Description
Book SynopsisAn assessment of the significance of primitivism and its contribution to the intellectual, artistic, and cultural climate of Europe in the early 20th century. This book argues that the radicality of early twentieth-century movements such as expressionism was not their modernism but rather their primitivism.
Trade Review“The author’s basic premise is an engaging one. . . . One must commend Pan for his economic tackling of a large subject using a great variety of multidisciplinary materials and sources within which to frame his discussion.”—Marion F. Deshmukh,
Central European History“Exceedingly well written and the author’s command of his sources is formidable. Pan’s achievement is to have rethought and resituated primitivism in modern European thinking and to have challenged once more our assumptions about the homogenous and monolithic nature of modernity.”—Katharina Gerstenberger,
Journal of English and Germanic PhilologyTable of ContentsContents: List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Part 1: Primitivist Aesthetics 1. The Primitive and the Civilized in Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy 2. The Dionysian Aesthetics of Myth 3. The Primitive and the Barbaric Part 2: Primitivism in Art 4. The Primitive Dimension in Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo 5. Abstract Art and the Primitive Spirit in the Work of Wassily Kandinsky 6. Construction and Mimesis in Carl Einstein's Theory of Art Part 3: Primitivism in Prose 7. Narrative Form and Experience in Carl Einstein's Prose Theory 8. From Fantasy to Sacrifice in Bebuquin or the Dilettantes of Wonder 9. Expressionist Myth and African Legend Notes Index
