Which of the Following Words Best Describe Primitive Art

Traditional Congolese Figurine (c.1900)
Fetish figure of Nkisi Nkondi
BNK drove. A bright example of
and then-chosen "archaic" African sculpture.

Definition and Characteristics

The term "Primitive Art" is a rather vague (and unavoidably ethnocentric) description which refers to the cultural artifacts of "primitive" peoples - that is, those ethnic groups deemed to take a relatively depression standard of technological development by Western standards.

It includes African Fine art (sub-Saharan), Oceanic Art (Pacific islands), Ancient Fine art (Commonwealth of australia) every bit well every bit other types of Rock Fine art from prehistory and also Tribal Art from (eg.) the Americas and S-East Asia. The notion of "primitive" people dates from the Age of Discovery (c.1500 onwards), and is largely (though non exclusively) associated with a Christian-Caucasian world view.

One should note however that the term "primitive fine art" is not typically used to describe Chinese, Indian or Islamic artworks, or works from whatsoever of the major cultures including Egyptian, Greek or Roman Civilizations.

The Dream (1910)
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
By Henri Rousseau.
A masterpiece of primitivist naif art.

POSTERS
Many examples of primitive art
are bachelor online as poster art.

EVOLUTION OF VISUAL ART
See: History of Art.

CATEGORIES OF ARTS
For sculpture and assemblage,
see: Plastic Art.
For ornamental designwork,
see: Decorative Art.
For artworks fabricated from salvaged
fabric, come across: Junk Fine art.
For a general nomenclature,
encounter: Visual Art.

The term "Primitivism", which emerged in art during the tardily 19th-century, is used to describe whatever fine art characterized past imagery and motifs associated with such primitive fine art. Marked by ethnographic forms, often of smashing visual ability, this artistic primitivism dates from the 1890s when it appeared in the Tahitian paintings of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and quickly led to a trend amidst French and German language artists of the Expressionist avant-garde. Indeed, several began to visit collections of ethnological artifacts: in 1902, the British-American sculptor Jacob Epstein visited the Trocadero Museum in Paris, as did Derain and Vlaminck in 1904-v, and Picasso in 1907; in 1903 and 1906, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner visited the ethnological collection in Dresden; in 1907, Kandinsky saw the new drove of primitive exhibits in Berlin, which was also visited by Schmidt-Rottluff, Franz Marc and others.

WORLD'S GREATEST ART
For a list of the Top 10 painters/
sculptors: All-time Artists of All Fourth dimension.
For the best oils/watercolours,
run into: Greatest Paintings Ever.
For the best plastic art,
see: Greatest Sculptures Ever.

Influence of Primitivism on Western Art

From 1906 onwards, dealers similar Paul Guillaume, as well as artists like Matisse, Picasso, Derain and Braque, began buying African tribal masks and figurines. As a result, the influence of "Negro fine art" on both painting and sculpture became quite noticeable in Paris subsequently 1907, and in Berlin, Dresden and London later on 1912. By 1920 it had become well-nigh universal, and continued until the early 1930s when Oceanic, Indian and Eskimo art became a leading source of inspiration for the Surrealists and their followers.

Among artists most influenced past primitivism were the German expressionists Emil Nolde (1867-1956) and Max Pechstein (1881-1955), the Fauvist Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the mod Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), the British sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), the Paris-based Italian portraitist and sculptor Modigliani (1884-1920), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), among many others. Russian primitivism had a major bear on on Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962) who developed a way calle Neo-Primitivist art. The impact of African, Oceanic, Aboriginal and other so-called primitive art on Western artists continues to this solar day, and encompasses a number of forms including painting, sculpture, aggregation, trunk art (such equally face painting and torso painting), tattooing, forest etching and others.

Primitivist Sculptures and Paintings

Although painters were the get-go to take an interest in primitivism, its greatest bear upon was on sculpture. The Fauvist painter Andre Derain fifty-fifty taught himself to cleave limestone in social club to produce primitive-style works. Among the greatest works of art created in the primitive manner are the following:

Greatest Primitive-Manner Sculptures

• Oviri (The Barbarous Adult female) (1891-93) by Paul Gauguin.
• Crouching Figure (1907) by Andre Derain.
• Standing Nude (1907) past Andre Derain.
• The Buss (1908) by Constantin Brancusi.
• Adult female Dancing (1908-12) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
• Sleeping Muse (1910) past Constantin Brancusi.
• The Beginning Step (1913) by Constantin Brancusi.
• Carmine Stone Dancer (1913) by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
• Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (1914) by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
• Assunta (1921) past Georg Kolbe.
• Adam (1938) Jacob Epstein's crawly Neanderthal statue.
• Crouching Woman (The Cheerio) by Henri Laurens.
• Jacob and the Angel (1940-41) past Jacob Epstein.
• Baboon and Young (1952) past Pablo Picasso.
• Divided Head (1963) Easter Island-style bronze sculpture by Cesar.

Greatest Archaic-Way Paintings

• The Moon and the Earth (1893, MoMA, New York) by Paul Gauguin - a piece of work in which Gauguin identifies the uncivilized female torso with both lunar rhythms and the regenerative powers of the earth.
• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, MoMA, New York) - Pablo Picasso's ground-breaking Cubist work based on African art forms.
• The Dance (1910, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg), Matisse's monumental blue-orange-greenish painting.
• Caryatide (1912, Sogetsu Museum of Art, Tokyo), one of Amedeo Modigliani's many "primitivist" canvases.
• Young Men From Papua (1913-fourteen, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), Emil Nolde's hugely expressive sheet which melds native figures with breaking waves.

Primitives: Naive/Outsider Art

In addition, the term "Primitivism" is also used to describe art created by "primitives" - the proper noun given to certain artists, normally self-taught, whose paintings are normally simplistic in form and color, and lacking in conventional motifs like chiaroscuro, linear perspective and other types of proportionality. Characterized by child-like imagery, this Western-style category of primitive art is besides known as "Outsider art", "Naive art", or Art Brut ("raw fine art") and is exemplified by the work of Henri Rousseau 'Le Douanier' (1844-1910): see, for instance, his masterpieces The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) and The Dream (1910), both at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Other archaic artists include: Paul Klee (1879-1940), Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964), L.S. Lowry (1887-1976), Jean Dubuffet (1901-85), Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Asger Jorn (1914-73), Karel Appel (1921-2006) and other members of the 1950s European avant-garde. The largest holding of Outsider art is Jean Dubuffet's Collection de l'Fine art Brut - located in Lausanne Switzerland. A smaller assembly is The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Fine art Collection, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), featuring works by artists like Aloise, Henry Darger, Madge Gill, Hauser, J.B. Murry, Oswald Tschirtner, Van Genk, Wolfli, Zemankova, and others.

Prehistoric Art is not Primitivism

All sculpture (eg. Venus Figurines) and painting (eg. cavern painting) created during the Paleolithic Era (Stone Age) - that is, during the period up to 10,000 BCE - is classified every bit Prehistoric Fine art. Since all humans of this catamenia lived a archaic being, the term "primitive fine art" does not apply to the prehistoric age. (Meet likewise: Prehistoric Fine art Timeline.)

Integral Part of History and Civilisation

Annotation notwithstanding, that art is non an isolated miracle. It is part of a culture, linked up with the history of the culture and with the history of the people. Consequently, we should view primitive fine art equally just a general term covering a variety of historical phenomena; the products of different races, mentalities, temperaments, historical events, and influences of environment. Every people, however archaic, has adult a specific style by giving preference to certain objects and patterns or certain arrangements of lines and spaces.

Primitivism As Opposed To Academic Art

The dehumanizing effects of 19th-century industrialization, combined with the carnage of the Great War (1914-18), caused a number of artists to become disillusioned by the culture and values of their own society which they saw as corrupt and morally bankrupt. Fine fine art - specially the official "academic art" taught in the Academies - was identified with these corrupt values. In comparison, "primitive" art seemed more spontaneous, more honest and more emotionally charged.

Primitivism and Aesthetics

To categorize a painting or piece of sculpture every bit "primitive" presupposes the existence of "non-primitive" art. How should we describe such a category of "not-primitive" fine art? - Modernist? Progressive? Technologically advanced? None of these descriptions seem satisfactory. Possibly because there is no such category. After all, aesthetics is not a scientific discipline - there is no such thing every bit "avant-garde dazzler" or "archaic beauty".

We Near Appreciate Art That is Familiar to Us

Quite often it seems as though a consummate enjoyment of beauty is only possible when we are confronted with a work of art which either belongs to our own kind of civilisation, or is at to the lowest degree superficially related to our own aesthetics or ideals of creative dazzler. The combinations of form and colour evolved by foreign civilisations may have many attractions, but they remain shrouded in a mysterious temper which can be quite conflicting to united states.

Works reflecting the way of "primitivism" can be seen in some of the best fine art museums in the world.

Bad Fine art is Not Primitive Art

Since the first phase of annihilation is usually undeveloped and unfinished, a popular meaning has grown upwardly for the discussion "archaic", denoting something crude - lacking that sure accordance of lines, spaces or colours, which is the source of our emotional sensation when nosotros look at a real work of fine art. The "primitive work" in this sense, may be just the piece of work of a bungler who lacks both artistic inspiration and technical skill, in which example it has nothing to exercise with existent primitiveness just is but bad fine art without even a documentary value to recommend it. On the other mitt, if information technology is the piece of work of a savage or a child, information technology volition have some importance at to the lowest degree every bit genetic or psychological testify.

Mode Dictates Aesthetics

An fine art way is not a static but a dynamic phenomenon, bound up and changing with a specific period of cultural development. It is an established fact that there is something like a periodicity of art styles, corresponding to a periodicity of tastes. It is non sure to what extent the style and the emotional reaction to it are conditioned past each other. The nigh obvious characteristic of modernistic artistic taste is simplicity. Living in a highly complicated world, noisy and mechanised to breaking point, twentieth-century homo developed a strong tendency towards simplicity - simplicity in the external forms of daily life, a distaste for ornamentation in architecture, piece of furniture and utensils, and a preference for primitiveness and spontaneity, rather than refinement and sophistication. That is why the simplicity of many primitive arts appeals to him so strongly. The critic One thousand.A. Stevens once wrote: "Primitive art is the most pure, most sincere class of art there can exist, partly because it is deeply inspired past religious ideas and spiritual feel, and partly because it is entirely unselfconscious equally art; at that place are no tricks which tin be acquired by the unworthy, and no technical exercises Which can masquerade every bit works of inspiration. Such a judgment, however, is only justified past comparatively express sections of the art of primitive races. In point of fact the "primitive" artist is not always every bit naive as i would like to call back.

What Are the Features of Archaic Art?

(1) Technique

Inadequate technical ways are not necessarily characteristic of "primitive art". On the contrary the materials in which the archaic artist works - stone, ivory, bone, wood, twenty-four hour period and metal - are largely the aforementioned every bit those of the European artist. Even in painting, the colour pigments from minerals, vegetables and fifty-fifty animals are in many cases similar. The ways at the disposal of the archaic creative person vest to his cultural level, and to his environs. In an African shrine or temple an oil painting on sail would be both historically untrue and aesthetically unpleasing. Primitive methods vary considerably even so we find like techniques practical in altogether different areas. The method of sculpture in wood, for example, is predominantly chopping, not carving. The tool is a kind of adze. The result in the finished piece is a faceted surface showing the unplaned marks of the tool. This technique is' prevalent in Western and Southern Africa, New Guinea and Northwest America. The aim of the primitive artist is good adroitness. The conditions under which he works are different from those of his" civilised" colleague. Before he tin can brainstorm an artistic work he has first to collect, manufacture and gear up his tools and his fabric, and usually he has to do all this single-handed. Have, for case, the North American Indian painter. Among the Plains Indians information technology is the women who are responsible for the geometric type of decorative art. The men confine themselves to representative paintings. In both cases plants or minerals must be collected to provide the paints. They must so be boiled or ground and mixed with size or fat to prepare the pigment. A buffalo hide must then be carefully prepared and the surface made as smooth every bit possible for the painting. Even after a very complicated preparatory process the surface is nevertheless and so crude that outlines must first be pressed into the footing before the drawing proper can be carried out, and the cartoon must be repeated several times to press the paint thoroughly into the hibernate. Consequently, a polychrome picture show is really a coloured engraving rather than a simple drawing. Fixing requires some other complicated procedure, just this is merely applied in geometric designs. All this preparatory work requires skilled craftsmanship and is largely mechanical. So was the work of a European painter in former times. Today, art textile of every clarification can be bought set up fabricated. Information technology is simply the sculptors who are however tied to whatsoever considerable corporeality of mechanical craftsmanship.

By and large speaking, the archaic creative person is faced with a difficult technical task. That does not hateful, however, that he is not a true creative person with ideas of his ain and sometimes genuine creative inspiration. Many years ago Professor Franz Boas of Columbia Academy met an Indian from Vancouver Island who had been a good painter, though his works were in the traditional style of the Northwest coast. This Indian was so seriously ill that he was confined to his bed. But during his affliction he used to sit upwardly holding his castor between his lips, silent and manifestly oblivious of his environs, He could hardly exist induced to speak, but when he spoke he dilated upon his visions of designs that he could no longer execute. Undoubtedly his was "the listen and the attitude of a true inspired artist." This intimate connectedness with solid craftsmanship seems to be the reason why the archaic artist is so frequently successful. The primitive creative person not only knows from the beginning exactly what he wants, but continues with unwavering constancy until it is attained.

(2) Vision

It has been suggested that the absence of perspective and other aesthetic devices makes even primitive arts of high quality tend to seem either grotesque or monotonous to u.s.a. on first contact with them. This may hold practiced for some archaic art just it cannot be accepted for all. In view of the great multifariousness of altogether different types; generalisations are dangerous. Similarly, violent deviations from reality cannot be taken as characteristic of purely primitive vision, for they are constitute also in the fine art of highly developed cultures. This is especially truthful of the lack of perspective which i finds in Egyptian, Byzantine and Gothic art, but information technology is also evident in the arbitrary proportion of limbs in figures painted by Botticelli or El Greco. On the other hand paleolithic and South African bushman artists take produced remarkable attempts at foreshortening, overlapping colours, linear perspective and colour shading. Indeed, some primitive artists have attained the highest level in realistic portrayal. Bushman paintings and drawings appeal to us strongly because we have no difficulty in understanding them. This type of graphic art is reminiscent of our own. It is simple and unsophisticated. Consequently, we find these works naive and "primitive" in an appreciative sense. We do not accept to apply any new or unaccustomed kind of vision, for, in the long run, the archaic creative person, like the European creative person, works from life. It is true that a big proportion of primitive fine art has evidently been worked from retentiveness, and that gods, demons and fantastic creatures are products of the artist'southward imagination, though some details may be, derived from existent forms. Simply innumerable works of fine art, especially sculptures, from Africa, the Due south Seas and America, are so realistic and private that 1 can assume with certainty that the artists were actually working from nature. To a higher place all, the sculptors of ancient Mexico and Republic of peru (who were, of class, far from being actually primitive) must accept been looking directly at nature, and their works are in fact masterpieces of portraiture. In Africa the beautiful heads from Ife are no doubt life portraits, though some foreign influence may be responsible for this extraordinarily loftier standard of sculpture. Only we observe life portraits among fifty-fifty more primitive African tribes, in the Cote d'ivoire, the parkland of the Cameroons and the Congo Basin. Portraiture exists also in the Pacific area. The Maori of New Zealand have developed what may be called, "schematic" portraiture, whereby the patterns of tattooing, that infallible means of identification, rendered it possible to preserve the memories of the individual ancestors through pictorial representation.

The terms "realistic" or "naturalistic" art are normally applied to piece of work which is done from life and hence is true to nature. But their meaning, though definite plenty in sculpture, tends to become ambiguous when applied to the graphic arts. If we speak of a naturalistic painting nosotros hateful that it is true to the optical impression of the model as observed at a given moment from a given angle. Just in a dissimilar sense of the term we may speak of naturalism or realism if an artist represents all the details really in existence, non only those he tin see at the moment but those he knows are at that place as well. In most primitive arts realism is of this kind. Arguably, it reaches its highest evolution in the X-ray drawings of Australia, Melanesia and the coastal regions of British Columbia and Southern Alaska. Here the creative person depicts every detail of the body, including backbone, ribs and internal organs, considering he regards these equally no less of import than the characteristic features of a human being'south outward advent. This amazing method often comes from the artist's cloth interests in particular details, rather than from any aesthetic appreciation.

In Northwest America there are awe-inspiring wall-paintings representing killer whales (or other animals) which are distinguished by the rendering of vertebras and ribs. Typical of all Northwest American graphic art is the stylised representation of the articulation. This foreign visual method is restricted to a few regions in the Pacific area, and is supposed to be one of the indications that this district may accept been afflicted by Western influences at some remote catamenia in the past. Intellectual realism of this sort cannot claim to be either naive or elementary. Information technology is (paradoxically) a sophisticated kind of primitiveness.

The accentuation of certain features in a figure oft leads to the condone of others, and so that realistic representation is gradually abased. Information technology is eventually replaced by symbolism, where a few feature traits suffice to convey the idea of an object, and may be stylised and transformed into conventional signs. In an extreme stage of development an isolated claw and a single wing may symbolise a raven. But here we have already left the realm of naturalistic art and entered the sphere of abstruse or conventional design.

Geometrical forms are found both in decorative drawings and as patterns in textiles and basketry. The diverseness of these patterns is endless, though some of them, such as zig-zag bands, frets, triangles, diverse types of crosses, etc., are frequent among altogether dissimilar peoples. They are, in fact, almost universal, and exercise not necessarily signal any historical relation between the several arts in which they occur: We observe four-square frets, for example, not only in ancient Greece and Prc, merely likewise among South American Indians, Melanesians, African Bantus and other African peoples. But by a certain combination of patterns, even so mutual the individual elements may exist, the artist produces a specific style of marked national colouring which makes information technology possible for us to ascribe a busy object to a sure people and often to a certain menstruation. This, of course, holds proficient for the study of fine art in full general and is not confined to primitive art.

In many cases decorative patterns are supposed to symbolise the material objects - animals, plants, then along - later on which they are named. The connexion between the pattern and its symbolic meaning arises in two means; either by the deliberate simplification of a representative design as in Northwest America, or else conversely by the observation of incidental resemblances between the geometric blueprint and its naturalistic interpretation.

In the decorative designs of the Indian tribes in the upper Xingu of the Matto Grosso (Brazil) 2 peculiar patterns are predominant: a simple equilateral blackness triangle called uluri and a parallelogram with the 4 angles marked by small equilateral triangles. The latter pattern is called mereshu. This is the name of a fish which is almost square in shape like a plaice. The four black triangles in the angles would then represent the head, dorsal fin, caudal fin, and ventral fin. Uluri is the name given to the merely wearing apparel worn past the women of the tribe, actually a hygienic protection against insects, rather than a garment. It consists of a folded piece of palm foliage in the shape of an equilateral triangle covering barely two square inches and catastrophe in a perineal band tied to a string which serves as a belt.

Professor Max Schmidt (tardily of the Ethnographical Museum at Berlin) has shown that both the uluri and mereshu patterns come nigh incidentally in plaited basket-work, which is the principal arts and crafts among the Xingu tribes. They arise specially from the use of light and nighttime strips of palm leaf crossing each other in various combinations. It is clear then that both names must have been applied to them later, subsequently the association of ideas had been angry past the appearance of the patterns.

In some such way, the particular technique used by the craftsmen has ofttimes led to the development of symbolic designs and of a specific ornamental style. Incidental resemblances can easily produce associations which requite a susceptible artist the impulse either to elaborate a natural object into a more complete representation of something which it already resembles, or simply to take it as a model. It has been suggested that the first artists of the Stone Historic period may accept been inspired by foreign natural forms, such as curiously shaped stones or rock promontories. One 24-hour interval in London, an antiquary showed me a stone in the shape of a bull's head, about two and a half inches long, which he held to be an example of paleolithic carving. This object actually had an amazing resemblance to a bull, but it proved on closer inspection to exist a natural formation, and the resemblance was purely accidental.

Not simply the class but besides the colour of the textile used in sculpture may influence the artist's inspiration. To take an example from a loftier cultural sphere: the Chinese, who have a special taste for working on hard stone of various colours (jade, agate, chalcedony, rose quartz, etc.), often adapt the incidental course and colouring of the stone in an incredibly good way In their carved vessels and figures. If past risk a piece of white agate reveals a cherry-red patch or vein, the rock cutter may produce a white vase surrounded by a cherry spray, and he then arranges it that the ruddy patch gives the outcome of the crimson. Similarly, a green vein may inspire him to correspond a frog or a lizard.

Generalisations are particularly dangerous when it comes to the suggestive upshot of technical forms. Amid the Indians of Guyana we find the aforementioned type of plaited basket work as in other pans of Due south America, simply here dark and low-cal strips are deliberately and very skillfully arranged to correspond brute figures (unremarkably jaguars and snakes), so that it is no longer a question of accidental effects and their subsequent interpretation.

An appreciation of the effects of artificial decoration to a certain caste extends beyond the limits of the human race. Man in his primeval uncultured state may have been impressed by beauty as it occurs in nature long before he started to produce artistic forms himself or to imitate the lines and figures occurring in his natural environment. Certain primitive peoples of today have an obvious appreciation of the beauties of nature, and in that location are some tribes in Melanesia who, in their decorative art, attempt to depict fifty-fifty such phenomena as the rainbow and the luminosity of the sea past symbolic ornaments and not in a naturalistic style. For the full appreciation of a work of art it should be seen equally far as possible in the setting for which information technology was created.

This is particularly true of primitive art because of its foreign and altogether different cultural groundwork. The statue of an ancestor or of a deity under African conditions of calorie-free, and intended to remain always in the gloom of a shrine or temple, cannot exist expected to produce the same effect when it has been removed from its original surroundings and displayed in a drinking glass chiffonier in a European room. Other light and shade effects may announced and they may be no less bonny, but they are not original and they add a foreign notation to the statue.

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