Primitivism

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Primitivism

• Major themes and finding Information Resources

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Primitivism a warning

• Refers to a series of trends that influenced a
  wide range of artistic schools from 1880s onward
• Term challenged as Racist and Ethnocentric.
  Cultural appropriation decontextualises artifacts
• Not simply western art inspired by tribal art.
  Naïve art, Children's Art, Art of the Outsider.

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Pymalion and Galetea, Jean Leon Gerome 1882
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Attitudes to the Primitive in 19th early 20th
Century Culture

• Social Darwinism's Charles Darwin's Origin of
  Species
• Progress evolution from simple to complex
  Primitive peoples less civilized hardly human
  at all
• Encounter with the non-civilized other Colonies
  France, Germany, Russia

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Rebellion against Academic Art

• Academie des beux arts
• Recreational highly polished
• Allegory, Historical subjects
• Bourgeois audience tastes
• Art removed from an integrated culture

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Reaction against modernity

• Industrialiasation
• Mass production

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The Primitive within Europe

• Gaughan1888 I love Brittany, here I find a
  savage primitive quality. When my clogs echo on
  this granite ground, I hear the dull muted,
  powerful sound I am looking for in painting

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Paul Gauguin 1889 Breton Calvary
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Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints I 1911
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Abstraction and Romanticism

• Revolt against modernity Kandinsky 1912 the
  Nightmare of materialism has turned life into an
  evil useless game

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Emil Nolde The Prophet 1912
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• The source of creativity is not reason but a
  retreat from it.
• Emil Nolde 1867-1956 German expressionism
  affinity to land, people

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Cubism Expressionism stylistic influences

• Les Demoiselles dAvignon 1907
• Influence of African masks geometric shapes

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German Expressionism

• De Brucke - the bridge
• Dresden 1905
• Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff,
  and, later, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein

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Ernst Ludvig Kirchner 1911
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1911 Auguste Macke, Indians on horseback
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Impact of World War I 1914-1918
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Dada Surrealism and Primitivism

• Revolt after the first war against European
  values
• Andre Breton 1924 Surrealist Manifesto
• Automism

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The primitive subconscious
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Max Ernst, Forest and Dove 1927
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Salvador Dali, Metamorphosis of Narcissus,1937
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Jackson Pollock

• On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer,
  more a part of the painting, since this way I can
  walk around in it, work from the four sides and
  be literally in the painting. Jackson
  Pollock, 1947

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Archetypes

• Karl Jung Swiss Psychoanalyst and seer
• The collective unconscious
• Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers dried
  up because the water has deserted them, though it
  may return at any time. An archetype is something
  like an old watercourse along which the water of
  life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel
  for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the
  channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or
  later the water will return Carl Jung

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Epstein, Jacob Female Figure 1913
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Henry Moore recumbent figure 1938
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Henry Moore reclining figure 1929
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Max Ernst, Moonmad 1944
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Modern Shamanism
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Beuys, Joesph I love America and America loves
me 1974
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• Shotdown over Crimea. Nearly frozen, he was
  found by Tatar nomads who saved his life by
  wrapping him in felt and fur

1943 was shot
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Primitivism discredited?
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