Je suis l’autre. Giacometti, Picasso e gli altri. Il Primitivismo nella scultura del Novecento

The volume was published on the occasion of the homonymous temporary exhibition held in Rome, in the Great Halls of the Baths of Diocletian and in Lugano, at the Museo delle Culture. Beginning in 1860, and then continuously for over a century, the eruption of non-Western cultures on the world scene produced a true revolution in the field of the arts: the universe of sources was extended for artists and emerged and grew desire to go beyond visions and schemes that European realism had inherited from four centuries of aesthetic reflection. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the «fatal encounter» was transformed into a lasting love affair. Despite the hegemony of the model sanctioned by Western aesthetics, the creation of a creative fracture, generated a fruitful cultural opening and the first true convergence of the world in art. The grammar of the artists, prompted by the plurality of new sources, was adapted to an infinite number of languages. The Oriental arts and the ethnic and popular arts were decisive, together with the expressions of other creativity, thoughtful «archaic» and «primitive» which, as a whole, configured a vast «primitivist arsenal» which ended up also including the cave paintings of hunters Paleolithic, Cycladic statuettes, medieval sculptures, icons and - not least - children's art and that which, in time, will be called outsider art. The East contributed to the renewal of languages ​​with a radical critique of perspective and with the simplification of the use of signs and plastic forms; more profoundly allowed the artists to access the idea of ​​the work as the object of meditation process. Conscious and participating interpreters of what was soon considered a widespread attempt to return to the origins, were at least three entire generations of artists, who adhered to it mainly by virtue of personal research paths. The inspiration drawn from the primitivist arsenal was for many a driving force for inner dialogue. In addition to a question of «affinity», Primitivism was a sort of «revelation» capable of making concrete linguistic and formal intuitions and emotions otherwise destined to remain unexpressed.