Hardly any twentieth-century art movement escaped the influence of primitive art. Much of the starry cast of the Paris School drank directly from the source without ever having set foot in Africa, Asia, Oceania, or the Americas. Surrealism and Expressionism plunged into “first” art to renew their visual discourse employing differentiated values and forms.
Many of the great masters of painting and sculpture reinterpreted traces of anonymous tribal artists, of lost peoples, especially in illiterate and socially and intellectually backward Africa, according to the prevailing cultural patterns of Eurocentrism. What can be said of the concept of “primitive” art, used since the early twentieth century as a semantic catch-all, encompassing prehistoric paintings to pieces created by common people without artistic training?
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The term naïve is more common in the discourse of galleries that sell colorful, realistic paintings, marked by figurative spontaneity free from the dogmas of composition and perspective. In Brazil, Heitor dos Prazeres and José Antonio da Silva began in the 1950s to pave the way for a very active community that established itself in the following two decades.
The watershed in the clash between primitive and modern was the 1984 MoMA exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Intelligent and vital, the intense research was curated by William Rubin, attended by a team of experts in primitive art who gathered rare pieces from European ethnographic museums, specialist galleries, and private collections in several countries. In an exciting assembly, he placed the works of modern Western masters such as Picasso, Giacometti, Brancusi, and Henry Moore side-by-side with museum pieces from Guinea, Oceania, and America. One goal was to show the similarity of the forms among works from such distant periods. The result went far beyond and put up for debate—even in forums outside the MoMA—the moral and political character of celebrated works by these untouchable contemporary masters. Criticism was leveled at the excessive emphasis on formal affinities, which evidenced cultural and social inequalities, and especially at the fact that Western artists were depicted as geniuses for having discovered and recreated anonymous and timeless primitives.
What arose is that the absence of an iconography or publications accessible to those objects allowed them to be appropriated by an artistic community without any questioning. Most of the artists collected rarities that they kept in their studios. The tension caused by the exhibition was due to the fact that there is no discussion about the power of intellectual property of this “primitive” art. According to American critic Gill Perry, the exotic was recreated by them, according to the Western assumptions and practices of the time—and, therefore, under the aegis of European colonialism.
By observing some works by Emil Nolde, Paul Gauguin, Henry Moore, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and others, one cannot help reflecting on what the visual arts in the 1950s would have been without this investment in primitive art.
Following the initiative of the MoMA, it was the turn of the French to dive deep into the issue by organizing a show that was a kind of response to the American exhibition. In 1989 the Beaubourg in Paris organized Les Magiciens de la Terre, which also encompassed the Grande Halle de la Villette. The curator Jean-Hubert Martin brought together hundreds of works, taking into account the peripheral production of the art circuit and hence primitive art. The French critic pondered the meaning of objects in the transition from one culture to another and on the evidence that there exists “primitive” authorship.
Politics and culture have always paid dividends to politicians of any country. The writer and intellectual André Malraux, a former culture minister of France, responsible for advancing the culture policy of that country in the 1960s, maintained the idea that it was necessary to consider “the primordial arts.” With this same refrain, the former mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, also left a mark by creating the Quai Branly museum, which brings together pieces of various periods with high anthropological and ethnographic value.
Upon entering the museum, or any of these exhibitions, one can imagine the eagerness with which these artists approached the production of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and America, which were authentic reservoirs of innovative values and forms. This “pirate” European production presents commonalities that draw the attention. First, they took the primitive element as a shield against modernity and as an affiliation to radical and authentic forms. They then appropriated what they considered “exotic”, to recreate the art using the Western practices of the time—and, as Gill Perry noted, building an art “under the auspices of the European colonialism.”
Indeed, the absence of an accessible iconography of these objects allowed them to be easily absorbed by a modern artistic culture. This decontextualization caused modern artists to be accused of responding ethnocentrically to African and Oceanic art, assigning twentieth-century Western meanings to its appearance.
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