Primitive Art Research Articles

Sculpture-Mask Under the Environment of Chinese Rock Painting Art

China is one of the countries where rock paintings were earliest and most numerously found and which has the earliest record of rock paintings. The artistic form of rock painting, as the materialization of primitive human’s aesthetic consciousness, can be treated as a reflection of material and spiritual life of our ancestors, which is what I focus on and keep pursuing. Not only does it reflect the varied and colorful life slices and unsophisticated spiritual world of ancestors, but also it shows the unlimited vitality of primitive art. In my “sculpture world”, sculpture, as a kind of culture and artistic form of expressing and creating great sense of beauty, represent the current reality of true feeling, a kind of direct, pure, original experience. In this thesis, by explaining the content, form and spiritual connotations of my sculpture work Mask, I will discribe my sculpture concept and pursuit-current reality.

African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde

From November 27, 2012, through September 2, 2013, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde,” a focused exhibition which investigates the formation of taste in African arts in New York during the modernist era of the 1910s and 1920s. Conceived to coincide with the centenary celebrations of the ground-breaking 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” better known as the Armory Show, the Met’s exhibition considers for the first time this key turning point for the arts in America in terms of its impact on the development of an appreciation for African arts. Indeed, while the Museum of Modern Art’s 1935 “African Negro Art” exhibition is commonly recognized as the first moment of New York’s consequential encounter with African arts, I argue that this encounter in fact took place twenty years earlier, following the Armory Show. At that time, the emergence of New York as a new platform for modern art revealed the possibility of dynamic art commerce between Europe and America. As a direct consequence of this generative event, the numerous galleries that opened in New York in 1914 all intended to acquaint their audience with the newest trends in art. Among the works they imported from Europe were African arts, which began to be systematically exhibited alongside work by the Western avantgarde. This moment constitutes the starting point of “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde.” Since art historian Robert Goldwater published his Primitivism in Modern Painting in 1938, considerations of the avant-garde reception of what was then called “Primitive art” have focused on the impact it had on Western artistic practices. Half a century later, the famous 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” at New York’s MoMA systematized this line of thought without critical detachment and provoked heated reactions among the academic community. Scholars questioned and criticized vocally the Western-centric nature of the MoMA endeavor. While these debates were necessary and opened the door to essential scholarship marked by greater self-awareness, they also had the unfortunate consequence of suspending research on the reception of African arts in conjunction with the development of European and American modernism during the first half of the twentieth century. However, in America, the systematic joint exposure, from 1914 on, of African and modern art had a tremendous impact: today, it is still so ingrained in popular imagination that it continues to inform Western appreciation of African arts. Based on fresh research performed for my doctoral thesis (Biro 2010), “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde” considers the modernist era with African arts at its center and not as a footnote in the history of modern art. By placing the focus on the actual settings in which African artifacts were first collected and exhibited in the United States, these works are propelled beyond their role as simple props or artistic catalysts for Western artists. Unfolding both chronologically and thematically, “African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde” is divided into four sections, from the initial 1914 exhibitions of African art in New York to the engagement of African-American artists during the Harlem Renaissance of the second half of the 1920s.

La figura y lo informe en el arte primitivo seguido de la imagen como despojo y traza

Through the concepts of formlessness and of image as an expression of spoliation, this paper intends to articulate the issue of figure in children’s drawings and primitive art. The image is taken as an ambiguous entity which lies between presence and absence, wavering between appearance and disappearance. These reflections unfold a proposal in which both gesture and pencil stroke are re-signified.

РЕТРОСПЕКТИВНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ ФЕНОМЕНА ДЕТСТВА: СОЦИАЛЬНО-ФИЛОСОФСКИЙ АСПЕКТ

Social and philosophical analysis of childhood in his retrospective dynamics encompasses two fundamental social and philosophical issues — the formation of the individual and the family. The article highlights the results of a study of the phenomenon of childhood using genealogical, psychoanalytic and civilizational approaches. Social and philosophical aspect of the analytics of childhood is presented in the context of social and philosophical understanding of nature: the relations between the elements of nature and the attributes of childhood, the relations between nature and a primitive man that are contained in primitive art as in imitation of nature and as the manifestation of the qualities of childhood are considered in the article. The value of archaic myths and structures of the human psyche in the understanding of the phenomenon of childhood as a distinct set of social and psychological characteristics is examined. And the universal essence of the phenomenon of childhood, which is expressed in the unity and diversity of the characteristics of the child as a primary integrity of organic and social is detected.

Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915 by Marilynn Strasser Olson (review)

Reviewed by: Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915 by Marilynn Strasser Olson Gwen Athene Tarbox (bio) Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915, by Marilynn Strasser Olson. New York: Routledge, 2013. Contemporary art instruction, production, and criticism take place in a global context, enabling artists to learn from each other and to share techniques, philosophies, and materials, often within a digital environment and at a rapid pace. The cultural and technological forces that have combined to bring about such an international, interdependent, and fluid art scene have their origin in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the hegemony of the major art academies in London and Paris, long the guardians of a highly nationalistic and [End Page 295] technically rigid set of practices, faced challenges from every quarter. Conquest in Africa and the "opening" of Japan led to the importation of artifacts, many of which eschewed the sort of realism current at the time within European art circles. The flood of scientific discovery called into question assumptions regarding the natural world, and exploration into human psychology encouraged artists to turn inward for inspiration. The rise of various artistic schools, grouped under the umbrella term "avant-garde," was propelled by artists, writers, and thinkers who embraced these new influences. Marilynn Strasser Olson's Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde focuses on the literary and visual production of artists whose careers unfolded during or just after La Belle Époque, and whose work is characterized by an interest in childhood. Beginning with the populist and culturally inflected Golliwog picture books produced for a child audience by Florence and Bertha Upton, and concluding with an examination of Marc Chagall's use of his own childhood memories as the foundation for such masterpieces as I and the Village, Olson demonstrates that child culture played a significant role in the aesthetic and intellectual development of artists affiliated with the Parisian avant-garde. Olson's introduction provides an effective history of the avant-garde in Paris, as well as a delineation of prevailing fin-de-siècle attitudes toward childhood and children. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's privileging of childhood innocence as an antidote to the perceived evils of industrialization, John Ruskin's theory that an art movement's finest period "belonged to its childhood," and the widely held belief that primitive art emerged from the supposedly childlike mind of the subaltern subject point to the manner in which European artists apprehended and processed childhood and children's culture into their philosophies and practices (13-14). By featuring the work of both French nationals and artists of other nationalities who studied in Paris, Olson represents "some of the diversity of class, gender, and nationality resident in the city during its fin-de-siècle years of preeminence," underscoring the idea that the "avant-garde had a richness of invention and idiosyncrasy at the turn of the century that, in itself, is worthy of celebration" (15). In the chapters that follow her introduction, Olson considers both the manner in which the avant-garde sensibility entered the realm of children's book illustration via the work of Florence Upton and William Nicholson, and how child culture intersected with the realm of avant-garde paintings produced by Henri Rousseau, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marc Chagall. Her approach underscores the interrelatedness [End Page 296] of the two categories; however, her choice of chapter arrangement, presented without a specified rationale, compels the reader to decipher many of the connections without overt guidance. The use of an organizational structure grouping the children's illustrators together to demonstrate their collective impact on twentieth-century children's literature, or one grouping artists together through their philosophical commonalities, might have been helpful, but this criticism is a minor one regarding a study that otherwise reflects Olson's extensive knowledge of both art history and child culture. Olson's discussion of Upton highlights a strain of early twentieth-century children's literature illustration that tapped into an avant-garde fascination with the so-called primitive and the grotesque, elements that had appeared before in Carroll and Tenniel's Alice books but were...

Documents: banaliteit gevierd in een modernistisch tijdschrift

This article studies the French avant-garde magazine Documents (1929-1931), which was founded by four French intellectuals: Jean Babelon, Georges Bataille, Pierre d'Espezel and Georges Wildenstein. Soon, Bataille became the editor in chief, whereas d'Espezel and Babelon withdrew. The magazine focused on (primitive) art, philosophy and ethnography. Documents reacted to Andre Breton's surrealism, which Bataille and cooperatives considered too idealistic and naive. They promoted a more materialistic philosophy, called bas materialisme. A focal point was the formlessness of reality: scientists and philosophers should not try to capture the world in rational and static texts. Documents turned against intellectualism, but did so, paradoxically, in highly intellectual texts. Thus, the magazine's form and content partly contradicted each other. On the other hand, the illustrations in the magazine correspond in interesting ways to Bataille's philosophy. It is this interaction between the form and intellectual content of the magazine that is the focus of this article.

The Implicit Apophaticism of Dada Zurich: A Spiritual Quest by Means of Nihilist Procedures

AbstractThe present article focuses on the intrinsic theological intuitions of the Avant‐garde. More to the point, the article is built around the key representatives of Dada Zurich and the relationship between their art and the concept of Byzantine apophaticism in an attempt to argue that the apparently anarchist movement can and should be interpreted in this theological key. Mostly due to a confusing understanding of nihilism and apophaticism, previous scholarship has generally linked Dada with nihilism, in spite of the anti‐nihilist essence of the central Dada ideals, such as man's spiritual freedom, the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) and the positive use of otherwise anarchist techniques, such as chance and de‐contextualisation. Methodologically, the article investigates each of these concepts from an apophatic perspective; thus, it focuses, respectively, on the deeply anthropologic interest of the Dadaists, their use of chance as an apophatic creative force, and on de‐contextualization as a key to understanding Dada spiritual concern with primitive art. Overall, this is a theological analysis of the early Dada artists in Zurich, aiming to underline the principles of their deeply apophatic manner of understanding and creating art.

Natural Packaging Materials and Green Package Design

This paper focuses on the natural packaging materials. Based on the research and exploration of natural packaging materials and green packaging design, t describes some Ideas such as "unity of heaven and man","the isomorphism", combining with the idea of the traditional packaging design. The concept of nationality and the green design are blended in packaging design so as that it has unique chinese flavour and embodies the spirit of primitive art, Then the design make full use of the advantages of natural materials at the same times.

Notes for a Networked Biography: The P. G. T. Black Collection of Oceanic Things

AbstractIn 1938, the Buffalo Museum of Science acquired some 62 hundred objects collected between 1886 and 1916 by and for P. G. Black, a branch inspector for Burns, Philp & Company Ltd., the famous Sydney‐based mercantile and shipping firm. Despite the collection's size, breadth, and significance as a product of the colonial encounter in northern Australia and Melanesia, its history is still largely unrecorded. This article begins to trace the social life of the collection by narrating a formative moment in its biography: the period of Burns, Philp's expansion into the southwest Pacific during which Black assembled the collection. It also identifies two other moments: the years after Black's death in 1921 when the overseas purchase of the collection was decried in Australian newspapers and the years after the collection came to Buffalo when objects were loaned for display at American fine arts museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At these particular biographical moments, objects in the collection were differently construed as native curios and ethnological specimens, national patrimony, and primitive art. This article advances a trend of recent scholarship in anthropology and museology by foregrounding the historical circumstances and social relations that condition the appropriation of objects. [Buffalo Museum of Science, P. G. T. Black Collection, Oceania, Australian Museum, art/artifact, object biography, national patrimony]

From Underworld to Avant-Garde:

From Underworld to Avant-Garde:

The Origins of the Concept of ‘Palaeolithic Art’: Theoretical Roots of an Idea

This paper explores the origin and theoretical roots of the concept of ‘Palaeolithic art’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1895–1906). It identifies three main sources for this concept: the Western category of ‘art’, the idea of evolution and the notion of primitive. This article shows how the traditional conception of ‘Palaeolithic art’ is a particular case of the wider idea of ‘primitive art’, a category that was born as an attempt to harmonise the notion of ‘primitive society’ and the nineteenth-century bourgeois concept of ‘art’. Additionally, I discuss this traditional conception as the source of a number of ideas that have persisted in our way of interpreting Palaeolithic images until recently, including the understanding of prehistoric images through the lens of the modern notion of ‘art’, their interpretation in symbolic-religious terms and their formal definition based on the idea of naturalism.

From Underworld to Avant-Garde:

From Underworld to Avant-Garde:

Johannes Edfelts hand

The Hand of Johannes Edfelt: The Study of a Motif
 This is a study of the hand as a frequent motif in the poetry of Johannes Edfelt (1904–1997), one of the leading Swedish poets of his generation and a member of the Swedish Academy. The hand motif in Edfelt´s poetry sometimes tends to be a vital theme and can be interpreted as a symbol, though flexible and ambiguous. From a rhetorical point of view it is more often than not handled as a synecdoche, more specifically as a pars pro toto referring to fate, the whole of mankind, or life itself. From a hermeneutic point of view it can manifest itself as a magic hand; as such, its origin is not merely biblical, but obviously also deeply connected to primitive art and especially to ancient petroglyphs and cave paintings, which began to inspire modernist writers and artists all around Europe in the 1920’s. Edfelt was devoted to the hand motif over the course of more than seven decades, from his first collection of poetry in 1923, to his last in 1996.

The Integration of Art in the Culture of Primitive Peoples

First published in Dutch in 1943, Frans M. Olbrechts’ essay promoted a new contextual approach in the study of primitive art and rejected the purely descriptive and “art critical” approach to the object, as exemplified by Tristan Tzara and others. Central to Olbrechts’ analysis is the “cultural content” that the object’s formal features communicate to its intended audience. Drawing on examples of objects from West and Central Africa and Oceania, Olbrechts argues that the motifs and the style of the objects must be decoded against their cultural background. Identifying that visual message, Olbrechts proposes, is the main task of any scholar who wants to get to the “essence” of the work of art under examination.

Representing Africa in American art museums: a century of collecting and display

In recent years, the critical study of museums has emerged as a major focus of scholarly inquiry across various disciplines, bringing into greater focus the effect that museum practice has on the formation of meaning and the public perception of objects. Representing Africa in American Art Museums is the first comprehensive book to focus on the history of African art in American art museums. Chronicling more than a century of building and presenting collections of African art in thirteen American art museums, from the late 1800s to the present, the book considers the art museum as a lens for understanding the shifting visions of African art that are manifested in institutional practices of collecting and display in the United States. Thirteen essays present the institutional biographies of African art collections in a selection of American art museums: the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Hampton University Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barnes Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indiana University Art Museum, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Menil Collection, and the National Museum of African Art. Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke offer a review of the history of collecting and displaying African art in American museums and identify important issues that are raised by the essays: defining aesthetic criteria for African art and for its display; breaking free from the monolithic rubric of primitive broadening perceptions of what constitutes African art; and formulating a place for context and culture in understanding and presenting African art. Representing Africa in American Art Museums concludes with an afterword that anticipates the direction for the collecting and display of African art in the twenty-first century, including the ethics and legalities of collecting; the deconstruction of a singular and authoritative museum voice in interpreting works of art; the interests and engagement of local African American and African communities that have a stake in how collections are represented; and how, if, and where to include contemporary art from Africa in museum collections.

A Study on the Value Change of Digital Image According to Digital Technology

The strategy through visual sense is one of the ways that subject builds the outside world and communicates. The visual sense seems higher level of dependence than the other senses and contributes to intercommunication. For this reason, the desire of image dates back to primitive art and visual image(visual media and visual culture) has dialectically developed in the history of mankind. Visual subject, based on perspective of Renaissance, was moved from God to human beings. Andre Bazin's 'la genese automatique' through technical art has epochally changed the paradigm of visual art and visual culture. From primitive art to photo and film, the image, based on visual sense, has reflected human wish, appealed visual desire and led to evolution of image. In the late 20 century, without dialectical evolution of technology and culture, rapidly progressive digital image has changed social and cultural implication over rational strategy of production and distribution and it strengthened authority of image through visual approach of endless desire. The goal of this study is to analyze the value change of digital image developing a new Renaissance through production, reading, communication, and implication of evolution due to digitalized image, which has evolved as object and tool of desire.

Museums in the Twenty-first Century: Still Looking for Signs of Difference

The impact of modernism and the challenge of primitive art are almost unrecoverable experiences.1 in this article I argue that the Musee du Quai Branly symbolizes debates concerning the contemporar...

The Creation of Indigenous Collections in Melbourne: How Kenneth Clark, Charles Mountford, and Leonhard Adam Interrogated Australian Indigeneity

My paper will explore three personalities, Kenneth Clark, Charles Mountford and Leonard Adam, and the impact they had on the creation and exhibition of collections of indigenous objects in Australia. Kenneth Clark visited Australia briefly in 1948 and left a dynamic legacy in both Melbourne and Adelaide. During his visit Clark was introduced to aboriginal art by Daryl Lindsay, director of the National Gallery of Victoria, one of the first Australians to show a passion for such things, by his friend Sir Joseph Burke, the first professor of art history at the University of Melbourne, and Charles Mountford, an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist. The most considerable contribution to the study of aboriginal art was made by Leonhard Adam, a German Jewish intellectual, who in his classic book: Primitive Art, espoused the Modernist Ideology of Primitivism. He arrived in Australia in 1942, and created an extraordinary collection for the University of Melbourne, of aboriginal works and what might be described as ‘global’ primitivism.

The Debates on Visual Arts as a Cultural Critique in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), whose final shape was taken during the First World War, inevitably deals with such modern crises from the problems of human relationships to the degeneration of culture and society. In the process, the novel brings to the fore an apocalyptic vision of the decadent Western civilization. In the novel, Lawrence, an amateur painter himself, takes issue with many artist characters and art schools such as primitive art, Impressionists, Bloomsbury, Futurism, Asian art etc. Many debates on art objects are connected with the criticism of life and society set in an atmosphere of cultural turbulence. Lawrence criticizes a group of degenerate London artists―Gudrun Brangwen, Julius Halliday―for their sensualism manifested in their worship of primitive art. He also criticizes Futurism for its cerebral emphasis and mechanism. Loerke’s industrial art is portrayed as an extreme version of the mechanical dehumanization of art; thus, his art epitomizes all the terror that Lawrence felt about modern art and the negative cultural forces behind it. The author tries to find an alternative trend of vital art in the Third World art such as Chinese painting or African fetishes, as opposed to the degenerate Western art. However, the novel also reveals a limit of Lawrentian cultural critique in the form of Eurocentric biases. For example, Rupert Birkin, the hero of the novel, argues that he can capture the essence of Chinese culture by copying a picture of geese. The grounds of his overbearing confidence in the knowledge of the other are neither verified nor deconstructed. Both Asian and African art works are appropriated to represent some oppositional principle to what Birkin believes to be the defects of Wetern culture. In this sense, it seems that he sets out to respect the other but ends up absorbing it into the frame of the same. However, Lawrence does not always totalize his aesthetic vision. Although he was certainly subject to Eurocentric backsliding, Lawrence tries to keep alive his spontanenous and multi-faceted aesthetic response towards the European and non-European artworks. Overall, Lawrence’s aesthetics in Women in Love, manifests itself as the significant attempt to a cultural critique which responds to, and incorporates the counter-cultural perspective of artworks and life.

Notes on the ‘ethnographic turn’ of the European avant-garde: Reading Carl Einstein’s <i>Negerplastik</i> (1915) and Vladimir Markov’s <i>Iskusstvo Negrov</i> (1919)

Abstract In the accounts of early twentieth-century modernism the ethnographic object and its ‘discovery’ by avant-garde artists has come to occupy a central role. But the African studies by the German author and critic Carl Einstein (1885–1940) and the Latvian artist Vladimir Markov (1877–1914) have regularly been demoted to the footnotes of primitivist appropriations. In the histories of non-Western cultures and the anthropology of art both have endured a place in obscurity. Described as ‘the first and most influential’ of the ‘champions of primitive art’, Einstein's Negerplastik has regained some recognition, whereas Markov's Iskusstvo Negrov remains the lesser known of the two books. Emerging at the same historical juncture both authors postulated the limits of Western artistic traditions by advocating the aesthetic autonomy of non-Western sculpture. By introducing a comparative reading, this paper argues that the image/text strategies of both studies orchestrated a poetics of alterity that was centra...