Gauguin wrote to a fellow artist about his stay in Brittany, 'I love Brittany. As art historian Gill Perry points out, Gauguin's primitivizing tendencies were well developed in the pictures he painted in Pont-Aven in the late 1880s. Before Gauguin's infamous South Pacific travels and relocation to Tahiti to escape the suffocating norms of civilized, modern Paris, he and others found relief in Brittany, a rural area of Northwest France famed among artists for the local customs and rituals associated with peasant life. The flattened space and simplified forms speak to the new visual language that Gauguin and other Symbolists were developing at the time. Gauguin sets the spiritual vision on a field of red to imply it is not happening in the physical world. Gauguin presents the viewer with a visionary scene: women in white bonnets and dark dresses, some of whom have their eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer, stand with their backs to the viewer witnessing a scene from the Old Testament, Jacob wrestling with an angel. Contemporary responses to Primitivism, often by African American artists and others with a connection to various countries in Africa, are an attempt not to simply appropriate the forms of tribal arts but to explore, recuperate, and reimagine the fullness of African heritage in contemporary society.The lasting legacy of Primitivism and the long-enduring assumptions about the inferior quality of art from colonized areas has made it difficult to incorporate African, Aboriginal, and Native American artists into art historical narratives, but attempts at creating a global art history are underway.Tinged with nostalgia, Primitivism sought connections to a pre-industrialized past in which people were more connected with nature and each other. As understood by the modern artists, primitive art not only provided new aesthetic forms, it also offered a deeper and more complex emotional and spiritual model that the artists employed to critique the modernization of Western society.Throughout the later 20 th century and into the 21 st, artists and scholars have attempted to historically contextualize Primitivism and expose its shortcomings as a framework for understanding art from non-European cultures.

While on its face, Primitivism was an attempt to embrace and raise the status of tribal arts, it was itself an inherently Eurocentric enterprise and, in many cases, was biased against the very arts it appropriated. Primitive art's use of simpler shapes and more abstract figures differed significantly from traditional European styles of representation, and modern artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse used these forms to revolutionize painting and sculpture. In many ways, Primitivism provided artists a way to critique the stagnant traditions of European painting. Beginning at the end of the 19 th century, the influx of tribal arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native Americans into Europe offered artists a new visual vocabulary to explore. Primitivism was not so much an artistic movement but a trend among diverse modern artists in many countries who were looking to the past and to distant cultures for new artistic sources in the face of increasing industrialization and urbanization. A complex and, at times, contradictory tendency, 'Primitivism' ushered in a new way of looking at and appropriating the forms of so-called 'primitive' art and played a large role in radically changing the direction of European and American painting at the turn of the 20 th century.

Book of travels concept art