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Interpreting Primitivism, Mass Culture and Modernism: The Making of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy

2000; Duke University Press; Issue: 80 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/488637

1558-1462

Mary Gluck,

Japanese History and Culture

When the French painter, Paul Gauguin, left for Tahiti in 1891, he helped create one of the enduring myths of twentieth-century modernism. He became the prototype of the modem artist as Primitive.1 Such a man, wrote the critic Octave Mirbeau just before Gauguin's departure from Paris, flees civilization, in order to discover a place outside of Europe nature is more in keeping with his dreams.2 Though few actually followed in Gauguin's footsteps,3 the motif of the Primitive caught on, becoming inseparably linked to avant-garde art and practice during the decade before World War I. Some artists chose to act out the role of the Primitive at artists' colonies, where they bathed in the nude with their models and learned to play with bows and arrows in imitation