Ever since the landmark exhibition “ ‘Primitivism’ and 20th Century Art” held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1984), the term Primitivism has primarily come to signify the appropriation of so-called “primitive” art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas by Modernist artists. This course investigates the protean nature of Primitivism through texts and images ranging across disciplines and m
edia. We will trace the various strategies of constructing the “other” through lithography, photography, museum displays and painting, ending with an in-depth examination of Picasso’s canonical Desmoiselles d’Avignon at MoMA. Combining art history with diverse literary texts, “scientific” treatises on race, and anthropological accounts, this course will deepen knowledge of the phenomenon of Primitivism by considering the continuities and ruptures in strategies of pictorial “othering” from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Case studies will offer competing definitions of what was deemed to be “primitive” at different moments isolating major themes including: the duality of the term “primitive” used as praise and critique, relationships between center and periphery, concomitant formulations of Nationalism and Colonialism, biological models and stylistic development, the interdependence of science and culture, and finally strategies of display in museums and private collections. This course presents opportunities to engage seminal works by Picasso and Gauguin in a new light but will also give students the chance to discover lesser-known treasures of medieval art at the Cloisters Museum and Library and provide a rare opportunity to visit a distinguished private collection of African art. Through these trajectories we will see that before Gauguin started painting Tahitian women on burlap sacks and Picasso first encountered African “fetishes” in a dusty museum, Primitivism already had a long history.
