Primitivism
Started: 1890
Ended: c.1945
KEY ARTISTS
 | Paul Gauguin Quick View  Artist Page |
| Paul Gauguin |  |
| Paul Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist artist who employed color fields and painterly strokes in his work. He is best known for his primitivist depictions of native life in Tahiti and Polynesia. Art Story: Paul Gauguin Artist Page | ||
 | Pablo Picasso Quick View Artist Page |
| Pablo Picasso | |
| Picasso dominated European painting in the first half of the last century, and remains perhaps the century's most important, prolifically inventive, and versatile artist. Alongside Georges Braque, he pioneered Cubism. He also made significant contributions to Surrealist painting and media such as collage, welded sculpture, and ceramics. Art Story: Pablo Picasso Artist Page | ||
 | Henri Matisse Quick View Artist Page |
| Henri Matisse | |
| Henri Matisse was a French painter and sculptor who helped forge modern art. From his early Fauvist works to his late cutouts, he emphasized expansive fields of color, the expressive potential of gesture, and the sensuality inherent in art-making. Art Story: Henri Matisse Artist Page | ||
 | Constantin Brâncuși Quick View Artist Page |
| Constantin Brâncuși | |
| Constantin Brâncuși, a Romanian artist working in Paris, was one of the founders of modern sculpture. His abstracted animals, portrait busts, and totem-like figures revolutionized the traditional relationship between the sculpture and its base. Art Story: Constantin Brâncuși Artist Page | ||
 | Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Quick View Artist Page |
| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner | |
| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the driving forces in the Die Brücke group that flourished in Dresden and Berlin before WWI, and one of the most talented and influential of the Expressionists. Art Story: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Artist Page | ||
 | Jean Dubuffet Quick View Artist Page |
| Jean Dubuffet | |
| Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor, and arguably one of the most famous French artists of the mid-to-late-twentieth century. Dubuffet's paintings employed the impasto technique, in which oil paints were thickened by materials such as sand, tar and straw. He coined the term "Art Brut," otherwise known as "raw art." Art Story: Jean Dubuffet Artist Page | ||
"Primitive sculpture has never been surpassed."
Summary of Primitivism
A complex and, at times, contradictory tendency, "Primitivism" ushered in a new way of looking at and appropriating the forms of so-called "primitive" art and played a large role in radically changing the direction of European and American painting at the turn of the 20th century. Primitivism was not so much an artistic movement but a trend among diverse modern artists in many countries who were looking to the past and to distant cultures for new artistic sources in the face of increasing industrialization and urbanization. Beginning at the end of the 19th century, the influx of tribal arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native Americans into Europe offered artists a new visual vocabulary to explore. In many ways, Primitivism provided artists a way to critique the stagnant traditions of European painting. Primitive art's use of simpler shapes and more abstract figures differed significantly from traditional European styles of representation, and modern artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse used these forms to revolutionize painting and sculpture.
While on its face, Primitivism was an attempt to embrace and raise the status of tribal arts, it was itself an inherently Eurocentric enterprise and, in many cases, was biased against the very arts it appropriated. Throughout the later 20th century and into the 21st, artists and scholars have attempted to historically contextualize Primitivism and expose its shortcomings as a framework for understanding art from non-European cultures.
Key Ideas
Beginnings:
The term "primitive" derives from the Latin, meaning "the first or earliest of its kind." Travelers to the South Seas and Africa brought back tales of new cultures that little resembled what Europeans knew or valued. Europeans admired these new cultures for their exoticism but also looked down upon them, understanding them to be essentially "uncivilized" in their manners and customs. As art historians Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten point out, the label "primitive" does not exist without the idea of the "civilized." The two terms are necessarily relational and create an ideological construct that renders what is primitive lacking in sophistication, but the interest in the primitive also pointed to a nostalgic tendency to prioritize a pre-industrial past in which one's relation to nature was primary.
Important Art and Artists of Primitivism | |
  | Vision After the Sermon (1888)Artist: Paul Gauguin Artwork description & Analysis: 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. Oil on canvas - National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh |
 | Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)Artist: Pablo Picasso Artwork description & Analysis: 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. Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York |
 | Bathers in a Room (1909, repainted 1920)Artist: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Artwork description & Analysis: 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. Oil on canvas - Saarland-Museum, Saarbrücken, Germany |
More Primitivism Artwork and Analysis:
![Constantin Brancusi: Little French Girl (The First Step [III]) (c.1914-18)](/images20/pnt/pnt_primitivism_4.jpg?1)
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Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 28 Jun 2018. Updated and modified regularly. 
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