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0009071

Author/Editor: MOORE Henry.

Publisher: Listener

Place Published: London

Year: 1941

Date & Collation: (24 April) 598-599(2 illus).

Description: Article prompted by Leonard Adam's book Primitive Art (1940, Penguin Books), originally published at a time when the British Museum was closed, and books had to be a substitute for the actual art works. Reprinted in Henry Moore on Sculpture (See 0005627). In this article Moore describes 'primitive art'* as making a straightforward statement its primary concern is with the elemental and its simplicity comes from direct and strong feeling... Like beauty true simplicity is an unselfconscious virtue; it comes by the way and can never be an end in itself. The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by people with a direct and immediate response to life. Sculpture and painting for them was not an activity of calculation or academism but a channel for expressing powerful beliefs hopes and fears." Moore argues that all art has its roots in the primitive and he traces primitivism through classical times into the Renaissance and the "steadily growing appreciation of primitive art among artists and the public today". Moore describes his visits to the British Museum and writes of the truth to material which he associated with certain works: "the artist shows an instinctive understanding of his material its right use and possibilities... Mexican sculpture as soon as I found it seemed to me true and right perhaps because I at once hit on similarities in it with some eleventh-century carvings I had seen as a boy on Yorkshire churches." Moore describes different works on display and points out that "a common world-language of form is apparent in them all; through the working of instinctive sculptural sensibility the same shapes and form relationship are used to express similar ideas at widely different places and periods in history... But all that is really needed is response to the carvings themselves which have a constant life of their own independent of whenever and however they came to be made and remain as full of sculptural meaning today to those open and sensitive enough to receive it as on the day they were finished".
Sometimes incorrectly cited as The Listener 24 August 1941. For German version see 0007039."
*Moore’s statement was part of a wider tendency in this period to group certain works from different times and places as ‘primitive art’, based primarily on perceived differences from approaches associated with academic art. Because it was often conflated with offensive assumptions about race and cultural difference, the term ‘primitive art’ is now rarely used directly.