BiblioVault - Books about Primitivism

THE AMERICAN QUEST FOR THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH

Richard T. Hughes

University of Illinois Press, 1988

The dream of restoring primitive Christianity lies close to the core of the identity of some American denominations---Churches of Christ, Latter-day Saints, some Mennonites, and a variety of Holiness and Pentecostal denominations. But how can a return to ancient Christianity be sustained in a world increasingly driven by modernization? What meaning might such a vision have in the modern world? Twelve distinguished scholars explore these and related questions in this provocative book.

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The Indian Craze

Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915

Elizabeth Hutchinson

Duke University Press, 2009

In the early twentieth century, Native American baskets, blankets, and bowls could be purchased from department stores, “Indian stores,” dealers, and the U.S. government’s Indian schools. Men and women across the United States indulged in a widespread passion for collecting Native American art, which they displayed in domestic nooks called “Indian corners.” Elizabeth Hutchinson identifies this collecting as part of a larger “Indian craze” and links it to other activities such as the inclusion of Native American artifacts in art exhibitions sponsored by museums, arts and crafts societies, and World’s Fairs, and the use of indigenous handicrafts as models for non-Native artists exploring formal abstraction and emerging notions of artistic subjectivity. She argues that the Indian craze convinced policymakers that art was an aspect of “traditional” Native culture worth preserving, an attitude that continues to influence popular attitudes and federal legislation.

Illustrating her argument with images culled from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century publications, Hutchinson revises the standard history of the mainstream interest in Native American material culture as “art.” While many locate the development of this cross-cultural interest in the Southwest after the First World War, Hutchinson reveals that it began earlier and spread across the nation from west to east and from reservation to metropolis. She demonstrates that artists, teachers, and critics associated with the development of American modernism, including Arthur Wesley Dow and Gertrude Käsebier, were inspired by Native art. Native artists were also able to achieve some recognition as modern artists, as Hutchinson shows through her discussion of the Winnebago painter and educator Angel DeCora. By taking a transcultural approach, Hutchinson transforms our understanding of the role of Native Americans in modernist culture.

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Primitive Passions

Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy

Marianna Torgovnick

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Marianna Torgovnick's Primitive Passions investigates Westerners' profound attraction to cultures that we call "primitive." Torgovnick explores the stories of Carl Jung, Isak Dinesen, D. H. Lawrence, and Georgia O'Keefe and the ways they used the primitive as a medium for soul-searching and personal fulfillment. Brilliantly linking literature, art, psychology, and cultural studies, Primitive Passions provides insight into our very notion of the exotic.

"Primitive Passions intends to provoke thought, not to tell you what you already know and for that reason alone it's extraordinary."—Walter Kendrick, New York Times Book Review

"A powerfully argued, impassioned, and intelligent exploration of the 'primitive' in our culture and in ourselves. Like Marianna Torgovnick's previous work, it is certain to be much discussed and provocative."—Joyce Carol Oates

"An inspiring effort to bring gender to bear on matters of race, ethnic identity, and spirituality."—Susan Gubar

"A fascinating, wide-ranging and provocative tour of twentieth century Western culture."—Cynthia D. Schrager, Women's Review of Books

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Primitivism and Identity in Latin America

Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture

Erik Camayd-Freixas

University of Arizona Press, 2000

Although primitivism has received renewed attention in recent years, studies linking it with Latin America have been rare. This volume examines primitivism and its implications for contemporary debates on Latin American culture, literature, and arts, showing how Latin American subjects employ a Western construct to "return the gaze" of the outside world and redefine themselves in relation to modernity.

Examining such subjects as Julio Cortázar and Frida Kahlo and such topics as folk art and cinema, the volume brings together for the first time the views of scholars who are currently engaging the task of cultural studies from the standpoint of primitivism. These varied contributions include analyses of Latin American art in relation to social issues, popular culture, and official cultural policy; essays in cultural criticism touching on ethnic identity, racial politics, women's issues, and conflictive modernity; and analytical studies of primitivism's impact on narrative theory and practice, film, theater, and poetry.

This collection contributes offers a new perspective on a variety of significant debates in Latin American cultural studies and shows that the term primitive does not apply to these cultures as much as to our understanding of them.

CONTENTS
Paradise Subverted: The Invention of the Mexican Character / Roger Bartra
Between Sade and the Savage: Octavio Paz’s Aztecs / Amaryll Chanady
Under the Shadow of God: Roots of Primitivism in Early Colonial Mexico / Delia Annunziata Cosentino
Of Alebrijes and Ocumichos: Some Myths about Folk Art and Mexican Identity / Eli Bartra
Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic / Fernando Valerio-Holguín
Dialectics of Archaism and Modernity: Technique and Primitivism in Angel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina / José Eduardo González
Narrative Primitivism: Theory and Practice in Latin America / Erik Camayd-Freixas
Narrating the Other: Julio Cortázar’s "Axolotl" as Ethnographic Allegory / R. Lane Kauffmann
Jungle Fever: Primitivism in Environmentalism; Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima and the Romance of the Jungle / Jorge Marcone
Primitivism and Cultural Production: Future’s Memory; Native Peoples’ Voices in Latin American Society / Ivete Lara Camargos Walty
Primitive Bodies in Latin American Cinema: Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca / Luis Fernando Restrepo
Subliminal Body: Shamanism, Ancient Theater, and Ethnodrama / Gabriel Weisz
Primitivist Construction of Identity in the Work of Frida Kahlo / Wendy B. Faris
Mi andina y dulce Rita: Women, Indigenism, and the Avant-Garde in César Vallejo / Tace Megan Hedrick

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Primitivism in Modern Art

Robert Goldwater

Harvard University Press, 1986

This now classic study maps the profound effect of primitive art on modern, as well as the primitivizing strain in modern art itself. Robert Goldwater describes how and why works by primitive artists attracted modern painters and sculptors, and he delineates the differences between what is truly primitive or archaic and what intentionally embodies such elements. His analysis distinguishes the romanticism of Gauguin; an emotional primitivism exemplified by the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups in Germany; the intellectual primitivism of Picasso and Modigliani; and a “primitivism of the subconscious” in Miró, Klee, and Dali. Two of Goldwater’s related essays—“Judgments of Primitive Art, 1905–1965” and “Art History and Anthropology”—have been added for this new paperback edition.

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