulas and execution — could escape comparison with the timeless groves that Puvis had popularized in murals for the museums in Lyon and Rouen, as well as the great hemicycle of the Sorbonne."
The artist Gauguin said that his paintings celebrated Tahitian society, and that he was defending Tahiti against French colonialism; nonetheless, from the postcolonial perspective of the 20th century, feminist art critics said that Gauguin's taking adolescent mistresses voids his claim of being an anti-colonialist.Solomon-Godeau 1986, p.324. As a European man, his sexual freedom derived from the male gaze of the colonist, because Gauguin's artistic primitivism is part of the "dense interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power, both colonial and patriarchal", which French colonialists invented about Tahiti and the Tahitians;Solomon-Godeau 1986, p.315. European fantasies invented in "effort to essentialize notions of primitiveness", by Othering non-European peoples into colonial subordinates.
Fauves and Pablo Picasso
In 1905–1906 period, a group of artists studied the arts from Sub-Saharan Africa and from Oceania, because of the popularity of the Gauguin paintings of Tahiti and the Tahitians. Two posthumous, retrospective exhibitions of Gauguin's works of art in Paris, one at the Salon d'Automne in 1903, and the other in 1906, influenced fauve movement artists such as Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain and Henri Matisse, but also Pablo Picasso. In particular, Picasso studied Iberian sculpture, African sculpture, and African traditional masks, and historical works such as the Mannerist paintings of El Greco, from which aesthetic study Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and invented Cubism.Cooper, 24
Anti-colonial primitivism