Perhaps it is somewhat unusual for one of a chemistry undergraduate’s greatest passions to be tribal art. Despite this, it saddens me that my favourite varieties of African and Pacific Island art have never made much impact in Europe bar a brief burst of primitivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Primitivism may be a loaded term, and one that deserves its own discussion, but I ask you to look beyond the word for a brief moment and instead at its history.

It was a movement in which Western artists took inspiration and influence from non-Western cultures, or folk art. I find that there is nothing primitive about the manner of presentation or adaptation of tribal works. It transforms them into something new, showcasing their tremendous expression.

The ultimate work in primitivism has to be Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso, his masterful depiction of five prostitutes of Barcelona. The centre and centre-left figures are imitating Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave, a work Picasso spoke of being in profound love with. It is intriguing to me that the two figures’ heads on the painting’s right imitate tribal masks. He later described accidentally visiting an ethnographic gallery at the Palais du Trocadero and recalled, “I understood that it was very important. Something was happening to me, right. The masks weren’t like any other pieces of sculpture, not at all. They were magic things.” 

Was Picasso using the masks disdainfully? It appears the figures are presented as ugly, backward, outcasts of society. But perhaps the key contextual evidence is that he formed a collection of hundreds of tribal artifacts over his life, and in this work he values the meanings of the masks to the people who made them.

The head of the bottom right figure is based on a sickness mask of the Pende people of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the two figures on the right are generally believed to represent venereal disease. Another ethnic group to influence Picasso’s work was the Fang of Gabon, who have a strong spiritual tradition associated with the cult of fire. Whilst the colonialists and missionaries were trying to eliminate this culture, some good was done in the exposure of the tribal objects to Western culture.

We seldom know the response of the original people whose work was being imitated by primitivism, but in the case of somefolk art we certainly do. Take Grant Wood’s famous work American Gothic, which has been described as America’s ‘Mona Lisa’. Painted in 1930, it evokes an earlier, simpler time in rural Iowa and queries the rose-tinted view we hold about our past. In its day, the response to the painting was mixed, rural Iowans complained, finding it mocking and many of the critics who liked it thought it was intended to be patronising. However, it is only through being in the naïve style that the message of humility and the common man’s struggle comes through in the work.

Whether or not primitivism is tasteful, I think, depends on the respect given to the original work. Emil Nolde’s must see work is Masks (Still Life III). Some of his work are caricatures, some show truly tender emotion, but all show great variety and respect. The artworks that inspired him can in many cases still be seen today, as his source was the newly emerging ethnological museums of Berlin.

What about art in the present? I believe that neo-primitivism could say a lot about the present day, with indigenous cultures dying out fast and globalisation fast erasing their individuality. Also, I feel it would dovetail well with the current dominance in contemporary art of artists who disregard art history and conventional inspiration and often are trying to celebrate the universality of human themes. It is tribal art that truly conveys this wonderful unity of emotion.