Following the trajectory of modernist primitivism from Gauguins journeys to Picassos museum explorations, what can be said about

the changing approach of modernist artists and intellectuals to non-European material culture in the years between 1890 and 1920? Rather than a specic movement or group of artists, Primitivism was a trend that spanned a period from the late 1880s to the Great War. It is, as Dana Arnold asserts, a notion crucial to 20th-century art and modern thinking 1, the profound effects of which are hard to overestimate. The artists who followed this trend responded to tribal arts distortions of form, bold patterns and contrasting colours...experimented with its simple shapes and outlines, symbolic codes, distortions and patterns...excluded details, realism, linear perspective and natural colours and created abstract works.2 In this way, they rejected accepted traditions of bourgeois morality and its art, believing the art of the cultures of Oceania, Africa and Australasia to be more moral, sincere and instinctive. In this essay, I will endeavour to analyse the specic effects that nonEuropean art had on Gauguin and Picassos work, and the signicance of the Primitivist trend on future artists and movements. I will also touch upon the problems associated with appropriating or drawing inuence from the art of non-Western cultures, and discuss whether non-Western art is still marginalised today. In the Oxford Companion to Art, Harold Osborne recounts how towards the end of the 19th century, it became fashionable to apply the term primitive to peoples outside the direct inuences of the great centres of civilisation on the mistaken evolutionist assumption that their life patterns represented cultural phases through which the great civilisations had progressed.3 It was exactly this evolutionist attitude that artists like Gauguin and Picasso (amongst others) wanted to challenge - and in Gauguins case, escape. The rapid expansions of both the British and French empires in the late 1800s had brought back and exposed the exotic, primitive culture of the colonies to many artists - as well as the general public - through means of exhibitions and creation of many ethnographical museums. These new art forms were a vital catalyst that made artists rethink their relationship to the world4 and, as Dana Arnold asserts: we can compare it to the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance. 5 Although this is quite a bold claim, there is no doubt that the artefacts exhibited in Paris and other European centres at the time stirred the Noble Savage inside many an artist. This having been said, the concept of the Noble Savage was not new. It stems from the thinkers of the Enlightenment more than a century before, and its ultimate source is the age-old tradition of an earthly paradise where Man

1 2 3 4 5

Dana Arnold. Art History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 2004. p. 50 Stephen Farthing. Art: The Whole Story. London. 2010. p. 343 Harold Osborne. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1979. p. 924 Dana Arnold. Art History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 2004. p. 50 Ibid.

had lived - and might perhaps live again - in a state of nature and innocence.6 This natural and innocent state is what Gauguin went in search for in Tahiti, and what Picasso was inspired by upon discovering African masks; and what all followers of the Modernist Primitivism trend wanted to recreate and invoke in their art. Paul Gauguin was one of the rst artists to nd visual inspiration in the arts of ancient, nonWestern societies; escaping what he felt as the connes of bourgeois Paris and voyaging to Tahiti in 1891. His experiences in Tahiti were recorded in a manuscript entitled Noa Noa7, which was later published. They describe a society untouched by the lthy hands of industry, its focus not on money and power, but on family and happiness, and their culture strongly rooted in ancient folklore and superstition. In it, Gauguin writes: I have escaped everything that is articial and conventional. Here I enter into Truth, become one with nature. After the disease of civilisation life in this new world is a return to health. 8 Seeing himself as both the subjugated savage and the dominating conquerer9, Gauguin journeyed to Tahiti as a sort of missionary in reverse, to learn from the natives instead of teaching them 10. Stephen Farthing describes how he studied the methods of local craftsmen [and] tried to make his own art more primitive, exotic, instinctive and closer to what he saw as the natural and moral purity of the indigenous people around him.11 Consequently, the art he produced in his time in Tahiti was more pure, with less artice and technical complexity, than his works produced in France. The images of Tahiti really do represent a life in Technicolor, with bright, resonant colours; something we can see in his painting of 1892, Arearea (see Fig. 1.). Exhibited in Paris in 1893 (what would be Gauguins last time in France), the painting simplies volume in its use of at planes of colour, and evokes an atmosphere of exoticism with its primitive intensity of colour and mix of dream and reality. 12 Indeed, the scene in the background is not real; it depicts several women worshipping an oversized Maori statue - a sacred rite that Gauguin has fabricated to enhance the spiritual meanings of the painting. The sky is absent, replaced by an eerie black, and the river between the two women in the foreground and the imaginary ritual runs red. The woman closest to us lifts one eyebrow; her expression challenging us to interpret this enchanted world...where man lives under the protection of the gods, in a
6 7 8 9

H. W. Janson. A History of Art. London. 1974. p. 508 Paul Gauguin & Charles Morris, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 1901. Ibid, found in: Harold Osborne. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1979. p. 462.

James F. Knapp. Primitivism and Empire: John Synge and Paul Gauguin. Comparative Literature. Vol. 41, No. 1. 1989. p. 57
10 11 12

H. W. Janson. A History of Art. London. 1974. p. 508 Stephen Farthing. Art: The Whole Story. London. 2010. p. 343 ibid.

luxuriant natural environment, in an archaic, idealised Polynesia.13 Gauguin frees colour from its primary representational function, therefore suggesting mental images and ideas rather than visual ones. Remarking on the primitive aspect of his work in Noa Noa, Gauguin writes: Primitive art comes from the spirit and makes use of nature. So-called rened art proceeds from sensuality and serves nature. Nature is the servant of the former and the mistress of the latter.14 Gauguin died in Tahiti in 1903, but the works he produced there would become not only his most famous and highly-regarded, but would also ignite the primitivist res of artists such as Henri Rousseau, Picasso and Matisse in the years following his death. Indeed, many art historians attribute Gauguin as the father of Modernism. In her essay regarding the Picasso and Africa exhibition held in Johannesburg in 2006, Julie McGee proposes that classical African art and modernism have been intertwined in a more confusing way than perhaps any other entities in art history.15 Issues to do with slavery, colonial exploitation and discrimination of Africa and its peoples have contributed to this - and in many ways still do. At the beginnings of the 20th century - when Picasso was living and working in Paris - the dark continent captured the imaginations of artists and writers working in an anarchist vein as a result of scandals and ery debates over French colonial policy in Africa. 16 These highly publicised 1905-6 debates revealed the disgusting, systematic destruction of tribal life in the interests of exploitation and of white atrocities, which caused an international outcry. 17 It was this colonial exploitation that really brought African art into the domain of French culture, but it was because of the exploitation that the modernists embraced a particularly romanticised view of African culture; considering Africa as the embodiment of humankind in a pre-civilised state, preferring to mystify rather than to examine its presumed idol-worship and violent rituals. 18 19 This treatment of African art, however anarchist it was at the time, now appears no less stereotypical than the racist caricatures it opposed. This having been said, Picassos reaction to the African art he saw at the Muse dEthnographie du Trocadero (now the Muse de lHomme) profoundly inuenced his art; most famously his Demoiselles dAvignon (see Fig. 2). The painting depicts ve prostitutes in a brothel, painting in a highly confrontational manner, their gures and faces disjointed and disgured - not at all like Manets curvaceous and feminine Olympia of 1853.
Muse dOrsay. 2006. Arearea - Joyousness. [online] Available at: http://www.musee-orsay.fr. [Accessed 27th March 2011].
13 14

Paul Gauguin & Charles Morris, Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 1901. Found in: Harold Osborne. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1979. p. 462.
15

Julie McGee. Primitivism on Trial: The Picasso and Africa Exhibition in South Africa. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. No. 52. 2007. p. 161
16

Patricia Leighten. The White Peril and LArt ngre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism. The Art Bulletin. Vol. 72, No. 4. p. 610
17 18 19

ibid. ibid.

Simon Gikandi furthers this in his article on Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference (found in: Modernism/ modernity 10. No. 3. 2003. p. 476) when he remarks how Picasso loved the idea of the primitive and the tribal but his relationship with the culture and the peoples of Africa...was more ambiguous.

The faces of the central two gures gaze out at us head-on; their features resembling those found in Iberian sculpture of pre-Roman Spain. The faces of the surrounding women are reminiscent of African sculpture and masks. The inuence of Iberian sculpture has been since conrmed by Picasso, yet the inuence of African art on his Demoiselles was famously dismissed by the artist (LArt ngre? Connais pas! 20) 21 Nevertheless, the faces of the Demoiselles announce Picassos origins and interests outside (and against) the French classical tradition; abandoning perspective and rendering everything in a at, two-dimensional world. With Les Demoiselles, Picasso is not only insinuating that the viewer is the next customer in this brothel of ghouls, but by incorporating recognisable African artistic features into the faces of the women, he also places the viewer in the position of dominating white male; the prostitutes his slaves. The power and savagery of the painting is obvious, yet there is a raw beauty about the painting - much like the Tahitian paintings of Gauguin. Indeed, Gauguins posthumous retrospective exhibitions in Paris in 1903 (and a larger one in 1906) would have likely had a powerful effect on the young Picassos work. Les Demoiselles is regarded today as not only one of Picassos seminal works, but the rst masterpiece of the 20th century. The issues it tackles and its primitive inuences inspired movements such as Cubism, and challenged the way non-Western art was used and regarded. In these artists we have seen that the preference for primitive cultures was as much an act of social criticism as a search for a new art. However, one would be wrong in presuming that the trend of primitivism was conned to painting; the theme of the Noble Savage rippled through music, literature, poetry and sculpture. Since these artists were active, it has become evident that the term primitive to describe non-Western cultures was inappropriate, as these cultures were not necessarily in either a formative or degenerate stage but had achieved maturity within a system of social organisation and technology different to western European civilisation... 22 (an admission that sadly did not surface until the second half of the 20th century). This revelation has encouraged criticism of the artists involved in the Modernist Primitivism trend, claiming that their work was not a signicant critique of the oppressions of modern industrial society 23 and was just one more example of Western colonial appropriation. 24 Personally, I think that the work of artists who followed the Modernist Primitivism outlook must be judged according to the specic historical circumstances they were practising within. It is very easy to criticise these artists today, when we a highly developed sense of political correctness25 and awareness of racial issues, but I think it is important to remember that, at the turn of the 20th century, these artists were
20

Pablo Picasso. Found in: Stephen Bevan. 2006. Picasso stole the work of African artists. The Telegraph. [online] Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk. [Accessed March 30 2011] However, Picasso later gave an account of his visits to the Muse dEthnographie to Andr Malraux (published in his book Picassos Mask, Paris, 1974), who quoted the artist: Les Demoiselles dAvignon must have come to me that very day Art historians now believe it more than likely that Picasso was inuenced by the African masks he saw. There also exists a photo from 1908 which shows Picasso surrounded by African masks in his studio.
21 22 23

Harold Osborne. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1979. p. 942

James F. Knapp. Primitivism and Empire: John Synge and Paul Gauguin. Comparative Literature. Vol. 41, No. 1. 1989. p. 58
24 25

Dana Arnold. Art History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 2004. p. 51

In his essay Primitivism and the Modern (boundary 2, Vol. 15, No. 1/2. 1986.), James F. Knapp remarks that the quotation marks we now apply to the term primitivism separate it from its customary associations while at the same time nudging it (or so it seems) in the direction of irony and doubt, and thereby alerting us to the possible shift in historical perspective...their purpose, to be blunt, is political.

highlighting these issues; appealing to a stereotyping audience in stereotypes that they knew and related to. In a sense, these artists were holding up ugly masks to even uglier people. To conclude with a quotation by Oscar Wilde: Man is at least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth. 26

26

Oscar Wilde. Found in: Patricia Leighten. The White Peril and LArt ngre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism. The Art Bulletin. Vol. 72, No. 4. p. 609

Fig. 1.

Paul Gauguin. Arearea. 1892. [oil on canvas] Paris: Muse dOrsay.

Fig. 2.

Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles dAvignon. 1907. [oil on canvas]

Bibliography Arnold, Dana. Art History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 2004. Farthing, Stephen. Art: The Whole Story. London. 2010. Gauguin, Paul & Morris, Charles. Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin, 1901. Gikandi, Simon. Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference. Modernism/modernity 10. No. 3. 2003. Janson, H. W. A History of Art. London. 1974. Knapp, James F. Primitivism and Empire: John Synge and Paul Gauguin. Comparative Literature. Vol. 41, No. 1. 1989. Knapp, James F. Primitivism and the Modern. boundary 2. Vol. 15, No. 1/2. 1986. Leighten, Patricia. The White Peril and LArt ngre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism. The Art Bulletin. Vol. 72, No. 4. Malraux, Andr. Picassos Mask. Paris. 1974. McGee, Julie. Primitivism on Trial: The Picasso and Africa Exhibition in South Africa. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. No. 52. 2007. Osborne, Harold. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1979.

Internet Sources Bevan, Stephen. 2006. Picasso stole the work of African artists. The Telegraph. [online] Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk. [Accessed March 30 2011] Muse dOrsay. 2006. Arearea - Joyousness. [online] Available at: http://www.musee-orsay.fr. [Accessed 27th March 2011].