- Primitivism and Twentieth-Century ArtOur PickEdited by Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch / A Documentary History
- Primitivism in Modern ArtOur PickBy Robert John Goldwater
- Primitivism and related ideas in AntiquityBy Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas
- The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and AestheticsOur PickBy Frances S. Connelly
- In Search of the PrimitiveBy Stanley Diamond
Important Art and Artists of Primitivism
Vision After the Sermon (1888)
Gauguin presents the viewer with a visionary scene: women in white bonnets and dark dresses, some of whom have their eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer, stand with their backs to the viewer witnessing a scene from the Old Testament, Jacob wrestling with an angel. Gauguin sets the spiritual vision on a field of red to imply it is not happening in the physical world. The flattened space and simplified forms speak to the new visual language that Gauguin and other Symbolists were developing at the time.
Before Gauguin's infamous South Pacific travels and relocation to Tahiti to escape the suffocating norms of civilized, modern Paris, he and others found relief in Brittany, a rural area of Northwest France famed among artists for the local customs and rituals associated with peasant life. As art historian Gill Perry points out, Gauguin's primitivizing tendencies were well developed in the pictures he painted in Pont-Aven in the late 1880s. Gauguin wrote to a fellow artist about his stay in Brittany, "I love Brittany. I find something savage, primitive here. When my clogs echo on this granite earth, I hear the dull, muffled powerful note that I am seeking in my painting." While overlooking the technological developments and the prevalence of tourists in the area, Gauguin found a supposedly untouched civilization where the peasants, in Perry's words, were "uncorrupted by the sophistication and materialism of the modern world."
Gauguin associated the simplified and flattened forms of his composition with what he thought was the primitiveness of the Breton people. Such abstractions corresponded not to observable reality but an inner meaning that had parallels with the Bretons' religious practices as well as Symbolist aesthetics. Gauguin would use these newly found forms and abstractions to represent similar aspects of the Tahitian culture that he later encountered, famously depicting Polynesian girls and women in eroticized poses in abstracted landscapes and interiors.
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)
One of the most recognizable paintings of the 20th century, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon depicts five nude females in various poses. Four of the five women look out toward the viewer. Their bodies are angular and rather abstract, and three of them possess mask-like faces. While the setting is stylized, with hints of a curtain and a still life on a low table in the foreground, Picasso's numerous studies make it apparent that the women are in a brothel. In this groundbreaking pre-Cubist work, Picasso combines his studies of Primitive art, namely Iberian and African sculpture, with references to El Greco and Michelangelo to create a new synthesis that would have reverberations throughout the 20th century.
Much has been made of Picasso's appropriation of Primitive art. He already had an interest in the early art from the Iberian peninsula as well as Romanesque art, and around 1906, after a conversation with Henri Matisse and visits to the Trocadéro Museum, he began collecting African sculpture himself. In 1937, Picasso recalled an epiphany he had while visiting the Trocadéro in 1907. While he was put off by the smells and arrangement of the museum, Picasso remembered that when he saw the African sculptures and masks he realized, "The masks weren't like other kinds of sculpture. Not at all. They were magical things.. The Negroes' sculptures were intercessors.. Against everything; against unknown, threatening spirits.." Picasso borrowed the formal qualities of the African masks, such as ovoid shaped faces and angular and geometric facial features, but he also, according to art historian Jack Flam, took in the idea "that the process of making a work of art could be conceived as an integral part of its function." While Picasso was not well aware of the contexts and uses of these masks, he linked the ritualistic and magical properties he assumed they had to his own artistic process when he described Les Demoiselles as his "first canvas of exorcism." The exploration of Primitive art and the rethinking of the creative process set Picasso on the path to develop his analytic Cubist style in which form and space were integrated and Renaissance spatial illusionism was completely abandoned.
Bathers in a Room (1909, repainted 1920)
In this large-scale painting, Kirchner transposes the usual idyllic, outdoor site of traditional bathers into his studio, brightly colored and decorated with pseudo-Primitive artifacts and textiles. Tall, dark statues decorate the door jamb in the middle ground, and a boldly colored curtain separates two rooms on the left. In the roundels on the curtain, one can make out a seated king as well as an amorous couple. Kirchner was familiar with African and Oceanic sculptures he saw in the Dresden Anthropological-Ethnographical Museum. While the sculptures and curtain are vague and not specific, as art historian Gill Parry points out, the Primitive objects along with the garish colors, the distortions and angularity of the figures would have signaled a "direct" or "authentic" expression then associated with Primitive, or uncivilized, cultures.
In the 1906 Die Brücke manifesto, one reads, "With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together all youth. As youth, we carry the future in us and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement against the long-established older forces. We claim as our own everyone who reproduces that which drives him to creation with directness and authenticity." Die Brücke's embrace of the Primitive declared their opposition to bourgeois values and the rapidly industrializing landscape and indicated their mediation between so-called Primitive thought and modern thought and dreams.