Indigenous primitivists: the challenge of Māori modernism

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s a generation of Māori artists broke with the customary art of their ancestors and, drawing on the strategies of European modernists such as Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore, created a modernist art that they believed would better address contemporary subjectivities. Articulating customary art as anachronistic, a copying of the past with no relevance to the present, the Māori modernists established a primitivist relationship with customary Māori art, using its alternative system of representation as a way to disrupt European academic conventions and thus enter into the discourse of contemporary art in New Zealand (and internationally).