FAH246H1 Lecture Notes - Synesthesia, Wassily Kandinsky, Scott Munter
Document Summary
All of these artists sought to challenge european conventions that they felt to be repressive, and all imagined the primitive as an exotic world where style and self might be refashioned dramatically. Primitivism extends beyond art, it"s a fantasy: return to origin, escape into nature, liberation of instinct. Journey outside western art was strategic: exceed old academic conventions and recent styles. Paul gauguin s primitivism major theme in 19th century. He was looking for the primitive, something that was untouched by modernity. Colonial period, tahiti, was a french colony. The search for primitivism became the looking for other cultures. The term is derogatory in itself, its part of the colonial mentality, the french, the dutch, the. Primitive people had access to the spiritual and unsullied with the modern world, speed and money, free perverse repression sexual and otherwise. They thought they could get away from this repression and suppression.
