ABSTRACT
A hierarchical view of culture has over time had an effect on how the West has valued people’s practices. As a force, modernism’s primitive bent, beginning at the beginning of the twentieth century, began to value the art of tribal cultures as containing elements equally expressive yet unusual to Europe. Primitivism sought an alternative aesthetic, although as an artistic evolutionary path turned few of its discoveries into lasting concepts. The lament here is that non-Western cultures have been continually misconstrued. What I will call the “disconnect” of primitivism is that contiguous, changing, improvisatory ideas are presented as representative, fixed notions.
