Decorative Sunday
This week’s plates are from the first volume of La Décoration Primitive, a collection of portfolios documenting the decorative art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (the last in two volumes, separated by pre- and post-Columbian). The four volumes were published in Paris by the photography and decorative arts publisher A. Calavas for Librarie des Arts Décoratifs, likely in 1922. The art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss postulated that these volumes, along with Calavas’s other publishing for Librarie des Arts Décoratifs, were “published specifically for the instruction of arts and design students” in her 1985 work The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
While the Oceania and two American volumes contain introductory texts by Daniel Réal, a painter and curator at the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, the text of La Décoration Primitive Afrique is by P.-C. Lepage. Lepage opens his introduction by addressing the use of the term “primitive,” insisting it is not used pejoratively. Indeed, “primitive art” was the most pervasive term used to describe non-Western art at the beginning of the 20th century. The term has declined in use as more of the art world has recognized the explicitly derogatory connotations. The rest of Lapage’s introductory text goes on to extoll the richness of the artistic tradition of the African continent, and laments the “disastrous influence” of les blanches in Africa, first by destroying “tout ce qui était à portée de leur ardeur iconoclaste (everything within reach of their iconoclastic ardor).”
-Olivia Hickner, Special Collections Graduate Intern