Primitivism and humanist teleology in art history around 1900

Abstract

The following text deals with the way the art of non-European peoples has been handled conceptually and theoretically by researchers around 1900. The text will focus on Karl Woermann, especially on his art history of “all peoples of all times”, Die Geschichte der Kunst aller Völker und Zeiten (1900), and on Ernst Grosse’s slighly earlier book on the beginnings of art, Die Anfänge der Kunst (1894). In both writing one can point out fundamental epistemological assumptions, like a division between an art of animals and an art of men, the existence of a ‘drive to decorate’ or ‘art drive’, the ‘fact’ of a development from more primitive forms of art towards higher ones or the commonality of art to all people, but not to the same extent as European art etc. If the ethnographer Johannes Fabian asked several years ago “how anthropology makes its objects” under the condition of colonialism, this text asks how art history made its objects under the very same conditions.

Keywords

• aesthetics
• humanism
• art drive
• ethnology
• primitivism
• colonial epistemology