Rem actam agis: primitivism as an archaeological search for origins

Abstract

In an era as scattered in its arguments and as accelerated in its way of breaking down topics as ours, it is very easy for certain issues, which seem to have been completely digested, to still be misinterpreted and require a balanced explanation. Primitivism in art is one of those fields of aesthetics and art history that, like many discourses today, presents different interpretations, whether from the point of view of artistic appreciation or from its relevance in historiographical literature. Like all artistic movements from Romanticism to the present day, social, anthropological, aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological variables play a role that deserves to be discerned in order to explain a panorama, that of art, which is increasingly complex and “fluid” as we enter modernity.