The Primitivist Imaginary in Iberian and Transatlantic Modernisms

Front matter

ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN ART HISTORY

The Primitivist Imaginary in Iberian and Transatlantic Modernisms

Taking into account politics, history, and aesthetics, this edited volume explores the main expressions of primitivism in Iberian and Transatlantic modernisms.

PART I Circulations 11

1 Decentering primitivism: Latin America, cultural authority, and the modernist writing of the European primitive 13 ALEJANDRO MEJÍAS-LÓPEZ

2 Cosmopolitan cubism, provincial Paris 29 MARK ANTLIFF AND PATRICIA LEIGHTEN

3 Los Pintores Integros: a primitivist rationale for Iberian and transatlantic modernisms 50 JOANA CUNHA LEAL

4 Primitivising the mural either side of the Atlantic: discourse and contingency in Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s murals 65 BEGONA FARRE TORRAS

5 Benjamin Péret’s remarks on Afro-Brazilian religions. Primitivist longings, ethnocentric critiques, surrealist ethnographies 84 ARTHUR VALLE vi

Contents

PART II Patterns and paradoxes Antropofagia, primitivism and anti-primitivism RAFAEL CARDOSO

Troping the “primitive” in Portuguese narratives of modernity and colonialism MARIANA PINTO DOS SANTOS

Returning to what never was: primitivisms in Canto da Maya JOANA BRITES (WITH THE CONTRIBUTION OF MARTA BARBOSA RIBEIRO)

The pastoral in modern Catalan art: Joaquim Sunyer and Joan Miró M. LLUISA FAXEDAS BRUJATS

Puppets, child art and an illuminated manuscript: Puppet shows with multilayers of primitivism in 1920s Granada MARTA SOARES

Index

Contributors

Mark Antliff, Professor Emeritus, Duke University, USA, is the author of Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1993), Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France (2007), and Sculptors Against the State: Anarchism and the Anglo-European Avant-Garde (2021). His forthcoming book focuses on radical pacifism and aesthetics.

Joana Brites is Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra and an Integrated Researcher at Coimbra’s University Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies. Her research and scientific production focus on the art of authoritarian regimes, colonialism and modern architecture, and dissonant heritage.

Rafael Cardoso is a member of the postgraduate faculty in Art History at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a research associate at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. His latest book is Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945 (2021).

Begoña Farré Torras is a researcher at the Art History Institute/IN2PAST, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal. Her research focuses on twentieth-century muralism in Europe and the Americas.

M. Lluisa Faxedas Brujats is a Modern and Contemporary Art History Lecturer at the University of Girona (Spain). She has curated Celso Lagar and Hortense Bégué. The Catalan Years, 1915-18 (2021), and is the author of From Symbolism to Abstraction: The Ideal of the Unity of the Arts at the Origins of Modern Art (2018).

Joana Cunha Leal is Full Professor at the Art History Department of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal. She was PI for the project “Iberian Modernisms and the Primitivist Imaginary” and director of the Art History Institute of the same university between 2016 and 2022. Her forthcoming book focuses on the cosmopolitan avant-garde in Portugal.

Patricia Leighten, Professor Emerita, Duke University, USA, is the author of Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914 (1989); The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris (2013); and, with Mark Antliff, Cubism and Culture (2001); and A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism (2008). She is currently researching anarchism and photographic history.

Alejandro Mejías-López, Associate Professor, Indiana University Bloomington, USA, is the author of The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism (2010) and co-author of Contemporary Colonialities in Mexico and Beyond vii Contributors

(2024). His current book project focuses on gender, sexuality, and cosmopolitanism in transatlantic modernist literature.

Mariana Pinto dos Santos is a researcher at the Art History Institute/IN2PAST, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal, curator, and lecturer also at NOVA. She is the author of Vanguarda & Outras Loas (2007) and is working on a book on art historiography. She was co-PI for the project “Iberian Modernisms and the Primitivist Imaginary”.

Marta Soares is a researcher at the Art History Institute/IN2PAST, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal. She has published articles and worked on exhibitions on Portuguese modernism. In 2023 she defended her dissertation on animation and modernism.

Arthur Valle teaches Art History at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro /Brazil. He is a member of the Brazilian Committee of Art History, of the International. Council on Monuments and Sites, and editor of the digital journal /9&20 (https://www.doi. org/10.52913/19e20).

Introduction

Primitivism, a difficult legacy. Iberian and transatlantic perspectives

This book explores the expressions of “primitivism” in Iberian and transatlantic modernisms and their political, historical, and aesthetic implications.

The term “primitivism” is bonded to modernity and modernism, and it constitutes a difficult legacy to be dealt with from a historiographical stance. The mere use of the term, with or without quotation marks, usually underlines a Eurocentric viewpoint. That is, despite scholarly efforts following Edward Said’s criticism on “orientalism” (1978) “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”,' the concept of primitivism still voices the European and North American experience of modernity. Moreover, the binary opposition it implies (primitive vs. civilised) rests on the very conception of history based on ideals of civilisation and evolution, that legitimised colonial exploitation.

Yet, the connections and artistic exchanges between the Iberian countries and their former transatlantic colonies can add significant layers to the ingrained complexity of this term. First and foremost, the manifold, and often contradictory, manifestations of primitivism in Iberian and transatlantic modernisms bring in a notion of the “primitive” that not only looks outwards to the colonised “others”, but also looks inwards to the putatively uncivilised, belated “self”.

Indeed, Portugal and Spain were both heads of colonial empires, but by the end of the nineteenth century had lost most of their power, Spain being defeated by the United States in 1898—when the United States intervened in the Cuban War of Independence against Spain, and took possession of the Philippines—and Portugal being humiliated by the British with the 1890 Ultimatum to stop expansion in inner African territories, thus breaking the Portuguese colonial interests between Angola and Mozambique. The independence of most of the American continent radically changed the geopolitics of the world. Power relations across the Atlantic stopped being defined on East-West grounds (Imperial Europe-American colonies), establishing instead a new vertical hierarchy between North and South. As Alejandro Mejías-López thoroughly analyses in his book The Inverted Conquest,’ that powerful line cutting the American continent in two halves had its counterpart in Europe. Portugal and Spain are Southern European countries, and despite having enjoyed a metropolitan centrality throughout their imperial history, their position within European modernity from the nineteenth century on was irrevocably peripheral.’ Therefore, they are invariably represented (both in national terms and by others), as not partaking in the European modernity that, nevertheless, they heavily contributed to build on the grounds of colonial extraction.*

Hegel’s philosophy of history epitomises this North-South divide in Europe, reinforcing the centuries-old Protestant/Catholic split. Enrique Dussel’s analysis makes clear the impact of Hegel’s thinking on the consolidation of European modernity, recalling that for Hegel development is dialectically linear and, as far as world history is concerned, has a direction that moves from East to West, Europe being its absolute end.? This movement, as Dussel points

DOI: 10.4324/9781003355519-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license out, leaves Africa out. Hegel considers it “the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history is enveloped in the dark mantle of night”,* and therefore pertains to the timeless condition we find associated with the “primitive”. Following Hegel's “fantastic apotheosis of racist ideology", by which history is refused to an entire continent, Hegel furthermore elucidates that “real” Europe is Northern Europe. He identifies Europe with Germany, France and the Scandinavian countries, while the land south of the Pyrenees stands with Africa. This is why Mejías-López sharply concludes that “the Iberian Peninsula fares only slightly better than the continent to its south: although perhaps not entirely erased from history (as Africa is from Hegel’s text), the Iberian Peninsula is written out of modernity”.* We will return to Hegel ahead, to further discuss his philosophy of history.

For now, we wish to point out that our question here does not dwell on the fallacy of a monolithic definition of Europe highlighted both by Dussel and Mejías-López (Piotr Piotrowski also denounces this monolithic definition while analysing the history of modernism and contemporary art).? Rather, we wish to stress the paradox arising from the subaltern position newly occupied by the Iberian countries in European modernity in the face of their imperial background. While doing so, we want to draw the attention to the fact that the terms in which Néstor García Canclini discusses the contradictions of Latin America’s “Modernism without Modernization" also partially apply to Spain and Portugal (particularly his thesis on the multitemporal heterogeneity of modern culture). '?

By looking at these contradictions and tensions, this book deals with primitivism's engagement with colonialism, identitarian representations and the definition of the peripheries as provincial. While so doing, it furthermore analyses the international exchanges and circulations of modernist Iberian and Latin American artists, their ideas, and their artworks, reconstructing their primitivist imaginary. An imaginary that rests on, and fuels, a notion of the “primitive” that looks both outwards to the colonised “others”, and inwards to the uncivilised, belated, “self”.

Walter Mignolo uses the term imaginary to refer to the modern/colonial world system." Turning his back to the Lacanian assumption of the Imaginary as a dimension distinct both from the Symbolic and the Real, Mignolo recovers the term from Edouard Glissant's Poétique de la rélation, for whom “the imaginary is all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving of the world.”* This broader sense of the term ‘imaginary’ allowed Mignolo to characterise the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system as the “overarching discourse of Occidentalism”,'* and it was determinant in the construction of this book. Indeed, primitivism Is part and parcel of that overarching discourse. This is why the primitivist imaginary involves disparate uses of the past. Its many expressions can accommodate different understandings of what that past was, should have been or could be when re-enacted in the present, but primitivism also implies allochronism,'* that is the presupposition that a “right” present time corresponds to a "right" geography, which coincides with Northern European (and North American) industrial civilisation.

Furthermore, while fuelling the chronological hierarchy in which it was generated and further expanding the distance between the fully developed or civilised and the underdeveloped and primitive (or folklorist, or naive, or exotic), primitivism also became a weapon in modern art. Even if for all the wrong reasons, modernist artists bestowed “primitive” objects with a disruptive power able to threaten the bourgeois status quo and the highly formalised academicism institutionalised in the artistic field throughout the nineteenth century. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten defined primitivism in the context of modernism as “an act on the part of artists and writers seeking to celebrate features of the art and culture of people deemed ‘primitive’ and to appropriate their supposed simplicity and authenticity to the project of transforming Western

Introduction 3 art”.'5 And this is how, they add, a term that had mostly negative connotations ended up having positive valences as well.

The positive valences ascribed to the “primitive” in this context arise in the framework of a look that, again, wipes all historical circumstances from objects observed. As Antliff and Leighten put it, the “primitive” belongs to the “mythic speech” as discussed by Roland Barthes, “for the label empties its referent of historical contingency and cultural specificity and instead subsumes it within an unchanging “nature””.'* This a-historical framework reinstated a promise of purity and authenticity that, besides constituting an alternative to the beaux-arts academicism, and the dominant visual culture masterfully instrumentalised by modernist artists in their primitivist productions, was also prone to regionalist or nationalist appropriations. This trend does not concern the appropriation of African sculpture as an aesthetic model, but rather inward-looking ethnographical explorations that reveal the richness of folk traditions in the artistic and architectural realms.

As far from modernist tendencies as he can be, the Portuguese art historian Vergilio Correia (1888-1944), in the first of a series of articles devoted to the study of folk art published in 1915, exemplifies the kind of heavy negative connotations associated to the autochthonous “primitive”.*” Developing one of the many possible mythical viewpoints on the subject at length, and addressing topics such as “the pre-historical grounds of folk art and its universality”, Correia arrives at a discussion around the “relationship between African art and European folk art” he classifies as obvious. In a marked contrast with the Philippine author Isabelo de los Reyes’ (1864-1938)'* empowering translation of folk-lore as el saber popular (knowledge of the people), the Portuguese art historian defines folk art as the product of “an inferior artistic stratum, made of simplicity and roughness, ingenuousness and tradition”. According to Correia, this kind of artistic production appears in modern societies as a sign of “primitiveness”, and to study these art forms one must dive into the “inferior rural strata of the Europeans” that evades history and civilisation.” The diagnostic of a close relationship between the aesthetics of Portuguese rural artefacts and those executed in the Portuguese African colonial possessions by native people recurs later in 1946, in the work of the Portuguese art critic Ernesto de Sousa (1921-1988), but this time a positive value is assigned to that link. Furthermore, Sousa takes both productions as resources for a political engaged modernity, as discussed in Chapter 7.

As these brief examples show, the concept of “primitive” is quite unstable. The chapters in this book deal with its mobility, either rejected or validated in multiple expressions that respond to cultural and artistic networks, as much as to Iberian and Latin American political contexts. Moreover, art history narratives have often eluded the role played by folk art and naif artists in the renewal of visual practices of the avant-garde, relegating it to a subaltern position. Chapter 2 repositions the centrality of folk and naif art in the making of the Parisian avant-garde, while Chapter 3 shows how Cubism and local folk art were put side by side in Madrid's first avantgarde exhibition.”

Reinstating Hegel as the source of Eurocentrism in the discourse of modernity (and thus, we add, of primitivism), Susan Buck-Morss linked Hegel’s philosophy of history with his contemporary historical events, namely the slave revolution and independence of Haiti and its later developments as read by the European intellectual elite.” According to Buck-Morss, Hegel's dialectics of lordship and bondage (also known as master-slave dialectics) must have been drawn, not from Ancient Greece, but from the information widely disseminated at the time of the events taking place in Saint-Domingue. These events showed that slaves could rebel successfully against their masters. Consequently, the French Revolution ideal of Liberty was not entirely European but had “world-historical implications”? embedded in it. In other words, “the desire for freedom was truly universal” 2 Hegel’s dialectics establishes that the master loses his dominance once he realises that he is not free, for he depends totally on the slave (from which it can be extrapolated that Europe’s and North America’s modernity rests on slave labour and extractivism). Hence, the slave-owning class “is incapable of being the agent of historical progress without annihilating its own existence”.? On the other hand, the slave’s freedom depends on gaining self-consciousness as the subject on whom the master’s wealth depends. According to Hegel, true freedom is obtained through self-consciousness and by “trial of death”: when one is willing to risk one’s own life for it. As previously mentioned, Hegel’s later writings establish the North-South divide that relegates the African continent to a primitive, barbaric and infant realm—where people lack self-consciousness—legitimising the colonial enterprise and the “civilising mission” of colonisation. Thus, the older Hegel established a hierarchy between the “primitive” and the civilised upon which modernity and the narrative of progress were built.? Yet, as Buck-Morss shows, the ideas of the younger Hegel on universal freedom can be rooted in the Haiti revolution—and not exclusively in European events or ancient history. This prompts a critical historiographical endeavour, one that recognises that the alleged universal categories established by Hegel are Eurocentric and filled with cultural bias, but at the same time, that they are driven from a wider geographical context of colonial and anti-colonial ideas and events to which Hegel’s philosophy responded. Eventually, this means we need to recognise the contingency and instability of modern categories and concepts, including the concepts of “primitive” and “civilised”.

Partha Mitter has reasoned in this direction. He writes that “asymmetrical power relations do not prevent the free flow and cross-fertilisation of ideas on the level of ‘virtuality’, as has happened across the globe in the age of knowledge and communications revolution in the previous century”.” Paul Gilroy has argued similarly about mutability, intermixture, instability of ideas in the Black Atlantic, which he defines as an “intercultural and transnational formation” that results mainly from people (and we may add, objects) on the move, either travelling, exiled, emigrated, displaced, fleeing or relocated.?

As far as primitivism is concerned, this means that the concept gained cosmopolitan connotations and worldwide projection. According to Partha Mitter, there was a possibility of an “empowering concept of primitivism”” because the very ambiguities, instabilities, and fractures within primitivism provided the colonised a singular weapon with which to interrogate the capitalist/colonial world of modernity, enabling them to produce a counter modern discourse of resistance. [...] What the periphery did was to turn the outward ‘gaze’ of Europe back to the West itself, deploying the very same device of cultural criticism to interrogate the urban-industrial values of the colonial empires.

This was not, of course, a generalised situation, but it can be found in the studies undertaken in this book, particularly in Chapters 1 and 6, the former analysing how Spanish American poets primitivised the former colony, and the latter how Brazilian Antropofagia rejected primitivism as a Western invention, proposing a variant of primitivism based on impurity and hybridity instead.

What is at stake here is what Susan Buck-Morss calls “porosity”,* a concept she relates to the possibilities of imagining new worlds, either in the colonies or in the metropolis, and with the transformations that are implicated in circulation, movement, and also violence and inequality. If, as Mignolo argued “the imaginary is all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving of the world”, porosity is the basis of the ongoing formation of the imaginary.

Introduction 5

Considering the term “primitive” in the conceptual framework of porosity complexifies the diagnosis of allochronism previously mentioned, since primitivism implied not only certain uses of the past but also certain uses of the then present, where the multitemporal and the multi-geographical mingled. This is well exemplified in Chapter 5, dealing with Benjamin Péret’s reception of Brazilian macumba and candomblé and how these practices did not report to authenticity and original purity, but instead to an impure, composite, syncretic experience. Such an experience consists of an imaginary that combines practices of different African origins with European and South American references and that lead a surrealist to reconsider his own aesthetic imaginary.

Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian modernist designer and architect that lived and worked most of her life in Brazil, and adopted vernacular vocabulary into her projects, once said: “Linear time is an invention of the West; time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement where, at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.”*?

What this book proposes then is to treat primitivism as a concept that 1s not fixed, but fluid, and that therefore acquires different meanings and uses, while being part of the entangled discourses and temporalities that constitute the world rumour, which in turn shape an unequal, heterogeneous, and multitemporal, experience of modernity.

This book is divided into two parts, each with five chapters. Part I is titled “Circulations”, emphasising the mobility of artists, works and ideas across the Atlantic.

In Chapter 1, Alejandro Mejías-López deals precisely with the idea of primitivism as an empowering tool for poets and writers from Spanish-speaking Latin America, such as José Martí, Ruben Darío, or Carlos Reyles, amongst others, who inverted the terms and relocated the primitive in Europe, while also renewing language through the incorporation of anachronistic medieval references. This amounted to a modernist literature that came from Latin American authors and soon would also renew the Spanish literary scene. At the same time, Alejandro Mejías-López exposes how historiographical narratives, stuck to the Hegelian model that does not conceive the inversion of geographical hierarchies, have obscured the role played by Spanish-speaking Latin Americans in the renovation of Spanish literature, by attributing that renovation to “a national introspection as a result of the loss of American colonies”, while contrasting it with the “formalism” of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans who were therefore in a previous stage of development. Mejías-López exposes how it happened otherwise and how an inverted primitivism is key to the understanding of it.

In their chapter, Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten challenge the historiographical narrative that has dominated Cubism studies since the 1920s by questioning the diffusionist thesis that placed Paris as the sole epicentre of the movement's inception, dismissing the cubist occurrences in other geographies as mere peripheral replications. While so doing, the art historians also bring to the fore a discussion on how Paris-based Cubists circulated and embraced various folk cultures, asserting local identities from Gascony and Normandy to Spain, Portugal, Mexico, etc.

Chapter 3 engages in this debate. Its case study is the Los Pintores Íntegros exhibition organised by Ramón Gómez de la Serna in Madrid in 1915. Joana Cunha Leal argues that the show introducing Cubism to the Spanish capital was built upon a primitivist rationale. Gómez de la Serna intertwined the local and the cosmopolitan showcasing artworks from artists circulating internationally (Diego Rivera and María Blanchard) with those of an artist only known to a Spanish audience (Lluís Bagaría), and a completely unknown folk, non-educated artist (A gustín- Choco). Cunha Leal furthermore argues that the /ntegros exhibition was not only calling for the Europeanising of Spain but was also making the values of local folk art and popular culture interchangeable under the umbrella of Cubism. This trend also encompassed the Spanishisation of the Cubist repertoire, a move that briefly anticipates Diego Rivera’s alternative primitivist myth of origins, grounded in Mexican ethnicity and culture.

Chapter 4 discusses the circulation of another Latin American artist with profound ties in Spain, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, approaching the multi-layered primitivist imaginary that his mural painting congregates. Begoña Farré Torras explores the primitivist traits that can be found in Torres-Garcia’s mural theory and oeuvre, while taking into consideration his European and Latin American background and practice, and examining the extent to which such traits were politically and ideologically informed, namely by issues of national and regional identity.

Arthur Valle’s contribution in the next chapter addresses the circulation of the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret in Brazil, by analysing the series of articles on candomblé and macumba he published in a Sao Paulo daily in the early 1930s. The chapter considers Péret’s valuable contributions to the understanding of these Afro-Brazilian religions, exposing at the same time the primitivist and ethnocentric biases embedded in his texts. Péret's articles are furthermore examined by Valle in light of the previously conceptualised “surrealist ethnography”.

Part II deals with “Patterns and paradoxes”, and each chapter approaches the intricate complexity and diversity of the Iberian and Latin America uses, appropriations and transformations of primitivism.

Rafael Cardoso’s chapter analyses Antropofagia’s anti-primitivism as a strategy that dealt with the relationship between primitivism and coloniality. Performing a genealogy of the Antropofagia movement, which discusses popular culture at equal stances with high culture, Cardoso goes through how the Pau Brasil movement, while exposing colonialism, still emulated a European gaze that exoticised Brazil as a primal realm to counteract civilisation and its discontents. But Antropofagia, according to Cardoso, goes a step further by returning “the outward gaze back to the West itself”, as Partha Mitter stated. Antropofagia disguised its primitivism as anti-primitivism by electing the “savage” instead of the “primitive” as a model, and by refusing ideas of authenticity and purity attributed to the latter. Antropofagia devoured civilisation as much as indigenous references and is therefore studied as taking advantage of colonialism as much as of anti-colonialism.

In Chapter 7, Mariana Pinto dos Santos tackles the primitivist tropes in the Portuguese context, taking into consideration how concepts of “primitive” and “primitivism” were part of the narrative of Portuguese colonialism, helping to present it as a modern enterprise. Pinto dos Santos analyses the way the “primitive” operated within modern Portuguese art history in the longue durée, by focusing on the entanglement of the primitivist narrative in the quest for modernity and the renewal of art, the emerging anthropological interest in folk and African art, the ideological narrative of the Portuguese colonial project, and anticolonial stances taken by Portuguese artists from neo-realist and surrealist backgrounds. She further discusses the concept of belatedness and its relationship with primitive and primitivism, reviewing, through some examples, the role these concepts have played in historical narratives from the European South- Western periphery that sought to dialogue with the master narrative of art history.

In Chapter 8, Joana Brites dissects the “primitivist impulse” of the Portuguese (Azorian) sculptor Ernesto Canto da Maya. Brites demonstrates how much Maya’s quest for the “simple” and “immutable” responds to the constraints he finds in modernity, and that his response encompasses a will for the regeneration of modern society and modern art. Discussing the relatively uncommon plurality of temporal and spatial references present in Maya’s work, Brites also highlights how time and space are experienced under a primitivist gaze, while relating the vagueness of geographic and chronological allusions in his sculpture with the imperial definitions then in force.

Introduction 7

Chapter 9 re-directs the discussion on the constraints associated with modernity to expressions of the primitivist imaginary via the theme of the pastoral. The pastoral projects a mythical vision of an Edenic landscape, putting forward an idyllic vision of the natural world in which animals, plants and humans live together in harmony. Yet, at the same time, it is fraught with tension caused by the rapidly-changing modern world. This tension is addressed by Maria Lluisa Faxedas Brujats, considering the specific historical circumstances of Catalonia in the early twentieth century, namely the aesthetic challenges posited by Noucentisme, within the scope of a comparative analysis between Joaquim Sunyer’s and Joan Miró's pictorial compositions of the Pastoral.

Also considering the many expressions of the primitivist imaginary in Spanish territory, Chapter 10 introduces the world of puppets, child art and illuminated manuscripts in the ongoing debates. Marta Soares focuses on 1920s Granada to discuss puppet shows and their primitivist resonances by addressing three shows that resulted from the collaboration between Federico Garcia Lorca, Manuel de Falla and Hermenegildo Lanz in 1923. Soares revisits these performances, while analysing explicit uses of the word “primitive” within the field of puppetry, and the links between puppetry and animism, a concept deeply rooted in theories on “primitive” mentality and animation theory.

LII

The editors wish to thank all the authors who participated in this book, and all the institutions, heirs and museums that allowed the publication of the images that are part of this volume. We also wish to thank Ana Paula Louro and Frederico Duarte from the Art History Institute, and Paula Monteiro from Research Management at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University, for their continuous support during the four-year research project Iberian Modernisms and the Primitivist Imaginary, which was the basis for this book.

The chapters benefitted from the discussion at the project's final International Conference “The Trouble with Primitivism: Uses of the Past in Iberian and Transatlantic Modernisms” held at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa on 26-28 May 2022, as well as several other moments of discussion between team members and with the consultants Patricia Leighten, Mark Antliff and Alejandro Mejías-López, who also contribute to this volume.

We would also like to thank Isabella Vitti for welcoming this proposal at Routledge— Taylor & Francis and for all her support and patience in the preparation of the manuscript.

Many thanks to Cristina Alcock for the revision of English, it was a precious and necessary help that improved the chapters written by non-native English authors. Thank you also to Rui Miguel Ribeiro for helping with the digital rendering of some of the images. We are most indebted to Begoña Farré Torras for further revisions of English, and also for her precious help in the overall revisions at the last stage of preparation of this book.

1 Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978, 1994 (ebook edition).

2 Alejandro Mejías-López, The Inverted Conquest. The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press 2010, 35-40.

3 See Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures)", boundary 2, 20, 3, Autumn 1993, 65—76. Mejías-López discusses Dussel's text and also sheds light into the impact of the divide between Protestantism and Catholicism in the configuration of this North-South axis; Mejías-López, op. cit., 35-36.

4 See for instance, Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26

27 28

29 30

Dussel, op. cit., 69.

Omotade Adegbindin quoting Hegel’s The Philosophy of History; Adegbindin, “Critical Notes on Hegel’s Treatment of Africa”, Ogirisi: A New Journal of African Studies, 11, 2015, 24.

Dussel, op. cit., 70.

Mejías-López, op. cit., 37. The author quotes Hegel: “When one is in Spain one is already in Africa. This part of the world... forms a niche which is limited to sharing the destiny of the great ones, a destiny which is decided in other parts. It is not called upon to acquire its own proper figure”.

Piotr Piotrowski, “Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde”. Europa! Europa? : The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent (Sascha Bru and Peter Nicholls, eds.). Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009, vol. I, 49-58.