Yvan Goll’s Surrealism

 

Next month I mean to post an analysis of Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto.

 

     While Surrealism is generally identified with André Breton and defined by his manifestos, he was the inventor neither of the movement nor of many of its ideas.  The term had been used in May 1917 by Apollinaire in his program notes for Cocteau’s Parade (a legendary production that featured the work of Massine, Picasso, and Satie) and again a month later for Apollinaire’s own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias.  In October of the same year, only weeks before Breton published his first manifesto, Yvan Goll included an unsigned manifesto he had written as the first article in  his journal Surréalisme.  The inaugural issue which included contributions from Apollinaire, Reverdy, Crevel, Jean Painlevé, and Robert Delaunay among others, turned out to be the only one.  The vagaries of literary fashion have resulted in Breton’s manifestos being reprinted and cited countless times, while Goll’s is quite difficult to find.  After failing to find any English translation, I made my own.

     Both Breton and Goll had a band of partisans and the meaning of the term Surrealism was debated for a time in journals and cafés, but this dispute arose as much from friendships and early associations as from disagreements about theory.  (In fact, the Surrealist group always included artists with a wide variety of styles.)  Goll, born Isaac Lang in Alsace-Lorraine, went on to write Expressionist plays and screenplays and to translate Joyce’s Ulysses.  His books of poetry were illustrated by such artists as by  Georg Grosz, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger (Der Neue Orpheus) and Pablo Picasso (Élégie d'Ihpetonga suivi des masques de cendre).

     Goll’s version of Surrealism has in common with Breton’s the preference for unlikely metaphor, the sort of juxtaposition identified with Lautréamont’s formula from Les Chants de Maldoror: “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”  In Goll’s words “The most beautiful images are those that bring together bits of reality far distant from one another as directly as swiftly as possible.”  This emphasis on the vividly presented image constitutes the modernity of the technique he prescribes, emphasized by his requirement that poetry should be “direct” and “intense” and avoid “abstract or second-hand notions” such as “logic, aesthetic theory, grammatical effects, and word-play” (while apparently allowing his own governing theory).

     Goll takes the opposite of Breton’s position from the start, however, when he acknowledges “reality” as “the basis for all great art.”  Indeed, all art might equally be described as Goll defines surrealism, as the “transposing of reality into a higher plan,” in other words, the phenomenal world filtered through the artist’s consciousness.  Art, he maintains, is put together out of the “raw material” of experience like the wallpaper included in a Cubist collage or the use of overheard talk mentioned by Max Jacob, or, indeed, the sources of any writer who makes something new based on experience.

     Goll dismisses popular entertainment, for him an oddly broad term covering not only both ballet and the music hall, but “all curious and picturesque art, art founded on eroticism and exoticism, strange art, unsettled art, frivolous and decadent art” as well.  He rejects Dada as well which for him consists of simply seeking to épater les bourgeois. 

     Most pointedly he condemns Breton’s Surrealism without naming his rival, saying that it, too, aims only at scandal and sensation and, with its fascination with dreams, erroneously makes of Freud “a new Muse.”  Goll insists as an axiom that “our physical organism” “instructs us that reality is always right” and “that life is truer than thought.”

   The fact is that his assertion that modern art centers on the image has proven substantially true in terms of the history of poetry.  From the Imagists through the Objectivists and later the practitioners of what some call the “deep image” and some “leaping images” this focus remained central for much of the twentieth century.  

     Goll’s place in the origin of Surrealism has been largely obscured by Breton’s success in assuming the role of leader of the Surrealist movement, with the authority to define the meaning of the term.  Yet both as a poet and as a critic Goll merits the attention of the historian of modern art and in particular of the avant-garde.  Evaluation of the following manifesto is perhaps the initial step in reassessing his significance in the art of the twentieth century.

 

 

 

 

Yvan Goll’s Surrealist Manifesto

 

     Reality is the basis of all great art.  Without it there is no life, no substance. Reality is the earth under our feet and the sky over our heads.

     Everything that the artist creates has an origin in nature. The Cubists, when they were new, understood that, as humble as the purest primitives, they lowered themselves radically into the simplest object, into what is valueless, and went so far as to stick a piece of wallpaper onto a painting, in all its reality.

     This transposing of reality into a higher (artistic) plan constitutes surrealism.

     Surrealism is a concept arising from Guillaume Apollinaire.  Looking at his poetic body of work, we find the same elements as in the earliest cubists: the words of everyday life possess for him a “strange magic” and it is with these, the raw material of writing, that he worked.  Max Jacob tells how one day he simply noted down words and phrases he overheard on the street and made of them a poem.

        With this raw material alone, he formed poetic images.  Today the image is the criterion for good poetry.  The rapidity of association between the first and second impression constitutes the quality of the image. 

    The first poet observed, “The sky is blue.”  Somewhat later, another declared, “Your eyes are blue like the sky.”  A good while later another ventured to say, “You have the sky in your eyes.”   A modern will cry out, “Your heavenly eyes!”  The most beautiful images are those that bring together bits of reality far distant from one another as directly as swiftly as possible. 

     Thus the image has become the most appreciated element in modern poetry.  Before the beginning of the twentieth century it was the ear that determined the quality of poetry: rhythm, sonority, cadence, alliteration, rhyme, all are for the ear.  In the last twenty years, the eye has had its revenge.  It is the century of movies.  We communicate better with visual signs.  And it is speed that makes quality today.

     Art is an emanation of human life and the human organism.  Surrealism, the expression of our own age, takes into account takes into account the symptoms that characterize our time: it is direct, intense, and it pushes back against those arts that rest on abstract or second-hand notions: logic, aesthetic theory, grammatical effects, and word-play.

     Surrealism would not be satisfied to be the mode of expression of a coterie or a country: it will be international; it will absorb all the “isms” that share Europe and will gather up the vital components of each.

     Surrealism is a vast movement in our time.  It signifies health and will with ease hold off the tendencies to decomposition and morbidity that come up wherever something is being built.

     The art of entertainment, of the ballet and the music hall, all curious and picturesque art, art founded on eroticism and exoticism, strange art, unsettled art, frivolous and decadent art will soon cease to amuse a generation that, after the war, needed only to forget.

      And the counterfeit of Surrealism which some ex-Dadas dreamed up to continue to shock the bourgeoisie, will soon be out of circulation.

     They affirm “the omnipotence of the dream” and make of Freud a new Muse.  That Dr. Freud makes use of dreams to cure highly terrestrial problems is all very well.  But to apply his doctrines to the world of poetry, is that not to confound art and psychiatry?

    Their concept of a “psychic mechanism based on the dream and the free play of thought” can never be strong enough to conquer our physical organism, which instructs us that reality is always right, and that life is truer than thought.

       Our surrealism recovers nature, the primal emotions of man, and proceeds, with entirely new artistic material, toward creation, toward an act of will.

Morning Glories on the Make

 

     Why are flowers universally considered beautiful?  Though a functional part of nature, enabling sexual reproduction, flowers are favorite images in poetry and visual art in all parts of the world.  As compared with leaves or stems, they are, of course, showy things, with extravagant forms, colors, and even fragrances all of which are considered attractive.  Surely, for one who suspects that aesthetics derives from functional use, flowers may be significant to people’s survival, though they are rarely eaten, because they are the promise of fruit to come.   As the flowering parts are sexual organs, the plants, it seems, are flaunting their reproductive capacity in the most flamboyant display possible.  Flowers bring the pleasure of a reinforced confidence that nature is percolating with vigor throughout, and that, on the most basic level, dinners need never cease.  Their showy sexuality is the dynamo propelling fertility.  Unsurprisingly, flowers have become part of the imagery and the social practice of romantic love, from “I am the Rose of Sharon” to contemporary St. Valentine’s Day marketing.  In nature the flowers’ reproductive organs communicate with other flowers as well as with birds, insects, and humans.  The faith of the flower in a generation to come is expressed in overdetermination to the point of glory.  

     The birds attracted to this floral display have their own costumes and rituals to celebrate their own affairs.  Such behavior is familiar to everyone who watches nature films.  The inconvenience of the peacock’s magnificent tail is undeniable at all times when the bird is not engaged in courting.  The bowerbirds not only build elaborate structures; they decorate them with shiny or brightly colored objects and perform dance movements to attract females.  Male jumping spiders twist their bodies to display colored or iridescent hairs (the most spectacular is called the peacock spider) while hopping about seductively and singing in distinctive tones.  Some have areas of ultraviolet reflectance which they also flaunt just as some flowers attract bird visitors through similar ultraviolet flashes).  Even the ordinary house fly cavorts before his love object with the hope of soliciting the female’s cooperation.  Egg-laying is the functional goal of the blue-footed boobies’ dance, or the solemn movements of pirouetting sandhill cranes, or Costa’s hummingbirds swooping and diving and then suddenly flashing a startling display of radially symmetrical purple face feathers, yet what the animal does is only secondarily, one might say symbolically, related to reproduction, rather like human fetishes. 

     Nature employs symbols to perpetuate itself, and it infuses those symbols with ostentatious passion by using the brightest colors, the most inventive forms, the most conspicuous cues.  The birds are surely expressing enthusiasm; I suspect the flowers may be as well.     

     Reproduction is the Aristotelean final cause of all this folderol, but the practical seems all but lost in magnificent symbolic clothing.  If the drive to pass on their DNA is what leads animals and plants to express themselves so creatively, one might suspect a similar goal lies at the root of human art.  While it may be undeniable that many artists have successfully pursued sexual variety, it remains unclear whether they developed their skills in order to provide variety in the bedroom. 

     I once witnessed a festival in Ogwa in Edo State, Nigeria in which, accompanied only by percussion of a drum ensemble, individual young men took turns doing acrobatic dances not unlike breakdancing that surely were meant here not only to satisfy the local deities but also to impress the young women of their acquaintance.  Though such an outright connection is rare, to Freud not only art but energy in general originates in the libido.  In a classic essay in 1910 he argued that the work of Leonardo da Vinci was entirely the result of sublimation after he had recoiled in horror from his own sexuality. 

     But can it be called sublimation when so often eros is explicitly invoked in art?  Vast amounts of love poetry have been produced (though in volume it may yet be outweighed by religious poetry).  I once worked in a prison library where a book in high demand, kept safely behind the counter, was called Pearls of Love.  It was a collection of romantic poetry from which the inmates copied warm passages to include in letters to their lovers.  Were the countless sculptures of naked women from the Venus of Willendorf to Jeff Koons’ Woman in Tub created from purely aesthetic motives?  Would Venus look equally beautiful to an alien who reproduces through budding? 

     Most would agree that a hungry person is unduly influenced by circumstance, who quite sincerely, while salivating, thinks that a photograph of a beefsteak the most beautiful thing in the world.  One suspects that the judgement would not survive a good meal.  Yet eros can hardly fail to be present when one person regards a figure of another. 

    Some artists are emphatic.  Van Gogh said, “There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” To Klimt “all art is erotic” and those who most appreciate his work might be likely to agree, while Picasso is said to have oracularly declared “sex and art are the same.”  Matisse said in an interview that “Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love.”  A link between artistic practice and appeal as a lover is encoded in popular art as well including Burgess Meredith’s character in That Uncertain Feeling, Lute the “troubadour” in the comic strip Hägar the Horrible, and the macho posturing of heavy metal guitarists.

    Even if the theme of a poem, painting, dance, or tune has nothing whatever to do with love or sexuality, surely in art where the maker like a god shapes a small universe with a free hand such a fundamental human element of nature must be present.   Just as dreams often take a sexual turn, the fantasies that we have learned to project for each other’ amusement, our art, is inevitably lit with some level of erotic glow.  Every text has a sexual meaning, just as every text might be read psychologically, or metaphysically, or socially, or self-reflectively, yet, for most humans, the sexual interpretation may have a certain primacy, an inside track.  Perhaps among us hominids who like to think of ourselves as “higher,” just as among the birds and the bees and the flowering plants, art is a secondary sexual characteristic.

Visions of Vorticism: Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound

 

Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915 (1961-62) by William Roberts. Representing Cuthbert Hamilton, Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, Frederick Etchels, and Edwatd Wadsworth.

  

     Like other self-conscious schools of twentieth century modernism, Vorticism was imprecisely defined by its inventors, inevitably then producing work of considerable variety.   Though the concept of the vortex had been first used by Ezra Pound to refer to some contemporary art and poetry, suggesting the site of the greatest concentration of energy, the idea of a Vorticist movement emerged publicly with Wyndham Lewis’s Blast in 1915 and the show at the Doré Galleries in London the same year. [1]  With an eye on being the most avant-garde of the avant-gardes, Lewis had sought to distinguish himself from recognized schools, maintaining the superiority of his own version of the geometric designs of Cubism, encouraging abstraction energized by a certain modern dynamic sometimes labeled “hard-edged,” resembling Futurism with an interest in industry and violence.   Lewis’s own art and that of others who exhibited as Vorticists – the original show included Lewis, Jessica Dismorr, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Frederick Etchells, and Edward Wadsworth [2] -- combined Cubist fragmentation of reality with imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment.  The idea of Vorticism itself adds little to understanding of the works from that show or of Pound’s poetry of the time.  Lifting the banner of a militant movement, however, l did provide an arena for avant-garde posturing by both Lewis and Pound, entertaining in itself, but shedding limited light on their art.   

      The investigation into the question of to what extent, if any, these artists constituted a coherent group would seem to depend primarily on their adherence to the principles of Vorticism.  As it happens, the same year of the Vorticist exhibition, Lewis published a manifesto in his journal Blast. [3]  The reader might be baffled to find virtually no reference to visual art in this document.  Its attention-getting typography reinforces the notion of volume implied by the publication’s title, but the shouting does not seem to add up to much of a program.  The emphasis is rather on playing the bohemian viva voce, satirizing the priggish and the sentimental, the conventional and the bourgeois, while claiming for England (and in that way for himself) the leadership of modern art.  Lewis here constructs a persona by taking center stage to enact the role of the modern artist.

     There are artistic references, all polemical, in the series of declarations opening the inaugural and penultimate issue of Blast titled “Long Live the Vortex!”  Bearing the banner of the avant-garde holds for Lewis a critical significance.  Due to the value he places in novelty, he declares that “education (art education and general education) tends to destroy the creative instinct,” though his own theory remains obscure, apart from a commitment “to destroy politeness, standardization, and academic, that is civilized, vision” and to express “vivid and violent ideas.”  He arbitrarily claims that “great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really fine artist have [sic] a strong traditional vein.”  Precisely what this might mean is unexpressed, except that Vorticist art must engage “the Reality of the Present,” shaped by the artist acting as an individual.

     With a self-conscious deprecation of realism, he maintains that Vorticism means to appeal to “every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL” in spite of the fact that he is well aware that the overwhelming majority of the populace will never hear the word.  He emphasizes this vague universality, concluding with the summary statement: “Blast presents an art of individuals,” a proposition acceptable to most Romantic and post-Romantic critics.  In an equally ill-defined clue to the identity of Vorticism, he anticipates Surrealism, saying “WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY – their stupidity, animalism, and dreams.” [4] 

     Whatever this may mean, he fears that his movement might be confused with Futurism which he repeatedly condemns as “sensational and sentimental,” no advance at all, but merely “the latest form of Impressionism.”  His own predilections for fascism made him no more sympathetic to Mussolini’s cheerleader.  He ridicules the Italian’s interest in industrial and mechanical imagery, saying “Marinetteism” [sic] amounts to nothing but “Automobilism.”  His rivals, though somewhat similar to Lewis to outsiders, are not to him even second-rate; they are contemptible

     Lewis compensates for the fact that Vorticism may seem to some a splinter of a faction by jauntily speculating on the pillars of society becoming Vorticists: Lloyd George, shortly to become prime minister, Lady Mond, Baroness Melchett, and perhaps even the king.  The effect of the suggestion, of course, is to emphasize its unlikeliness and thus to highlight Lewis’s counter-cultural credentials.

     “Long Live the Vortex!” is followed by a lengthy manifesto, or series of manifestoes.  The first eighteen pages are a compilation of blessings and curses of things English and French, an amusing and typographically spectacular definition, I suppose, of Lewis’s specific individuality.  Much of this content is satirical or otherwise humorous, though certain significant patterns emerge.  English wet weather and politeness are both rather predictably condemned, but so are England’s “socialist-playwright” and “tonks.”  Considering France he curses “gallic gush,” the Arc de Triomphe, and France’s status as a “Mecca for Americans” and for many an “amative German professor.”  The years 1837 to 1900, the period of “bourgeois Victorian vistas” are denounced as a whole, though he blesses Britain’s “seafarers” expressing particular fondness for their “restless machines.”  Having blasted “humour” in one section, he returns to bless it a few pages later.  In England the “art-pimp” is blasted though with no description by which he might be identified, while in France a similarly mysterious “bad music” is condemned.  The reader is clearly dealing with a self-identified enfant terrible, more eager to provoke than to present a new view of artistic practice.  The address of Blast is, after all, the Rebel Art Centre, implying that the most important element in Lewis’s Vorticist program is rebellion.

     A seven-part document titled “Manifesto” follows.  Part I sheds little new light on artistic practice, but rather aims to evoke and destroy dualities in the same pronouncements.  This principle is restated in several forms.  The first item says “Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves.”  Next, starting from “opposite statements of a chosen world,” the Vorticist wishes to set up a “violent structure” between the extremes.  Thus “we discharge ourselves on both sides.”  Etc.  What this might mean in terms of practice or connoisseurship remains obscure.

     Perhaps in illustration of this dialectic, Lewis proceeds, after establishing England’s reputation as “anti-artistic,” to assert that this is the very reason “why England produces such good artists.”   Hints of appropriate subject matter emerge as “the Art-instinct is permanently primitive,” finding “stimulus” in a chaos of imperfection, discord, etc.,” a “savage” wholly unlike any “Futurist individual of Mr. Marinetti’s limited imagination.”  The modern artist will derive material from “this enormous, jangling, journalistic fairy desert of modern life” as artists of the past had been inspired by nature.   In spite of the world’s being “a fairy desert,” Lewis laments the passing of fairies and offers a somewhat premature elegy for the Spanish bullfight.  Fruitful imaginative resources, “springs of creation,” remain, however, characterized by “mysticism,” “gladiatorial instincts,” and “blood and asceticism.” 

     Shakespeare embodies a certain British “mysticism, madness, and delicacy” uniting comedy and tragedy.  Lewis indulges in his peculiar version of chauvinism by claiming that the “Modern World” as a whole is due to “Anglo-Saxon genius,” making the English the natural practitioners of the imagery of “machinery, trains, steamships” “buildings, bridges, and works.”  They are “the inventors” of modern “bareness and hardness,” and the enemies of “Romanticism,” while the similar modernism of the Futurists is to him spurious, “romantic and sentimental,” nothing but “gush.”  The tone of the journal is clear from the next feature, poetry from Ezra Pound, beginning with his “Salutation the Third” which opens, “Let us deride the smugness of ‘the Times’:/ GUFFAW!”

     Apart from his considerable brio in presenting an individualistic catalogue of preferences somewhat resembling the lists of the hip and the non-hip Norman Mailer compiled for the Village Voice and his generalized bad boy persona the reader may yet wonder just what a Vorticist work of art looks like.  The show at the Doré Gallery perforce answered that question and, in Lewis’s “Note for Catalogue” [7] of the exhibition, he let the cat peek just a bit out of the bag.  He opens with an adroit faux naïf use of passive voice, referring to “painters, to whom the name Vorticist has been given” (as though he and Pound had not concocted the movement).  He has not dropped his rivalry with Marinetti, referring to the “fuss and hysterics of the Futurists,” but he is now at pains to distinguish himself from another rival as well, Picasso in whose work he finds “passivity” (Lewis used all capitals) in contrast to Vorticist “activity.”  To him Picasso is a “dressmaker” who simply “matches little bits of stuff he finds lying about. He puts no life into the pieces of cloth or paper he sticks side by side, but rather contemplates their beauty.”

      The heart of Lewis’s remarks in this introduction to the exhibition, however, stresses abstraction rather than dynamism.

The impression received on a hot afternoon on the quays of some port, made up of the smell of tar and fish, the heat of the sun, the history of the place, cannot be conveyed by any imitation of a corner of it. The influences weld themselves into an hallucination or dream (which all the highest art has always been) with a mathematic of its own.   

He criticizes naturalistic or academic painting the goal of which is what was later called photorealism, concluding that abstraction is the only adequate method of conveying his vision.  His whimsy has not altogether departed.  He suggests that if advertisements were abstract “the effect architecturally would be much better, and the Public taste could thus be educated in a popular way to appreciate the essentials of design better than picture-galleries have ever done.”  As a final caprice, he implies that Vorticism is a contribution to the British war effort in contending against German Kultur.  In terms of actual Vorticist characteristics, gallery-goers are offered only in fact abstraction as a kind of higher symbolism and the idea of energy.

     While Blast had been primarily a counter-cultural entertainment, an irreverent eruption making considerable noise while shedding little light, the exhibit allowed Lewis to define the “movement” with bit more specificity.  Today descriptions of Vorticist art generally limit themselves to prescribing “hard-edged abstraction” allied on the one hand with Cubist forms and on the other with Futurist themes. 

     The movement’s other parent, however, was Ezra Pound whose primary concern was literary.  Pound argues in his essay “Vortex” [8] for a sort of abstraction in literature as well as visual art, quoting with approval Pater’s line that “all arts approach the conditions of music.” He elaborates.

It is no more ridiculous that a person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours, than that they should receive or convey such emotion by an arrangement of musical notes.

 For him consciousness is “the primary pigment,” and the artist is reproducing a state of mind, not an observed external scene.  Just as poetry tends toward the pleasures of music, music answers and, to him, “music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech.”  Everything is symbolic.  “The vorticist relies not upon similarity or analogy, not upon likeness or mimicry.”  Realism is a “secondary application”

     In Pound’s Vorticist poetry prettiness, too, is not the focus. 

Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.

In accordance with Pound’s admiration for craft, the primary aim for him is formal, a value highlighted by his claim (which he immediately moderates) that “Lewis is Bach.” 

Music was vorticist in the Bach-Mozart period, before it went off into romance and sentiment and description. A new vorticist music would come from a new computation of the mathematics of harmony, not from a mimetic representation of dead cats in a fog-horn, alias noise-tuners.

     Far from dropping Imagisme for Vorticism, he built on its foundation.  Far from being left behind, the image generates the vortex.  For him “THE IMAGE IS NOT an idea,” and presumably not mere decoration either. He characterizes it using formal terms, beginning with the word vortex itself.  To Pound the vortex is “a radiant node or cluster.”  His images are meant neither to be symbols requiring decoding nor decorative elements, but rather vortices, formal patterns “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”  Even the sort of images he admired in East Asian poetry become, through this lens, vorticist nodes of activity in spite of their apparent stillness.   Rhythms alone are, like music, capable of communicating anything.  “I believe that every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it.”

     Physicists in the early twentieth century found, upon close examination of material reality, that its apparent solidity conceals teeming activity and extraordinary potential energy on the subatomic level.  At the time of Vorticism scientists were beginning to dig deeper yet, uncovering first the mysteries of relativity and then those of quantum mechanics.   By analogy the Vorticist claimed to be likewise looking into the very essence of things. 

     Pound, then, argues for the formal values of abstraction while maintaining a practice of imagism, asserting what to him  are essentially artistic values against thematics.  He republishes his principles of Imagism which have now become principles of Vorticism as well. [9] He aspires to pass beyond the mild beauty of the picturesque, beyond the appeal of the concrete specific, to reach a glimpse of the tumultuous, sometimes awe-inspiring energy of the vortex.   He repeats at the same time Lewis’s conviction that Vorticism must be altogether au courant, in the very forefront of innovation.  “Vortex is the present, the moment of the creation of the future.”

     To visualize Vorticism as the central modern art movement he situates it among others, Marinetti, Picasso, and Kandinsky in particular.  He declares defiantly that Marinetti “did not set on the egg that hatched me,” he disparages Marinetti’s Futurism as merely “a sort of accelerated  impressionism.”  For him all non-Vorticist work, “every work that is not poised in this whirlpool” [i.e., the vortex) “is a corpse”.

     On the other hand he admires the artists most associated with abstraction and Cubism, Kandinsky and Picasso, and is willing to accept descent in their lineage.  “Picasso, Kandinski, father and mother, classicism and romanticism of the of the [Vorticist] movement.”  In associating Picasso with a sort of “classicism,” he may have been recognizing the tendency toward poised serenity in composition of many of Picasso’s Cubist work during the World War I period even before what art historians often label his ”classical” phase. 

     To Kandinsky he attributed the principle that content is quite irrelevant.  “An artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us.”  This insistence on abstraction is shared by Lewis and Pound and is perhaps the chief discernable principle of Vorticism. 

     The documents here analyzed preserve the idea of the movement, though Lewis’s visual works might well be subsumed under other labels.  Vorticism is ever elusive since it “never presented a coherent point of view.” [11]  A critical article wonders “on what basis we can call any work of art ‘Vorticist,’” adding  “It is difficult to imagine any sentence as an example of the Vorticist style, or any visual style in painting.”  A description of Vorticist work might be equally applied to paintings by Kandinsky or Picasso or, indeed, to “most of the paintings created between 1907 and 1915 by the avant-garde.”   Vorticist poetry seems to be in an even worse case.  Even when looking at Pound’s own work, the Vorticist character “remains elusive.” [10]  another investigator says that, in general, Vorticism “failed miserably,” and “left no permanent traces on  Western styles of art.”   “If few understood it then,” the writer concludes, “it is even more obscure now.” [12]

     Vorticism, though occasioned perhaps more by Lewis’s break with Roger Fry’s Omega group and Pound’s rambunctious free-lance troublemaking than by theoretical considerations, enjoyed a brief efflorescence.  At its crest, though, the movement had little to distinguish it from the longer-lived trends of Imagism and Cubism.  Vorticism’s founders, much as they looked down upon Marinetti, shared with him a noxious politics that has discouraged discipleship.  Yet for a time Vorticism seized the spotlight of the art world, though this most often meant attracting scorn.  The Daily Mail commented that “Almost any child between the ages of eight months and three years can be a first rate Vorticist if it is given some lightly coloured paints, bottle of blacking and mama’s new white tablecloth.” [13]  Such philistinism is by no means entailed by a critique of Vorticism.  Lewis’s pictures and Pound’s poems retain a lasting value and Blast will remain a marvel, a pyrotechnic display that energizes and amuses still after more than a hundred years, a reminder of a time when the Bohemian avant-garde still possessed the power to shock and, with that sometimes, to stimulate thinking.    

 

 

1.  This was followed by a New York show at the Penguin Club the same year1915.  The group then lost coherence, though elements recoalesced as Group X (which exhibited in 1920).  Since then, major shows focusing on Vorticism as a historic phenomenon, first at the Tate in 1956, and since at the Estorick Collection in 2004, and again at the Tate in 2011. 

2.  Others of the circle included Lawrence Atkinson, Cuthbert Hamilton, and Sir Jacob Epstein.

3.  Though the manifesto bears eleven signatures, it is thought to have been written by Lewis.

4.  Capitals in the original.  Following this statement, however, Lewis’s capitalization seems impressionistic and improvisatory, guided by design more than content.  To avoid an unpleasantly busy page, I shall silently return other cited phrases to conventional capitalization. 

5.  Reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, p. 364-6 where the reader learns that “Schrodinger’s model of the atom,” “differential calculus,” and Catholic things are hip, while  “Bohr’s model of the atom,” “analytic geometry,” and what is Protestant are square. 

6.  Whether another critic might deem “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” passive may seem dubious, though many of the artists’ Cubist works are serenely composed and he was shortly to enter what art historians call his neo-classical period.

7.  Available online at https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/exhibition/724.

8.  “Vorticism,”  The Fortnightly Review, September 1914.  Available at https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/.

9.  “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist,” Poetry Magazine,z March 1913. 

10.  William C. Lipke and Bernard W. Rozran, “Ezra Pound and Vorticism: A Polite Blast,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1966).

11.  Arthur J. Sabatini, “Vorticism Revitalized,” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Summer 2015).

12.  Herbert N. Schneidau, “Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound.”  Modern Philology, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Feb., 1968).

13.  Quoted in  Andrew Thacker “Blasting Beyond Britain,” Fortnightly Review, August 24, 2011.

The Power of Picasso’s Sculpture

     The current show of Picasso’s sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art provides, as all who have commented have noted, a rare opportunity to have a fresh look at the work of the artist who dominated so much of the twentieth century. A considerable number of the works are being shown for the first time in this country, many on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris. The artist was not trained in sculpture, and he kept many of his three-dimensional works in his own possession – they are often prominent in photographs of his studio. Though never for long a central focus of his work, he regularly returned to work in bronze, pottery, and plaster, often using found objects throughout his lengthy career, and viewing this extraordinary collection of objects does not so much as inspire new insights as remind the critic of why Picasso’s oeuvre is so much more powerful than much art since. The great innovator exemplifies the most classic values: emotional strength, vitality, traditional formal aesthetics, and a sort of soaring and unpredictable spirit that might emerge in one moment as wit and in another as insight. Even while participating in Cubism, primitivism, Surrealism, and socially conscious art, Picasso reminds us with the deft dodges and relentless dashes of his unique sensibility. His work could be invigorated by a manifesto yet it would never be contained within the confines of any theoretical program. In our own belatedness, even measured against a hundred years ago, I fear that nothing retains the power to arrest the viewer in the same way. Even were such impact possible today, few artists could make the kind of commanding use of space as one sees Picasso doing here in brand new ways in every room of the exhibit.
     As abstraction arose in Dada and came to dominance in New York following World War II, Picasso explored its possibilities but always retained links to figuration. No admirer of Arp’s voluptuously biomorphic forms or Brancusi’s elegant imaginative leaps can doubt the potential for emotional power in altogether abstract work (familiar as well to listeners to Beethoven quartets), but for Picasso ever since his Cubist portraits, the tension between the artist’s view of a real-world object and the viewer’s is a significant element in the work . Drawing a pencil line on a brown paper bag, piling sand in the middle of a room, or sitting opposite a stranger in a gallery (no matter how prestigious the space) do not demand any investment of artistic intention nor can they offer significant aesthetic pleasure.
     One hundred and forty works, nearly one fifth of Picasso’s sculptures, are on display in New York. Every viewer will have passionate favorites. Convinced that the value of each work of art is not inherent and automatic but rather is constituted in the consumer’s encounter with it, the most precise data on this show is perhaps contained in my reactions to individual pieces.
     Guitar (1914) is a Cubist painting but burst into three dimensions, its refraction of representation combatted by its utter poise in placement, its serene symmetry reminiscent of great paintings such as the 1932 painting Girl Before a Mirror or even, for all its dynamic tension, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907. The use of a musical instrument as subject is emblematic of the artist’s life in Montmartre, suggesting art, beauty, leisure, cafes, and dance. Rendered in sheet metal and wire, as much assemblage as sculpture, its position hanging on the wall makes it seem partly a canvas while its shadows in the clear gallery lighting insist on its volume, thrust, and harmonic balance. The artist has established a firm beachhead on the margins of genre itself.
     The painted bronze absinthe glasses of 1914 (with ready-made tin spoons), on the other hand, are a tour de force of anti-art, constructed in defiance of tidy art school design prettiness. The “glass” itself with its Cubist multiplication of surfaces has become clunky and crude, quite unlike those made of glass. They are painted with simple designs that might have come from the most archaic pottery. Yet their impression as one views each of the six in turn accumulates to mutate becoming complex, playful, and dynamic. The viewer recalls the same object surrounded by other artifacts of cafe life in the 1911 painting Glass of Absinthe.
     Woman in the Garden( 1929-30), one of the rejected designs the artist submitted for Apollinaire’s gravesite, is likewise elegant and lyrical. The inherently weighty iron looks as though it is blowing in the wind and might take off at any moment. Open space is an element at least as important as metal here, and many of the iron portions are so thin as to approach the character of lines. Picasso again displays wit and discernment in his use of found objects and includes rounded forms in the shape of philodendron leaves to soften the otherwise prickly texture of a piece that, in its total impact, is suggestive of the poet’s energetic imagination or of a soul in flight.
     The Bull (1958) is breathtaking: at once monumental in the husky torso and large head yet lyrical as any line drawing in the curves of leg and horn. And in the middle of the elegance every bit as demanding as a Matisse design, a pair of witty complications compete for attention: the infantile three dots for a face gazing at the viewer from archaic times and childhood and a tree branch, seemingly casual but in fact the axis of the composition. Here one sees art brut and objets trouvés as no mere theoretical assertions but as tools in the artist’s inventory of possibilities, intentionally employed to produce a calculated effect that maximizes allusive associations ranging from Neolithic bullheads through the Minotaur to Catalan bullfighting and the rich possibilities offered by parallels in the artist’s earlier and later work, including other pieces in the same exhibit: the bull’s head made of a bicycle handlebars and seat and a ceramic bull seemingly from the dawn of time with beautifully swelling forms and topped with schematic designs.
     I appreciate the Head of a Warrior (1933) with its look of goofy eternal outrage, its tennis balls for eyes and off-kilter Trojan helmet, but the plaster heads of Marie-Thérèse seem to me less eloquent. The deformation in the 1931-2 Head of a Woman plasters strike me as evasive or perhaps just wandering. In my eyes the one The Museum of Modern Art owns is the best of the lot, its evocation of antiquity freshened and flavored by Cubism and Surrealism. On the whole, though, I prefer the classically balanced painting of the same model from 1932-4 (and the canvases featuring her from later in the decade). (I may have simply overdosed at the four “Heads,” a “Bust,” and a dozen other representations of the woman in one room together, reminding me that a single visit to a show so grand may be misleading.)
     The show offers many other pleasures and revelations. A collection of casually collected and painted pebbles and pottery shards situates the viewer at the beginning and end of time, recalling the pleasure and mystic significance with which children can endow any objects through artistic manipulation. In a sly reference to the paintings by Renoir, Seurat, Cézanne, Gaugin and others, generally so pretty, Picasso’s The Bathers (1956) is instead an installation of lumber yard scraps looking sufficiently outsider to put me in mind of the temporary pieces people used to erect on the Oakland approach to the Bay Bridge. Even familiar works take on new significance in this rich context. The museum’s own 1950 She-Goat (which I have been at pains to call on every time I visit) is a veritable fertility deity with its swollen body (formed on a wicker basket) and udders (two ceramic jugs).
     The reviewers have pulled out all the stops in their praise of the show: “staggering,” “dumbfounding,” “magnificent,” “a work of art in its own right,” and I need add no superlatives. In the broadest sense, Picasso’s Sculpture reminds every viewer what art is about, and every admirer of Picasso what is peculiarly his in twentieth century art. For one viewer at least, it was also a reminder of a time when the avant-garde’s power to shock, to challenge, and to surprise was fructifying and productive of new meaning and unsuspected beauty. Now, as techniques more radical than Picasso’s have become altogether mainstream in universities, galleries, and museums, when artists receive foundation grants to execute pieces using the fossilized remnants of avant-garde technique, the aesthetic payoff has become piddling indeed. Picasso in the end reminds us of the potential strength of art in a way that cannot be denied by a viewer with open eyes.

The Fetish of the Primitive in Twentieth Century Art

This is a work in progress, the current draft of a lecture I will deliver in the spring or summer at the Seligmann Center’s Robert Fagan Library which includes a substantial share of books describing non-European art. Kurt Seligmann himself not only traveled around the world in 1936 but made a further trip to the American Pacific Northwest in 1938 where he purchased a magnificent totem pole now on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.


     The visitor to my home will see West African carvings from Benin and Urhobo artists, masks from the Tarahumara of the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental, weavings from the Maghreb, a Cambodian wooden Buddha, set among dozens of other artifacts collected during a lifetime of travel. Doubtless these are simple souvenirs like the decals of Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon people used to place in their car windows, yet to my mind they also provide a potent reminder of the nature of art, displayed as they are among contemporary drawings and paintings, many by my wife or by friends and acquaintances. Thus I am no scholar claiming a fictitious objectivity; rather I am myself a participant in the fetishization I mean to discuss. Far from casting doubt on my conclusion, this involvement seems to me to provide life and blood to my inquiry.
     The articulation of connections between the twentieth century artistic avant-garde and the idea of the primitive is hardly a simple pattern of influence or inspiration. The revaluation of so-called “primitive art” [1] as well as folk art, outsider art, and children’s art by sophisticated European artists, critics, and intellectuals has been a significant influence in poetry and music as well as visual art. In many cases the use of “the primitive” requires little or no specific reference to indigenous art but signifies primarily either a rebellious inversion of received ideas or a more general claim to artistic freedom. In fact, the primitive has been used as a fetish, very much in the historical and anthropological use of the word which originally, like poem, meant simply an artificially constructed object, which is to say, a work of art, but which was used by Portuguese mariners to describe West African objects charged with power by human imagination. Just as the Africans infused their masks and charms with juju, and Polynesians with mana, so, in turn, the European artists gave those same objects a new sort of force, replacing the contempt with which their white ancestors had viewed the “superstition” of what seemed lower races, with respect and even awe. The art was cut free from the world-view of its creators and made to serve instead the purposes of its modern discoverers.
     Though many in the nineteenth century subscribed to an evolutionary view of human development in which the most recent developments were considered the “highest,” a significant faction of artists dissented, finding value in what was generally rejected or ignored. Especially since the Romantic era, the mythic projection of the “primitive” as Other meant that such art was seen by a counter-culture as having greater access to emotion, truth, and the divine than that produced by etiolated Europeans throttled by self-consciousness and decadence. In this polemical reaction against prevailing values, artists conflated all “primitives” into a single category and sometimes also included children, mental patients, peasants, and women as fundamentally similar.
     Such symbolic use of primitive as Other charging it with significance it would not otherwise bear is in fact an ancient and universal topos, far too vast a topic to treat here. It was sophisticated urban Greeks that invented the poetic pastoral, presenting poetry with shepherds as personae, sometimes for comic effect, but often as ideal lovers. Theocritus was an Alexandrian but wrote in the voice of a Sicilian shepherd, and one of the themes of Classical pastoralism is the superiority of rural life to that of the corrupt cities. For Ovid the primal age was Golden without armies, judges, or even labor. [2] It was to this mythic era that Rousseau refers in The Social Contract which opens “Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” His Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men maintains, as Engels was to do a century later, that originally men lived in a utopian communist state and that private property is the source of classes and inequality.
     During the Romantic Era the polarity received renewed attention. The Romantics privileged emotion and intuition over rationality, spontaneity over craft, originality over tradition, and the primitive over the civilized. Thus in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth says he has decided to “chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men [that is to say, not in literary or learned language].” He goes on, “Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.” [3]
     The celebration of the “primitive” was evident as well in the new-found attention and respect oral literature received from Percy in England, Burns in Scotland, Herder, von Arnim, Brentano, and the Grimm brothers in Germany. The nationalist impetus during the nineteenth century led to the recognition and use of folk motifs in music by composers such as Lvov, Chopin, Sibelius, and Dvořák the last of whom declared that "In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music." [4] Meanwhile on the level of popular culture minstrel shows were the leading form of musical entertainment in nineteenth century America. [5]
     With the growth of colonialism, knowledge about the actual circumstances of other societies became more widespread and the curious could view non-European artifacts, not in art museums but in new institutions whose galleries were entirely devoted to ethnographic displays. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns led to the popularity of “oriental” scenes which increased in popularity throughout the century in both France and Britain, particularly as an avenue of presenting “harem” scenes or other female nudes. [6] By the end of the nineteenth century not only had European museum collections of colonial art swollen; in addition, the general public was exposed to such work at expositions such as the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and the 1908 Franco-British show in London which included “indigenous villages.” [7]
     Scholars had, for the first time, sufficient fairly accurate information about oral cultures to generalize in such works as Primitive Culture (1871) by E. B. Tylor, the “father of cultural anthropology,” James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910). As the title of Lévy-Bruhl’s work reveals, these authors generally took an evolutionary approach, regarding the thought processes of the societies they studied as quite different from those of the moderns studying them. [8]
    A significant number of artists and intellectuals accepted this sort of conventional judgment, but reversed the values, preferring the primitive. For this reason artists in France left the metropolis for Pont-Aven in Brittany, thinking it more backward and thus Edenic. Long before setting out for the South Seas, Gauguin wrote “I love Brittany. I find something savage, primitive here.” [9] He was joined by Émile Bernard, Paul Sérusier, and others, while German artists were forming similar colonies for the same reasons in Worpswede and Neu Dachau. These artists were in general not seeking to imitate folk art styles; they sought instead the inspiration of what seemed a more elemental lifestyle. Thus Gauguin, speaking of his “Vision after the Sermon,” said, ““I believe I have achieved a great rustic superstitious simplicity in these figures.” [10] Gauguin proudly declared his satisfaction with a village where, as he said, “I live like a peasant and am known as a savage.” [11]
     But the fact was that Brittany had already become a favored spot for British and American second homes as well as for the occasional artist, and it soon seemed too civilized for Gauguin. He traveled to Tahiti and then to the Marquesas. Among the artists who sought in their travels a first-hand look at “the primitive” were Matisse, who spent time in Algeria and Morocco, Kokoschka in Tunisia, Pechstein who followed Gauguin to Tahiti, and Nolde who visited the Far East and New Guinea. Meanwhile they and others looked with a new eye during their visits to museum collections such as those at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro which attracted the attention of Picasso and others. [12] Further, by 1905 Matisse, Vlaminck, and Derain had all purchased African art for their own collections. [13]
     Artists of the Blaue Reiter group protested “the contemptuous gesture with which connoisseurs and artists have to this day banished all artistic forms of primitive cultures to the fields of ethnology or applied art is amazing at the very least” [14] Marc, Burliuk, and others labeled themselves “savages,” (just as slightly earlier artists had been called les fauves) [15] while in Russia Shevchenko called Neoprimitivism “a profoundly national phenomenon.” [16]
     For the Surrealists Freud’s concept of the unconscious placed a sort of primitive realm within every person’s psyche, reachable by dreams, by art, and by chance operations, but which are as well immediately available in the primitive. There they thought they might find “manifestations of uninhibited desire” and techniques to further “the integration of the sacred in their everyday world.” [17] Breton even operated a shop Gradiva which sold non-European art as did Éluard on a smaller scale. Michel Leiris participated in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti that brought thousands of objects from Africa to France. Max Ernst created a myth of his own shamanic rebirth as “a magician” “seeking to find the myth of his time.” [18] Their attitude was reflected in a map of “the world in the time of the Surrealists” in which Europe is insignificant and Oceania both central and immense. [19] Many classic Surrealist techniques such as invention of automatic writing, trance, and the invention of myth and ritual were considered to mirror practices of primitive cultures.
     In spite of this profound and consistent interest in primitive art among generations of moderns, actual stylistic borrowing is rare indeed. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century artists rebelled against the illusionist realism of academic painting by stressing the flat and decorative surfaces they perceived in Japanese woodcuts and Oceanic ornamentation in what Dujardin called Cloisonnism. The schematic planes of some African masks clearly encouraged Cubist portraiture. Yet even these cases cause and effect is very difficult to demonstrate convincingly. According to Robert Goldwater’s pioneering study Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), artists used the primitive precedent to ratify or reinforce what they were already doing. [20] The groundbreaking Negro Art Exhibition at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery curated by Marius de Zayas was designed to open viewers to modern art rather than to educate them about Africa. In the pamphlet he wrote for the exhibit de Zayas says, “Negro art has reawakened in us a sensibility weakened by education.” Though itself a “product of the ‘Land of Fright,’ created by a mentality full of fear and completely devoid of the faculties of observation and analysis,” African art resembles the most modern in that it is “intensely expressive” rather than “natural.” [21]
     Primitivism in poetry proves an instructive parallel to that in visual art. Occurring later, due doubtless to the lag in the availability of oral texts in comparison with sculpture from the same regions, the valorization of the primitive by writers once begun went hand in hand with that by painters. After a vogue for the archaic in the Romantic era that produced such faux semi-primitives as Macpherson’s Ossian and Chatterton’s Rowley, [22] the interest in foundational national epics led to Lönnrot stitching together the Kalevala and Longfellow’s composition of Hiawatha. In Une Saison en Enfer Rimbaud had declared as a battle-cry, “The pagan blood returns!” [23] shortly before he departed for the African bush. D. H. Lawrence’s infatuation with Mexico and ancient Etruria and his fierce critique of modern society was informed by his familiarity with Tylor and Frazer.
     The Dadaists celebrated the primitive as part of their drive to overturn all received ideas. Weimar Dadaist Hannah Höch showed her own work, including African-style masks, under the title “From an Ethnographic Museum.” Huelsenbeck invented his own “Negro words” (“’Umba, umba,’ which I roared and spouted over and over again to the audience” [24] is a fair example) and Tzara collected African and Oceanic art and wrote what he called Negro Poems. [25] They performed “les chants nègres” with music, sounds, and dancing of their own invention. Tzara said “My other brother is naïve and good, and laughs. He eats in Africa or along the South Sea Islands . . . Art, in the infancy of time, was prayer. Wood or stone were truth.” [26]
     In the early twentieth century translations of Far Eastern poetry by Pound, Waley, and others had an impact on Imagism comparable to that of African sculpture on Cubism. The best-known Asian poetic traditions are, of course, highly sophisticated. After such individual adventures as Artaud’s visit to the Tarahumara peyotists in Mexico and Paul Bowles’ transcription of the stories of illiterate Moroccans, the quest for primitive poetry led to Jerome Rothenburg’s best-selling Technicians of the Sacred in 1968 to be followed by other anthologies, and then his founding of the journal Alcheringa with Dennis Tedlock two years later.
     Though Tedlock is an academic anthropologist, he is also an initiated shaman among Highland Mayan people (as is his wife Barbara) in Guatemala. Alcheringa published translations of oral texts as well as new poetry by poets such as Gary Snyder and Robert Kelly. Its first issue identified itself as “the first magazine of the world’s tribal poetries,” yet disclaimed scholarly goals, noting that “while its sources will be different from other poetry magazines, it will be aiming at the startling & revelatory presentation that has been common to our avant gardes.” In other words, the “primitives” are to read as though they were contemporary experimentalists despite the fact that the social role of all oral poets guarantees that they be highly conventional traditionalists.
     Rothenburg claimed for the primitive a mystical “sense-of-unity” he believes to have been “shattered” by modern minds. “Revolutionary & limit-smashing” poets are to him “forerunners” in the recovery of such a wholesome unified vision. [27] He lists six areas of common ground between the primitives and his own circle, including orality, “intermedia,” and the poet’s role as shaman. This bias leads to the presentation of texts and events first recorded by anthropologists in such a way to make them resemble happenings or performance art. With this refracting lens, a simple conversation in William R. Geddes’ Nine Dayak Nights in which the tribal people explain quite sensibly that they discard food waste from their stilt houses without carrying it to a dump area because their pigs eat it becomes a “Garbage Event” in which “the participants defend the ‘abandoned beauty’ and ‘town-quality’ of their environment” [28] though in fact the quoted terms are those of the European observer and not those of the natives at all. The primitives again provide an excuse for deviation from the norm and criticism of existing values. Other American poets participating in similar shamanistic ambitions include Michael McClure (whose growlings differ little from the pseudo-African cries of the Dadaists) or the feminist myth-making of Diane di Prima in Loba and Anne Waldman in The Iovis Trilogy.
     In the eighteenth century Schiller had regarded “naïve” poetry expressing a “primal unity of vision,” which the civilized, entangled in “artificial relations and situations” could only recall as an ideal. [29] The early twentieth century considered primitive art a model in that it was somehow absolute art, “non-referential,” or “self-contained,” in the words of Carl Einstein “oriented not toward the viewer, but in terms of themselves” [30] though in fact, anthropologists would say that in traditional societies art is far more closely integrated with other realms of people’s lives. According to Wilhelm Worringer all art had been at first abstract, though European art had deviated in its gradually tendency toward mimesis and illusionism. [31] Françoise Gilot recalled Picasso’s saying that what impressed him about African sculpture was that it was made for “a sacred purpose, a magic purpose.” [32] Surely it is no coincidence that the attempt to recover the artist’s vatic role, the search for the divine, for a truth truer than science arose in the wake of the nineteenth century death of god and the rejection of modern capitalist society went hand in hand with the rejection of rationality itself. Nietzsche’s deeply non-logical but creative will passed into the Freudian subconscious. Those who sought truth and beauty in the primitive often were little concerning with actual “primitives”; instead they were expressing a sort of faith in the metaphysical itself, imperiled by science, and asserting the central role of artists in accessing a deeper truth than that of everyday consciousness.
     Looking at the Huichol yarn painting on the wall of my study, or the Haitian wax figures from a Brooklyn botanica behind the glass in a barrister’s bookcase, or, indeed, the works my wife Patricia has brought home from schizophrenic patients and the paintings of my small grandchildren provides me not so much with information about the specific vision of the artists who created these objects as a constant reminder that an accurate concept of art cannot be constructed without the inclusion of such evidence. Art for most people in most times seems in many ways far closer to these “anthropological” artifacts than it is to the work of Raphael or to Marina Abramović, but art is universal because it is at its root an essential need of humanity. We require fetishes to make life livable just as the masked tribal dancer possessed by deity does. Often investigators have sought to recover the “artistic” value of what once was labeled primitive art; it is time to admit the “magical” value of work by contemporary and cosmopolitan minds. The biologists have long known that, since the appearance of our singular species and in every part of the world to which we have spread, our minds are all the same.



1. Of course, the term (as well as others like “savage,” and “barbaric”) is now considered impossibly ethnocentric and outmoded. In the first half of the twentieth century “primitive” was used unselfconsciously, including by Robert Goldwater for his seminal study Primitivism and Modern Art. I employ it here since my focus (like his) is the idea of the primitive; it is for anthropologists to analyze the actual cultures that were once given that label.

2. Metamorphoses, 1, 89 ff.

3. Among other significant pre-Romantics who revalued the primitive is Montaigne whose marvelous essay “On the Cannibals” declares “there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.” Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Diderot’s Supplement au voyage de Bougainville and most particularly Vico’s New Science were particularly influential in the 18th century.

4. Often quoted, the remark first appeared in an interview in the New York Herald Tribune for May 21, 1893.

5. The trend continued as first ragtime and then jazz enjoyed enormous vogues in the early twentieth century. In the past fifty years that connoisseurs have discovered blues and other folk music including that from India and other parts of the world. Most would agree that West African music is, by way of American jazz, blues, and rock and roll, the most important component of popular music throughout the world today. Compare the prominent place of the music of the socially despised and poverty-stricken Roma in Europe.

6. Many commercially produced postcards of the era and indeed well into the twentieth century featured putatively North African or Arab models in partial or complete undress.

7. Such shows had been part of the Jardin d'acclimatation amusement park in the Bois de Boulogne since 1877. They became de rigeur thereafter in virtually all such exhibitions including Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931). “Natives” were often caged and appeared nude or semi-nude. Since the 1874 introduction of Sami herdsmen to accompany a reindeer exhibit in Hamburg, indigenous people were increasingly featured in zoos. Such attractions were offered in fifteen European zoos by 1900 as well as in America. The trend lasted until 1936 when the last such exhibit was closed in Turin. Artists such as Kirchner and Heckel visited such shows. See Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the Modern,” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993), 63.

8. Lévy-Bruhl’s book was translated into English as How Natives Think (1926). To Tylor all religion was a vestigial survival of primitive modes of thinking.

9. Quoted in Perry 8.

10. Quoted in Perry 18.

11. Quoted in Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art, (London: Thames on Hudson, 1994), 26.

12. Picasso’s visit in 1907 occurred 83 after he had painted Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1928 Georges-Henri Rivière who had ties to the Surrealists became the director of the museum.

13. Perry 55.

14. August Macke, “Masks,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac The Documents of 20th-Century Art, edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc documentary edition by Klaus Lankheit (NY: Viking Press, 1974), 88.

15. The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 61, 72, and elsewhere.

16. See Aleksandr Shevchenko’s Neo-primitivizm (1913). Shevchenko envisioned an art in which influences of Cézanne, Cubism and Futurism would mix with traditional Russian 'folk art' conventions.

17. Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (Routledge: London and New York, 2003), 59. It is telling that, while providing a wealth of historical and biographical data, Tythacott’s detailed study offers little in the way of specific borrowing.

18. Rhodes 174.

19. Published in a special issue of Varietés in 1929 along with writing by René Crevel, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, André Breton, and others. Africa is small. Alaska is huge as is Russia, though perhaps this fact owes more to Communism as to primitivism.

20. Joyce Henri Robinson in a review of Frances S. Connelly’s The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics 1725-1907 in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 4, No. 1, fall/winter 1999, p. 130 supports Goldwater’s contention that it is more a matter of an “attitude conducive to art” than specific borrowings.

21. Reprinted in Primitivism and Twentieth-century Art: A Documentary History, edited by Jack D. Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2003).

22. Compare with Armand Schwerner’s imitation of Sumero-Akkadian texts in his Tablets (1974).

23. He had originally considered titling the book Livre païen or Livre nègre.

24. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (Berkeley: University of California, 1991),9. Huelsenbeck says then that Mynheer Ephraim, the landlord of the Cabaret Voltaire, an old sailor, objected that these were not Negro at all and taught Huelsenbeck what he said were authentic African and Oceanic chants.

25. Reprinted in a translation by Piette Joris, Alcheringa II,1 (Boston: 1976), pp. 76-114.

26. Reprinted in Vassiliki Kolotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou’s Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281.

27. Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1969), xxii.

28. Rothenberg 108. Cf. W. R. Geddes, Nine Dayak Nights (London: Oxford UP, 1967), 19-20.

29. See Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.
30. See Carl Einstein, African Sculpture (1915).
31. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908).
32. Francoise Gilot and Carleton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 266.