Before the twentieth century, Western eyes were insensitive to the beauty and power of the art created by people of Africa, Oceania, and the New World. Primitive was a word used pejoratively to describe art that was unsophisticated, created by untrained artisans, and reputed to have little but ethnographic or anthropological interest. With the discovery of African and Oceanic masks and sculpture by such modern masters as Picasso, Matisse, and Derain in the years 1906-1910, tribal art assumed new aesthetic value. Discourse on the subject, however, was still confused about how to define primitive and how to describe such objects according to stylistic interpretations, in art historical terms. Anything that was “savage” and could not be clearly understood according to Western (Greek, Roman, Renaissance) definitions was relegated to the primitive category.
The early decades of this century saw the advent of both a more positive definition and a narrower scope, relegating primitive to a descriptive term for tribal arts. African, Oceanic, and North American Indian art fit into this category. But the art produced by New World cultures that culminated in the highly sophisticated and technically superb works of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec peoples bears no resemblance to tribal art.
The small volume under review is concerned primarily with aesthetics—the philosophy of art—as it relates to primitive art. It addresses the problems of why there is no aesthetics of primitive art and why there is no art history or art criticism of primitive art. It attempts to define primitive art—and primitive societies—and then to establish aesthetic criteria that can be applied to works in order to evaluate them stylistically.
The author establishes that primitive art is made by primitive societies, and then addresses two fundamental questions: “Is primitive art primitive?” and “Is primitive art art?” His main focus is Africa, but he also includes illustrations from Mexican villages—thereby continuing to confuse accepted definitions of primitive art as tribal. Mexican village culture may not display the architectural monuments of later societies in Mexico, but it is not tribal; and to group all developing societies as monolithic, static, and somehow homogeneous from Africa to the Pacific is incorrect. To look for stylistic (aesthetic) similarities in order to define African, Mexican, Oceanic, and American Indian within a specific category would imply that the early ceramic cultures of the Andes should also be included under this blanket. Where do the generalizations end?
Every object of art must first be understood in terms of its particular culture. Only then will its most distinct aesthetic and artistic elements be recognized. While this book’s premise is important and promises new insights into the particular problems confronting the art historian specializing in the field, the book actually accomplishes little. Long diatribes about aesthetic models and methodologies and repetitive discussions of the nature of primitive societies are frustrating and confusing to read.
