ABSTRACT
His words seem to have a twofold meaning: both of listening to one’s ‘inner self, and of declaring where one is, one’s position (as a product of the historical process) in relation to those of others. Such an idea is particularly helpful in writing about ‘primitivism’. In spite of my desire for objectivity, I feel sure that what I write will inevitably be a personal analysis of where I stand in relation to a very large and complex cultural phenomenon which we are all somehow caught up in. For primitivism, to adapt a phrase of the art historian Max Dvorak, combines ‘problems peculiar to art’ with ‘momentous questions which confront every thinking person’.
