The contribution of E.H. Gombrich to the study of the primitivism

Pashentsev Ivan Dmitrievich Master's degree; Department of General Art History; Lomonosov Moscow State University 119991, Russia, Moscow, Lomonosovsky ave., 27, building 4, office G-420 pashentsev_i@mail.ru

Art historians, historians, and cultural scientists in the 20th century devoted a lot of work considering such a multifaceted phenomenon as primitivism. This phenomenon attracted the attention of scientists, since the "primitive" showed its apogee as one of the main artistic trends and a significant historical and philosophical principle in the XX century. When analyzing this phenomenon, researchers were interested in such questions as the reason for the flourishing of the "primitive" in European visual arts at the designated time, how to understand the ambiguity of the term and how to reconcile its various interpretations with each other, as well as where the origins of primitivism in European thought and culture are. Art theorist E. H. Gombrich became one of those who investigated such problems. It should be noted that in Russian historiography, the study of Gombrich's concept of primitivism is practically absent, unlike foreign studies, where the views of an art critic on the "primitive" are analyzed in one way or another (I must say, despite their presence, their number is not so numerous. It should be borne in mind that these studies have been published in the form of articles in collections or sections, chapters of monographs, but so far there are no full-fledged monographs or even dissertations that fully address this issue). Therefore, the problem of identifying the key features of "primitive" art for this art historian seems to be in demand and relevant.

The subject of the research is the writings of E. H. Gombrich devoted to the phenomenon of primitivism. The purpose of this work is to substantiate the contribution of an art historian to the development of this phenomenon in European art. The methodological basis for achieving this goal will be the source studies, comparative-diachronic, hermeneutic methods. These methods contributed to the scientific novelty of the article; thanks to them, for the first time in Russian historiography, it was possible to present the concept of Gombrich's primitivism comprehensively and fully, identifying its key features and highlighting the chronological stages of the evolution of the art historian's views on this issue.

The historiographical tradition of analyzing primitivism before Hombrich.

First of all, we should mention some of E. Gombrich's significant predecessors in the study of primitivism in European culture, mainly in the visual arts. Research on this topic arose due to the action of several factors: understanding the experience of Europeans' fascination with their past in the form of so-called "primitives" (this concept meant works of medieval art up to the High Renaissance and the art of Ancient Greece up to its classical period (5th century BC) ^{[25, p. 358]}) a certain collapse of "historicism", "progress" and other concepts that lead European thought only forward, along a linear period of time. In addition, the emergence and development of such a science as anthropology played an important role, thanks to the achievements of which Europe as a civilization began to learn about other peoples and civilizations, whether they were Eastern civilizations (China and Japan), African and other tribal peoples, or even tribes of prehistoric, pre-written times. And, undoubtedly, for art historians, the most important factor is the growing influence of primitivism as an artistic trend and trend in the visual arts since the end of the 19th century. Lionello Venturi (1885-1961) was perhaps the first art historian to come close to the problem of the "primitive". In his work "The Taste of Primitives" (1926 ^[37]), the art historian attempted to explain the preference of "primitives" by Europeans in the 19th century, meaning by "primitives" primarily the works of the Italian Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance of the 13th-15th centuries, up to Leonardo da Vinci, as well as Byzantine and Chinese art^{[38, p. 78, 222-226]}. Venturi considered primitivism as a phenomenon in connection with the formalistic concepts of "art form" and "inner eye" ^{[30, p. 78]}. These properties of certain works help to make an aesthetic choice between classical and non-classical taste in favor of the latter ^{[30, p. 15]}. It is this dualism that is the core of the history and theory of "primitives", covered by the author from ancient art, then medieval art to the 19th century, where special attention is paid to the perception of works of the "Romanesque style" in the 19th century and the views of John Ruskin ^{[38, p. 19-33, 52-81, 102-139, 140-168]}. Thus, L. Venturi laid the foundations of the discourse on primitivism, outlined a perspective for analyzing this multidimensional concept ^{[30, p. 16, 22]}, introduced the aesthetic category of "taste" into the theory of primitivism not as a rational preference, but as an instinct or natural inclination ^{[4, p. XXI]}. With the "Taste of primitives" it became possible to consider the "primitive" as an aesthetic and psychological pattern.

The next stage, already laid down by American historiography, can be called the work of scientists, the founders of the historical discipline "history of ideas" by Arthur Lovejoy (1873-1962) and George Boas (1981-1980) "Primitivism and related ideas in antiquity" in 1935 ^[29]. This fundamental monograph was the first to analyze primitivism as a historical and philosophical principle that originated in the philosophical and artistic thought of Ancient Greece. Moreover, Lovejoy and Boas introduced terminology that allows us to present primitivism as a complex of ideas with many aspects and their varying connotations — "cultural" and "chronological" with their characteristic subspecies: "soft" and "hard". "Chronological" primitivism is based on the belief that the earlier times of humanity's existence in general or European civilization in particular were more blissful, bright, and to some extent even blameless (classic examples of this "faith" in the past are the myth of the Golden Age, the Christian narrative of Eden before the fall of Adam and Eve, the famous the myth of the "noble savage" and other similar ideas). "Cultural" primitivism assumes that civilization carries with it the threat of the loss of all the virtuous things that nature has placed in people, therefore, nature and civilization are opposed in favor of the former (this dichotomy was embedded in the philosophy of Cynicism, where a number of thinkers, for example, Antisthenes and the famous Diogenes of Sinope, called for abandoning the oppression of civilization, referring to animal lifestyle) ^{[29, p. 1, 7, 11]}. The subspecies of primitivism depend on the degree of radicalism of beliefs: the stronger the denial of the civilizational, socially established way of life, the exaltation of the past, the more this worldview can be called "hard" primitivism; a less radical version of this view, respectively, is "soft" primitivism ^{[29, p.10]}. Unfortunately, after the volume devoted to ancient primitivism, only a book was published that highlights the ideas of the "primitive" in medieval thought and was written by Boas alone (1948 ^[6]). Nevertheless, as we will see, the influence of the concept of primitivism as part of the history of ideas will be evident in the monographs of many historians and art theorists, including E. Gombrich.

In the same decade, the famous work of art critic Robert Goldwater (1907-1973) "Primitivism in Modern Painting" (1938 ^[7]) was written, based on his dissertation. This book was truly groundbreaking for science, as it was the first monograph to trace the connection between primitivism as a trend in European art at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries and the "primitive" art of the natives and prehistoric peoples. In addition, Goldwater, as an art theorist, classifies the types of primitivism, presenting it as a definite idea (I think, not without the influence of the work of Lovejoy and Boas), expressed in a number of artistic trends of the late XIX- early XX century.: 1) the "romantic" primitivism represented in the works of Paul Gauguin and other artists of the Pont-Aven school, the Fauvists; 2) the "emotional" primitivism of German Expressionism (the Bridge and the Blue Horseman groups); 3) the "intellectual" primitivism characteristic of the "primitivist" painting and sculpture of Modigliani, Picasso and for abstract painting; 4) the primitivism of the "unconscious", manifested in the works of Dadaists, Surrealists, as well as artists who focus on children's drawing (for example, Paul Klee), or "primitives" – painters without the skills of academic composition, anatomically correct writing of figures, etc. ^{[7, pp. 57-86, 87-116, 117-142, 143-170]} This classification, as well as the general interpretation of the ambiguous definition of primitivism, was subsequently consistently considered in the works of art historians; it can be stated that turning to Goldwater is an indispensable condition for studying this phenomenon, especially its variations in the art world of the 20th century.

Primitivism as an aesthetic and psychological category in Gombrich's writings.

A representative of the "young generation" of the Vienna School of Art Studies, students of Yu. According to J. von Schlosser, Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich explored various facets of this phenomenon throughout almost his entire scientific activity and life: his first essay on the theory of art – a graduation essay at school – was devoted to the idea of progress (a concept opposed to primitivism and at the same time conditioned its existence) in the legacy of the "father of art studies" Johann Joachim Winkelmann ^{[1, c. 8]}, and the latter was seized by the desire to comprehend the essence of the "primitive" – "Preference for the primitive: episodes in the history of Western taste and art" in 2002 (the book was published after the author's death) ^[18]. Thanks to numerous works dealing with the problem of primitivism in one way or another, it is possible to build a certain evolution of Gombrich's views on this issue and establish which aspects he was interested in at one time or another of his scientific career. In 1950, the famous book "The History of Art" ^[20] was published, perhaps the only work of an art historian that is known not only to experts in the history and theory of art, but also to the general public. The "History of Art", which is natural, refers to primitivism not as an autonomous philosophical and artistic principle, worldview, but as part of the artistic tendencies of primitive (primitive as close to the original state of humanity) art (chapter 1 "Mysterious origins" ^{[2, pp.39-54]}), and as the art of the late 19th-first half of the 20th century (chapter 27 "Experimental art") ^{[2, pp.557-598]}. It must be said that in this monograph E. Gombrich speaks sparingly and without detail about "primitive" (in all connotations) art, primarily in the case of Art Nouveau, but it is worth noting that in the first chapter, on the very first page, the art historian lays the groundwork for his subsequent reflections on the essence of the phenomenon of primitivism. In particular, in this place there is an argument that primitive art and its works were created with a specific purpose and function, and for the primitive consciousness aesthetics and utilitarianism were strongly linked ("primitive peoples do not know the difference between a building and its image in terms of their usefulness" ^{[2, p. 39]}). Such a train of thought became an aid to the study of primitivism as aesthetic and psychological features in the history of European visual art in the work "Art and Illusion: a study of the psychology of pictorial representation" in 1960 ^[9]. One of the tasks that the researcher set himself was to compare the construction of an image in academic European art and art that was called "primitive" at various times – primitive, ancient Egyptian, Greek before Phidias, medieval and Renaissance art before Raphael, Chinese, Japanese, etc.; on the other hand, in children's drawing and painting of persons without professional drawing training. The key concept derived by Gombrich in relation to "primitive" art is the "conceptual" or "schematic" image. The essence of this term lies in the fact that the history of art, starting from primitiveness and up to the 5th century BC, was based not on imitation of the surrounding world (as happened in the art of Hellas in this century), a tendency to accurately depict nature, but on the depiction of "conceptual schemes" of the subject, presented as vivid and simple characters. An important component of any "primitive" image is its connection with magical thinking, which is alarmed by the phenomena of this world and has fixed its excitement within a certain framework ^{[9, p. 87, 97, 111]}. The latter position, as another work by E. Gombrich ("The Primitive and its value in Art") will later show, was taken from the book by G. Semper (1803-1879) "Style in Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetics" ^{[19, p. 315]}. However, the art historian tries not to associate "primitive" ways of seeing and representing ^{[9, p. 293]} only with the primitive world; according to the scientist, ancient Egyptian hieratic art, ancient Greek art before the 5th century BC, medieval art, etc. belong to this aesthetic and even psychological view of the world. ^{[9, p. 121-25, 128-129, 294-295]}. Thus, Gombrich sums up many epochs and periods of European and world art under the "umbrella" term "primitivism"/"primitive" art. This trend will continue in subsequent books and collections on the theory of art, for example, in the collection of essays "Reflections on a wooden Horse and other essays on the theory of art" in 1963 ^[13]. It examines subjects and themes from early 20th-century art as "primitive" art (the essay "Psychoanalysis and Art History", primarily an analysis of Picasso's work ^[14]), medieval art ("Achievement in Medieval Art" ^[8]), etc. It is worth highlighting the article "Visual metaphors of value in Art" from 1952, published in the same collection ^[24]. The fact is that it is in it that Gombrich formulates for himself the main question of primitivism not so much as a philosophical principle, but as an aesthetic and psychological tendency. In other words, we can talk about finding an answer to the question that greatly worried E. Gombrich: why was there a preference for "primitive" themes, motifs, and styles throughout the European history of art? Part of the answer has already been given: preference arose as a result of the rejection of existing art due to the "complication" of taste, its "sophisticated regressions" ^{[24, p.18, 21]}. This conclusion can be observed in almost all subsequent monographs and articles by the art theorist on primitivism.

The search for the historical and cultural origins of primitivism and its consideration as an idea.

In addition to raising the above question, another characteristic feature of Gombrich's work emerged in the 1960s.: He's trying to trace the genealogy of his fascination with the primitive, and I'm delving into its history. The art historian finds the roots of this phenomenon in late Antique rhetoric – in the speeches of Cicero, Quintilian and in the Pseudo-Longinus' treatise On the Sublime. The analysis of the works of these speakers was carried out in two articles of the 1960s - "Biographies" Vasari and Brutus Cicero" and "Discussion of primitivism in ancient rhetoric" ^{[17; 23]}. Consideration of such a topic as respect for art and culture of the past at the expense of denying the present state of affairs in art allowed Gombrich to derive a certain aesthetic formula – "Cicero's law". According to this peculiar artistic pattern, the preference for the archaic over the relevant in culture occurs due to the fact that ancient works, according to critics and viewers, art connoisseurs, are more "mature, refined" than new ones, which are disgusting because of their sensitivity and brightness. Therefore, there is a "rejection of the immediate pleasure" of contemplating paintings that are often verified and close to the ideal; this saturation with art passes through preference and consideration of the ancient past. A significant role in the generation of these feelings is played by the perception of the primordial, primordial as sublime, pure, and immaculate, according to Pseudo-Longinus' treatise of the same name ^{[23, p. 33, 34]}. This aesthetic reaction, based on the psychological reaction of "denial", can occur and repeat itself over and over again, thus having a cyclical character. All the phenomena of different cultures and epochs that were ever called "primitive" went through this path of "regression", and, according to E. Gombrich, it absorbs all the described phenomena ^{[27, p. 292]}. The article "Biographies" Vasari and Brutus Cicero's law" vividly demonstrates how the "law of Cicero" influenced the organic law of art development (in addition, the role of Aristotelian "Poetics" in the construction of this "organic metaphor" should be taken into account here), described by Vasari in his "Biographies" on the example of Renaissance art: from the initial stage, which is characterized by technical "immaturity"works, before the High Renaissance, when the works reached both "technical perfection" and "a high degree of maturity." After this development, decline occurs; then, according to Gombrich, the aesthetic phenomenon of abandoning seemingly perfect art takes effect ^{[27, p. 292]}. So, in this 1960 article, the art historian deepened an early prepared answer to the question of preference for the "primitive", expanding his statements about the "complication" of taste, its "sophisticated regressions" (which we discussed above, discussing the essay "Visual metaphors of value in art"). Indeed, Cicero's law became the rational tool for analyzing the "primitive" in European art in all subsequent works by E. Gombrich, including "Preference for the Primitive", where it is described in detail by the researcher in the introduction ^{[18, p. 7-8]}. Moreover, a significant result of the methodological searches of the 1960s was the appeal to the history of ideas, more precisely to its methodological apparatus for studying primitivism ^{[5, p.199]}, in the article "The Dispute about primitivism in ancient rhetoric" in 1966. In an article comparing the ideas of Cicero and Vasari, Gombrich uses terminology from the famous monograph of representatives of the discipline "history of ideas" by Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas "Primitivism and related ideas in antiquity" in 1935: two types of primitivism – "cultural" ("When we are most worried about the softness and effeminacy of our civilization, we are more all that attracts is the strength and inviolability of the past") and "chronological" ("the dream of a golden age of peace and abundance") and its two types – "soft" and "hard" ("George Boas and Arthur O. Lovejoy wittily and appropriately distinguished between what they called "soft" and "hard”primitivism. The dream of a golden age of peace and abundance is a mild version of the myth of the heroic age; when man joined the fight against monsters, it is a harsh version") ^{[17, p. 34-35]}. Thus, the art critic identifies primitivism with utopia and nostalgia, which is a key feature of the concept of primitivism in the framework of the history of ideas ^{[3, p. 126]}. The appeal to this monograph determined Gombrich's desire to present the history of primitivism primarily as a historical and cultural idea, rather than as a specific form and style. Reflections on the methodology of the history of ideas and personal communication with Boas (who was his friend) prompted the art critic to consider primitivism in conjunction with another aspect – the concept of progress.

The study of the relationship between the concepts of primitivism and progress; the resolution of the main questions by Gombrich regarding the phenomenon of the "primitive".

The 1970s were the decade when E. Gombrich continued to turn to primitivism as an idea that existed throughout various historical stages of art. In his 1971 lectures "Ideas of Progress and their Impact on Art", delivered at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in New York, and in the 1978 book "Art and Progress: the Impact and Transformation of Ideas", based on these lectures ^[11], the art critic examines the crisis of the European theory of progress in art and the beginning of the fascination with "primitives" at the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries. I. Winkelman played a significant role in this. In his periodization of ancient Greek art based on the principle of the evolution of technical means towards achieving the perfect ideal (echoing, thus, the description of the evolution of ancient Greek tragedy according to Aristotle's "Poetics" and Vasari's periodization of Renaissance art), the German thinker, praising the works of the "ancient style" ("noble simplicity and calm grandeur"), unwittingly gave the reason for the criticism of the perception of the history of European art as a change from the best to the worst and admiration for the ancient monuments of Ancient Greece ^{[11, p.33]}. His reflections, as well as the identical arguments of enlightenment philosophers Diderot and Rousseau about the "moral decay" of modern culture with its excessive "sensuality", prompted the students of Jacques-Louis David to rebel against the teacher (as a result of disappointment in the painting "The Abduction of the Sabines") and create a group of "primitives" ^{[11, s. 28-29, 67]}. Thus, the phenomenon of preference for the "primitive", namely the reverence of ancient Greek art before Phidias and medieval art before Raphael, was "legitimized" in the art world of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, which can be traced back to the "bearded" (another name for the art group "primitives"), and the "Nazarenes" and other subsequent movements. and the directions of the specified time frame ^{[11, p. 73]}. The main conclusion of this work was the following paradox: progress and primitivism are inextricably linked; progress opens the way for the "primitive" ^{[5, p. 204]}. Another significant work of E. Gombrich of that period was the BBC radio series "The Primitive and its Value in Art", later published in the collection "Essential Gombrich" ^[19]. For the first time in the entire scientific activity of an art historian, a definition of "primitivism" is given, although it is rather vague: "Primitive art is art that includes any kind of art that has ever been called primitive, in particular, when the term was used as praise" ^{[19, p. 321]}. This multifaceted definition makes it possible to combine under an extensive term various understandings of "primitive": from ancient and medieval "primitives" to formal borrowings of techniques of tribal and oriental art (for example, "Japanism" as a phenomenon of Art Nouveau). Gombrich also used the conclusions of his famous work "Art and Illusion" regarding the role of the "pattern" and its suggestion on the viewer's perception to illustrate how interest in tribal and primitive peoples arose in the 19th century ^{[35, p. 90, 91]}. According to researchers, this ambiguous designation of "primitive" art creates certain difficulties ^{[35, p. 91]}; in addition, in the context of the postcolonial turn in the humanities, it became incorrect to speak of primitivism only as a phenomenon of perception of only non-European (even tribal) cultures, especially in the 1980s ^{[5, p..197]}, when the 1984 exhibition was held and a monograph by V. Rubin (1927-2006) was published ^[33]. However, unlike Rubin and other scientists (A. Solomon-Godot, K. Rhodes, M. Torgovnik ^{[34, 32, 36]}), Gombrich was able to deduce the history of the idea of primitivism as a cross–cutting idea from antiquity to the first half to the middle of the 20th century, focusing on the "primitive" not only as an artistic trends of the twentieth century. The 1979 cycle "The Primitive and its Value in Art" demonstrates this aspiration of the art critic. In fact, these speeches are the forerunner of his future monograph "Preferences of the Primitive: episodes from the History of Western Taste and Art." The only significant difference between these two works lies in the amount of material: the podcast pays modest attention to twentieth-century primitivism, in contrast to the origins of the idea of the "primitive" and its development, while the monograph gives a full chapter to artists and sculptors who worked in a "primitive" manner ^{[18, p.201-268]}. Thus, already in the late 1970s, E. Gombrich finally formed an independent idea of primitivism.

Collecting and synthesizing episodes of primitivism from the history of Western taste and art.

Now, in order to prepare a larger-scale work on understanding the "primitive" in the theory and history of art, it remained only to clarify individual plots and themes for inclusion in a future monograph. It actually took two decades to think about it. During this time, Gombrich managed to prepare several articles and a couple of collections ^[15], where the "primitive" in art was still represented in the form of many episodes of art history: tribal art ^[22], ancient art ^[16], medieval art ^{[21, 10]}, etc. The most significant work was the article "Taste Primitives: the Roots of the Uprising" in 1985 ^[12]. This article is extremely important in the intellectual biography of E. Gombrich. The title of the work refers to the monograph of the same name by L. Venturi in 1926. This was done intentionally, since the art critic to a certain extent argues with Venturi and Giovanni Previtali (1934-1988) (a student of L. Venturi and R. Longhi, author of the 1964 book "The Fate of Primitives: from Vasari to the Neoclassicists", dedicated to medieval "primitives" ^[31]), indicating that they were hostages of the concept of evolution Giorgio Vasari's art shows that their "taste for primitives" is not formed without the influence of his theory of "organic" progress. This statement is very paradoxical, according to Gombrich, since L. Venturi highly appreciated the Italian medieval "primitives", unlike the author of "Biographies", to whom it was important to demonstrate the development of the Renaissance from low–quality works to almost perfect ones ^{[12, p. 11, 12]}. In addition, E.H. Gombrich as in previous works ("Art and Progress: the Impact and Transformation of an idea" and "The Primitive and its value in Art"), he emphasizes that the turning point in the emergence of interest in "primitives" in the context of the 19th century was the formation of a group of "bearded men" (aka "primitives") led by He was a student of Jacques-Louis David M. Couet, who influenced the further preference for works of the European past and works of cultures of other civilizations and peoples, tribes, and the formation of taste for them ^{[12, p. 33]}. Thus, an important trend of this period of studying primitivism was its interpretation not only as episodes of the European history of art, but also the development of aesthetic taste and value. It was this interpretation that allowed us to create the conceptual basis for the latest monograph, "Preference for the Primitive: episodes from the History of Western Taste and Art." As mentioned earlier, this work by E. Gombrich does not make new conclusions in comparison with the above works. Nevertheless, it is worth noting its place in the historiography of twentieth-century primitivism. On the one hand, the art historian follows the works written already in the second half of the century in the spirit of postmodernism, where the emphasis is on the study of formal borrowings by European artists of elements of African and other tribal cultures (in particular, the mentioned book by V. Rubin focuses on "the similarity of tribal and modern" ^{[5, p. 198]}). In particular, this is demonstrated in chapter 5 ("The liberation of formal values" ^{[18, pp.177-195]}). On the other hand, Gombrich surpasses his fellow researchers in that even formal foundations fit into aesthetic and psychological patterns. In "Preference for the Primitive," he repeats once again one of the significant signs of primitivism as a general principle of various works of diverse cultures: a "negative reaction" against "naturalism" and "mimesis," directed towards underestimating or even neglecting the technical aspects of the work. This criterion makes it possible to combine many other similar concepts and phenomena under one term ^{[26, pp. 143-147]}. A certain advantage of the book lies in the disclosure of the historical and cultural features of primitivism as a wide, complex range of diverse artistic and cultural ideas peculiar to various periods of European history and art. In this sense, the art historian follows both Goldwater's monograph and historians' research of ideas, which he used very often. Thus, to some extent we can agree with the statement that for Gombrich the idea stood above the problematic of form and style in the study of the "primitive" ^{[28, p. 187]}. His latest work vividly demonstrated this, as well as his desire to trace the historical roots of the preference for primitivism.

Conclusions

Summing up, it can be stated that the numerous works of E.H. Gombrich in the second half of the 20th century made a significant contribution to the study of primitivism as a historical, philosophical and, of course, artistic and aesthetic phenomenon. Gombrich continued to study primitivism in an aesthetic-psychological way, following L. Venturi, placing more emphasis on the psychological perception of the "primitive", starting in the 1950s. Like R. Goldwater and the founders of the history of ideas, the art historian used the concept of "primitivism" as a multidimensional cluster of ideas that developed in the history of European art; this approach arose in the works of the 1960s due to the search for the origins of the concept in the European history of thought. Moreover, in the 1970s, he analyzed the interdependence of the theory of progress and the idea of the "primitive" in history in the theory of European art, which is an important merit and achievement of the scientist. By the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, E. Gombrich managed to build a complete history of this definition from antiquity to almost the middle of the 20th century, which made it possible from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s to systematize materials to create a full-fledged monograph, the last work of an art historian. If we look at his intellectual path of comprehension of the "primitive", then in fact all his works can be considered not so much art criticism as cultural and philosophical works, which allows us to consider primitivism in a historical and cultural context. Despite the fact that E. Gombrich's approaches are contradictory in many ways, when viewed from the perspective of postcolonial historiography (the new historiographical tradition of primitivism), the very definition of the central concept of "primitivism" is vague and ambiguous, nevertheless, it is worth recognizing the significant contribution that the art historian has made to the study of this vivid and important phenomenon in the history of modern art.