Jewish Primitivism
Title | Jewish Primitivism PDF eBook |
Author | Samuel J. Spinner |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Pages | 338 |
Release | 2021-07-27 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1503628280 |
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.
"Primitivism" in 20th century art : affinity of the tribal and the modern ; [published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title shown at the following museums: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Dallas Museum of Art]
Title | "Primitivism" in 20th century art : affinity of the tribal and the modern ; [published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title shown at the following museums: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Dallas Museum of Art] PDF eBook |
Author | William Stanley Rubin |
Publisher | |
Pages | 343 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9780870705342 |
Published for an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984.
Literary Primitivism
Title | Literary Primitivism PDF eBook |
Author | Ben Etherington |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Pages | 300 |
Release | 2017-12-26 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1503604098 |
This book fundamentally rethinks a pervasive and controversial concept in literary criticism and the history of ideas. Primitivism has long been accepted as a transhistorical tendency of the "civilized" to idealize that primitive condition against which they define themselves. In the modern era, this has been a matter of the "West" projecting its primitivist fantasies onto non-Western "others." Arguing instead that primitivism was an aesthetic mode produced in reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism, and that the most intensively primitivist literary works were produced by imperialism's colonized subjects, the book overturns basic assumptions of the last two generations of literary scholarship. Against the grain, Ben Etherington contends that primitivism was an important, if vexed, utopian project rather than a form of racist discourse, a mode that emerged only when modern capitalism was at the point of subsuming all human communities into itself. The primitivist project was an attempt, through art, to recreate a "primitive" condition then perceived to be at its vanishing point. The first overview of this vast topic in forty years, Literary Primitivism maps out previous scholarly paradigms, provides a succinct and readable account of its own methodology, and presents critical readings of key writers, including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay.
Primitivist Modernism
Title | Primitivist Modernism PDF eBook |
Author | Sieglinde Lemke |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 192 |
Release | 1998-04-30 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0195344545 |
This book explores a rich cultural hybridity at the heart of transatlantic modernism. Focusing on cubism, jazz, and Josephine Baker's performance in the Danse Sauvage, Sieglinde Lemke uncovers a crucial history of white and black intercultural exchange, a phenomenon until now greatly obscured by a cloak of whiteness. Considering artists and critics such as Picasso, Alain Locke, Nancy Cunard, and Paul Whiteman, in addition to Baker, Lemke documents a potent cultural dialectic in which black artistic expression fertilized white modernism, just as white art forms helped shape the black modernism of Harlem and Paris. Coining the term primitivist modernism to designate the multicultural heritage of this century's artistic production, Lemke reveals the generative and germinating black cultural Other in the arts. She examines this neglected dimension in full, fascinating detail, blending literary theory, social history, and cultural analysis to document modernism's complex absorption of African culture and art. She details numerous ways in which African and African American forms (visual styles, musical idioms, black dialects) and fantasies (Baker's costume and dance, say) permeated high and mass culture on both sides of the Atlantic. So-called primitive art and high modernism; savage rhythms and European music hall culture; European and African American expressions in jazz; European primitivism and the racial awakenings of African American culture: paired and freshly examined by Lemke, these subjects stand revealed in their true interrelatedness. Insisting on modernism's two-way cultural flow, Lemke demonstrates not only that white modernism owes much of its symbolic capital to the black Other, but that black modernism built itself in part on white Euro-American models. Through superbly nuanced readings of individual texts and images (fifteen striking examples of which are reproduced in this handsome volume), Lemke reforms our understanding of modernism. She shows us, in clear, invigorating fashion, that transatlantic modernism in both its high and popular modes was significantly more diverse than commonly supposed. Students and scholars of modernism, African American studies, and cultural studies, and those with interests in twentieth-century art, dance, music, or literature, will find this book richly rewarding.
Primitivism in Modern Art
Title | Primitivism in Modern Art PDF eBook |
Author | Robert Goldwater |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 374 |
Release | 1986 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780674704909 |
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.
Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction
Title | Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction PDF eBook |
Author | Charles Harrison |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 280 |
Release | 1993-01-01 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780300055160 |
On art in the early 20th century
The Myth of Primitivism
Title | The Myth of Primitivism PDF eBook |
Author | Susan Hiller |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 597 |
Release | 2006-05-23 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1134980388 |
This book explores the fusion of myth, history and geography which leads to ideas of primitivism, and looks at their construction, interpretation and consumption in Western culture. Contextualized by Susan Hiller's introductions to each section, discussions range from the origins of cultural colonialism to eurocentric ideas of primitive societies, including the use of primitive culture in constructing national identities, and the appropriation of primitivist imagery in modernist art. The result is a controversial critique of art theory, practice and politics, and a major enquiry into the history of primitivism and its implications for contemporary culture.