Monday, June 16, 2008

Tuareg Nomads of the Sahara - Blue People in a modern World

"Adventure Series' - Homage to Paul Gauguin/2008


copyright mrust 2008
Photostream: Click link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27395668@N03/sets/72157605651437255/show/






Self Portret - Paul Gauguin

Primitivism


Paul Gauguin - 1891 -Gauguin's final home in the Marquesas Islands


Primitivism was an art movement of late 19th century painting and sculpture; characterized by exaggerated body proportions, animal totems, geometric designs and stark contrasts. The first artist to systematically use these effects and achieve broad public success was Paul Gauguin. The European cultural elite discovering the art of Africa, Micronesia, and Native Americans for the first time were fascinated, intrigued and educated by the newness, wildness and the stark power embodied in the art of those faraway places. Gauguin like Pablo Picasso in the early days of the 20th century was inspired and motivated by the raw power and simplicity of the so-called Primitive art of those foreign cultures.

Gauguin is also considered a Post-Impressionist painter. His bold, colorful and design oriented paintings significantly influenced Modern art. Gauguin's influence on artists and movements in the early 20th century include Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Fauvism, Cubism, and Orphism among others.

Primitivism refers to a) an artistic movement in particular which originated as a reaction to the Enlightenment, or b) the general tendency to idealize any social behavior judged relatively simple or primitive, whether in the arts, social sciences or elsewhere. Anarcho-primitivists are one example of the latter, although others exist.

Rousseau was the first to draw attention to the concept of the 'noble savage'. What 18th Century culture lacked, he argued, was nature, passion, emotion, instinct and mysticism. The Romantics developed this idea further. They believed that modern society was moving away from its traditional roots, losing touch with its "true primitive condition". Out of this came Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Byron and Wordsworth, and later Conrad and Picasso.

Primitivism could also be seen as a set of modern European and Euro-American representational conventions inspired by non-Western art and artifacts. These conventions were first developed by Europeans and Euro-Americans who were dissatisfied with a variety of aspects of European culture, and sought to find what they were missing in other parts of the world. What emerged was a simplistic understanding of other cultures, structured by the primitivists' own desires, their lack of knowledge of other societies, and the racism of European society[citation needed]. Their work has contributed to an ongoing belief in the multitude of non-western societies as fundamentally similar in their "primitiveness," supposedly meaning their irrationality, closeness to nature, free sexuality, freedom, proclivity to violence, "mysticism," etc. Such artists, especially Picasso, are still popularly understood as somehow escaping European conventions and expressing "primal" impulses within themselves.

Paul Gauguin (painting) and early Igor Stravinsky (music) are two of the important examples of primitivist art. Another example of primitivism in music is Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, whose "Dionysian" modernism he abandoned for a more "Apollonian" neo-classicism.



The Charismatic Jim Thompson - Legendary American of Thailand.



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