Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern “Primitivist” Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–8

Cohen, Joshua I.

doi:10.1080/00043079.2017.1252241

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…As Joshua I. Cohen recently observed, 'evolutionist thinkers generally believed threedimensional forms to be more "advanced" than two-dimensional ones, and were unsettled by African sculpture, which was often boldly volumetric but clearly (in their minds) not "advanced" because it was not naturalistic'. 21 It is important to note as well the kind of aesthetic dissonance necessary for perception of such things as artworks. At a remove in New York, and in the context of an American avant-garde interest in tribal art, did Duchamp's industrial objects allegorize the kinds of perceptual displacements necessary to perceive tribal artefacts as art?…”

Section: From Tribal Artefact To Readymade and Back Againmentioning

confidence: 99%

Readymade Primitivism: Marcel Duchamp, Dada, and African Art

Folland¹

2020

Art History

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It has long been axiomatic that the readymades of Marcel Duchamp exemplify the New York dada movement. But the mass‐produced objects that he famously chose and inscribed with his name were also a response to another paradigm of early twentieth‐century modernism: that of primitivism. Indeed, it is surprising to discover the extent to which the immediate culture from which the readymades emerged was one saturated in notions about the so‐called ‘primitive’, the result of a sudden influx of African art into New York in the years following the First World War. This essay re‐situates the readymades within this historical context and posits that they allegorized primitivism. It is equally argued that the profound impact of African art on the development of twentieth‐century modernism exceeds traditional art‐historical narratives. If Duchamp's primitivism has remained largely invisible it is because of the ways in which the primitive (as a set of ideas about art that are racial in origin) has been corralled within Western modernism.

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Section: From Tribal Artefact To Readymade and Back Againmentioning

confidence: 99%