Primitivism reconsidered (Part 1): A question of attitude

Abstract

The first writer to reinstate and elaborate a dialectical understanding of primitivism was Hal Foster, in a 1985 commentary on MoMA’s exhibition in the light of postcolonial theory entitled “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art.”41 Foster argued that a two-way process was in play: on the one hand, an increasing dissatisfaction with inherited aesthetic norms as noted by Schapiro, and on the other an unanticipated and traumatic shock to European aesthetic values as a side effect of colonialism. Other, briefer commentaries of the time went in the same direction.42 It was several years, however, before anyone took the obvious next step and related pre–World War I cubist primitivism to the anticolonialist movement of the same period. Patricia Leighten’s densely researched 1990 article “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” which she wrote in reaction to the MoMA exhibition, demonstrated that no one in Picasso’s immediate circle could have been unaware of colonialist atrocities in Central Africa; today one might add that earlier atrocities in North Africa would also have been difficult to ignore.43 Important though the article was, however, the impact of Leighten’s intervention was limited by its lack of a corresponding argument on artistic form. In fact, Leighten’s view of Picasso’s primitivist practice as a response to a stable category of primitive art effectively made the development of such an argument structurally impossible, acquiescing as it did to the assumption that tribal form lacked the capacity for modern agency.

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