1. The Sleep of Reason: “Primitive” Art as the Inverse of Classicism
The academic tradition in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe kept a tight rein upon the imagination, much more so than its Renaissance prototype.
Dessin had as its foundation the rule of mind over matter and the rule of theory over nature. Correct proportions and spatial relations, standardized gestures, as well as conventions of beauty and decorum were imposed upon unruly nature.
“Primitive” masks do away with all this (thank God)
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The inception of the work of art was in the mind of the artist and drawing was the embodiment of the idea into visual form. According to the painter Antoine Coypel, the artist must first learn how to think before learning how to paint: “Avant donc que de peindre, apprenez àpenser”. (In the notes for this it says: Wright, French Classicism, 163. Félibien stated the work of art begun without a clearly formed idea was the same as an infant born prematurely: not only did it cause great pain to the mother, it rarely arrived in a state of perfection (preface to Conférences, 5:307).
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Primitivism: The Embrace of the Peripheral
Friedrich Schiller in his essay, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793-95)…Schiller argued that it was no longer possible for a youth to learn to be a great artist; instead, the aspiring artist-prophet must travel back in time to study from the ancients themselves:
No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him who is its disciple, or its favorite. Let a kind deity take the infant betimes from the breast of his mother, let it nourish him with the milk of a better age, and let him mature beneath the skies of Greece. Then when he has become a man, let him return to his century as a foreigner, not to delight it with his appearance, but, rather, terrible like Agamemnon’s son, to cleanse and purify it.
If primitivism was synonymous with a desire for rejuvenation, it was also fueled by a wish to escape the responsibilities of reason and to allow nonrational faculties, the imagination, the passions, the spiritual, freer reign.
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….the magical powers of the idol played a role in the primitivism of both Gauguin and Picasso.
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Victor Hugo recognized in his 1827 essay on the grotesque that it could elicit both laughter and horror: “The grotesque…is everywhere; on one hand it creates the deformed and the horrible, on the other the comic and buffoonery”. And as we have seen above, many European accounts of “idols” conjoined the horrible with the ridiculous, such as Ellis’s description of “grotesque clay images”, and ridiculous caricatures”.
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Hugo claimed that the grotesque was an integral part of modern art because of its powerful expression .He argued that while there was only one standard of ideal beauty, the variations possible for the grotesque and the ugly were without limit.
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The Oceanic sketches suggest that Meryon’s affinity for the gothic went far beyond historical documentation or perversion. The artist seems to be motivated by a desire to recover something of a “primitive” sensibility lost to the modern sophistication of nineteenth century Paris. There is also evidence that he also understood the grotesque to be the natural expression of the “primitive” mind, one with which he felt a considerable affinity.
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| The Stryge, Charles Meryon, 1853, Etching |
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| Demoiselles d’Avignon, Pablo Picasso, 1907, Oil on Canvas |
Despite [Meryon’s] predilection for the grotesque, he illustrated existing monsters but did not invent one himself. The full incorporation of the grotesque in both style and content would come much later, and not with Gaugin, whose depictions of brooding, malevolent idols were not much different from the Stryge, but with Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907.
These monstrous forms embody the second of those traits in African and Oceanic sculpture to be emulated by Picasso: their “affective, magical force”. They communicate the same irrational emotions Picasso claimed to have felt during his first confrontation with “primitive” sculpture (mostly African) in the Trocadéro. Salmon described some of the sculpture owned by Picasso as “grimacing idols”. Picasso’s recollection with his first significant encounter with African and Oceanic sculptures there combined a recognition of them as “magical things” with a very physical revulsion to their grotesque presence.
Since the association of the monstrous grotesque with the idol was a log-standing one, it is not surprising to find a connection made between Picasso’s “primitivised” imagery with idols and magic by observers outside of Picasso’s immediate circle. Members of the Russian avant-garde sensed the magical power of Picasso’s proto-cubist paintings, some of which were part of the Shchukin collection. Gregory Chulkov wrote:
Picasso’s work reaches its culmination in his monumental pictures, drawn and painted with extraordinary conviction, precise as geometrical axioms despite the unexpectedness of their nightmarish forms…..Picasso’s conversations with the demon in those days were remarkable indeed.
The surprising appropriateness of Picasso’s artistic forms to the emotions that have arisen in him enables us to judge with assurance those conversations with the devil. Satan himself suggested to Picasso that woman is not a mechanism as Degas thought, or a doll as Renoir felt her to be, but an idol – and what an idol.
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Picasso’s incorporation of the grotesque was an especially daring attack upon the classical tradition, as was his use of the idol, which functioned as the literal embodiment of irrational forces and a parody of the great tradition in classical sculpture.
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Conclusion: Modernist Appropriations of “Primitive” Arts
“Primitive” art seemed to offer a return to creative possibilities. As we have seen, this involved a break away from mimesis toward alternative means of representation, but it also opened paths that skirted ut pictura poesis in pursuit of other means of expression. The desire to regain a “primitive” sensibility was, on a more profound level, a desire to overthrow the literary with the visual. Perhaps the key contribution of primitivism was its attempt to remedy art by returning it to pure visual means, to make it mute and physical, impassioned and poetic. Turning the classical tradition into a pedagogical formula, the art academies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cut away the body and left a talking head. This is best demonstrated by the fact that those characteristics attributed by the academic frame to “primitive” expression were also those characteristics recognized by Renaissance artists and aestheticians as the marks of artistic genius. Narrative and illusion could be learned, but only the artist of inborn genius could transform their rational structures into a truly profound work of art by virtue of his invention (ingenia) and his creative passion (furia). To be hieroglyphic was high praise, for it signalled that the artist had endowed mute, visual form with transcendent meaning.
As a result, primitivism finds itself in a decidedly ambiguous position, for it is only within the larger frame of a self-defined “civilised” and “rational” culture that artists can be “primitive” and “irrational”.
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