Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern “Primitivist” Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–8

Abstract

Fauve painters discovered African and Oceanic sculpture in 1905, when Vlaminck collected several wooden figures and a mask. Derain then studied Oceanic works in London, and Matisse struggled to paint a small figural statue he purchased in fall 1906. Fauve interests in shallow-relief, relatively naturalistic, and surface-ornamented sculptural objects suggest conformity with turn-of-the-century artistic and scientific ideas conflating heterogeneous strains of so-called primitive material culture. The dominant conceptual framework of primitivism, however, has tended to limit art historical understandings of external formal influences on modernism, which can be gleaned by closely examining the particular objects the Fauves appropriated.