ABSTRACT
PRIMITIVISM INVOLVES THE admiration of the virtues of cultures at an earlierstage of development. It can also involve the representation or expression of these virtues through the arts. An important facet of primitivism in the twentieth century was its relationship to the emergence of modernism. Modernism involves formal, technological and cultural “progress” that may create a sense of distance from the past. Primitivism, by rooting expression in primal or original impulses, potentially counters the dislocation that occurs within modernism. More generally, primitivism can be a source of ideas that contribute to stylistic change in the arts within any period. Primitivism was a major intercultural impulse in modernism, but it is not limited to that period. The attraction to the primitive remains an important aspect of culture today and was also strong during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before the rise of modernism.
