Primitivism and twentieth-century art: A documentary history

Ed. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch
2003, Berkeley:University of California Press
Cloth $65.00. Illus. b/w. 491 pp.

ISBN 0-520-21278-9

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
 
pepperell@ntlword.com

After one hundred years of cultural assimilation, not to say exploitation and misappropriation, it is surprising that so-called 'primitive' art can still move us and, to some extent, shock us. Certainly it is difficult now to image a time when artefacts from the African, Oceanic and Native American traditions were regarded merely as the products of stunted evolutionary development, and consequently dismissed as child-like, ugly, crude or barbaric. Although we now understand more about the diversity and complexity of such objects, and that of the cultures that produced them, this only enhances rather than diminishes their uncanny effect, especially when met in the flesh.

As is evidenced in Primitivism and twentieth century art, there were broadly two kinds of response to the objects that French colonial merchants brought back to Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Matisse's was almost purely formalistic; he talked about the "relations between volumes"and the "sculptural language"of the African objects he claims to have been the first to bring to the attention of the "group of advanced painters", including Derain (p. 31). Picasso's response, on the other hand, was almost entirely superstitious. Speaking of his infamous visit to the Trocadéro Museum in 1907, which included a disorganised display of traditional objects, he later said: "The Negroes' sculptures were intercessors . . . They were weapons. To help people being dominated by spirits, to become independent."(p. 33). And although Picasso was to exploit the formal possibilities of African sculpture to a much greater extent than Matisse, one gets the sense he did so in order to acquire for himself some of the potent energy he had experienced in the presence of the "masks, the red Indian dolls, and the dusty mannequins".

Given the central importance that the 'primitive' arts (the deficiencies of the term are acknowledged early on by the editors) occupy in the development of western art, it seems this volume of primary sources, many translated for reprinted for the first time, will be an essential reference for art historians students of art and cultural theorists. It contains some seventy or so extracts and essays from artists, critics, curators and collectors arranged chronologically and reaching almost to the present day. As well as many illustrations there is a coda section containing brief quotes on the subject of primitivism from artists and writers, a chronology of key events and a selected bibliography.