ARTH 389 Issues in Ethnocultural Art Histories: Reconsidering Primitivism in Modern Art

• Fridays, 12:15-14:45
• EV-1-615
• Instructor: Dr. Marco Deyasi

For much of the Twentieth Century, artistic primitivism was central to the definition and history of modernism in art. Everyone has heard of Picasso and his passion for African sculpture, exemplified both in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the famous story he later told about visiting an ethnographic museum where he was transfixed by African art. For decades, Picasso was merely the most well-known and successful among the many artists who adopted primitivism as an aesthetic strategy. By the 1910s and ’20s, artistic primitivism was the key method by which artists sought to transform both Euro-American art and culture. As Patricia Leighten characterized it: “These artists were of and against this world.” We will explore, in a closely-historicized way, what artists and critics understood primitivism to be, why it was necessary, what possibilities it held, and what its intellectual contours and limitations were.

We will begin with a consideration of earlier forms of exoticism or proto-primitivism from before 1907. Readings will focus on diverse contemporary sources to trace the development and changes in artistic discourse in parallel with a close visual examination of art works. Among the artists and issues we will examine will be: Symbolism, Gauguin and Van Gogh, the Nabis, Cubism, Picasso, Fauvism, Matisse and Vlaminck, Die Brücke and Der Blauer Reiter, Carl Einstein, Max Pechstein, how the meanings of African art changed between Africa and Euro-America, the revolutionary cultural politics of primitivism and anti-classicism, the importance of cultural exchange for the revival and transformation of Euro-American culture, how the appreciation of African sculpture is tied to modernist aesthetics, the connections between art collecting, colonialism and the human sciences (anthropology, ethnography, sociology, etc), and the problematic canonization of “classic” African art (dark, polished wood).

The later portion of the course will examine the more recent scholarly discourse around primitivism, beginning with the 1980s and 1990s when the field of art history began to interrogate the problematic cultural assumptions that underlay it; this was part of a larger intellectual shift of attention towards issues of gender, race, and class. The goal in this later section is to reflect on both primitivism and the polemical arguments against it by a more recent generation of critics and scholars in order to develop a useful and nuanced understanding informed by insights from postcolonial theory and critical race studies.