Rethinking narratives of "primitivism" and "discovery"

What is it about?

Fauve painters “discovered” African and Oceanic sculpture in 1905, beginning when Vlaminck collected several wooden figures and a mask. Derain then studied Oceanic works in London, and Matisse struggled to paint a Kongo-Vili statue he purchased in fall 1906. Fauve interests in shallow-relief, relatively naturalistic, and surface-ornamented sculptural objects suggest conformity with turn-of-the-century artistic and scientific ideas conflating heterogeneous strains of so-called primitive material culture. The dominant theoretical framework of “primitivism,” however, has tended to limit art historical understandings of external formal influences on modernism, which can be gleaned by closely examining the particular objects the Fauves appropriated.

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