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‘Modern interest in primitive, archaic and prehistoric art no doubt reflects a certain weariness of mechanized civilization and its excessive intellectualism.’ Thus, flatly and somewhat misleadingly, Mr Bihalji-Merin begins the introductory essay to his lavishly illustrated book. (1) Quoting Gauguin, ‘Sometimes I went back very far, further than the horses of the Parthenon . . . to the wooden rocking horse of my childhood’, he establishes him as the outrider, whose ‘myth of the exotic utopia’ as formulated in his book Noa Noa, regenerated interest in primitive art, with its simple directness as a necessary source of stimulation. Quickly qualifying the ambiguity of this, Mr Bihalji-Merin distinguishes the successive stages of influence by negro sculpture on sophisticated painters, and the appearance of a naïve or popular art created by contemporary innocents. On the one hand Picasso, on the other Henri Rousseau. Jung’s ‘vanishing collective soul, which, as in a dream, repeats over and over again the fundamental eternal elements of the human soul’, applies to  both. It is possible to discern, as this essay does, an infinite number of gradations between the highly complex artist, apparently aware at every stage of the exact significance of his gestures on canvas, and the simple amateurs of the heart — neo-primitives or Sunday painters — who meticulously and often crudely transfer a vision no less obsessive or remarkable. The middle period of American abstract expressionism, for example, with its total liberation from the conceptual image, can hardly avoid being called ‘primitive’, if that term is to be allowed any universality of meaning. That it was usually carried out by trained, febrile and potentially skilled draughtsmen is another matter altogether: the result, however ‘painterly’ in execution, was by its nature a linear rejection of that same formality against which in language Rimbaud, for instance, rebelled. It is impossible for the genuine artist at intervals not to hate the whole business of art, in whatever media, and still more the parasitic world that lives off it or is deluded by it. A feeling that ‘everything has already been done, painted, thought, written, etc.’ is the strongest impulse behind most artistic suicides, whether actual or symbolic. An awareness that, historically, the individual’s puny mark on canvas, his stringing together of words, merely adds to a surfeit, is what causes the abstention, permanent or temporary, in genuine or counterfeit practitioners. Rimbaud hoped to become God, in whatever fashion he envisaged him, and his early disillusion made even an African outpost preferable to the environments of compromise. Valéry, obsessed with the purity of the virgin sheet of foolscap, could only with extreme difficulty overcome his reluctance to deface it. Silence, one might wryly conclude, is the purest form of music. In their absence of scruples about this, the great lonely masters, the journeymen and the primitives, of whatever category, are united. Virtuosos like Picasso, squirrel-like in their rifling of history’s storehouses, the craftsmen carrying out commissions that beginning as mere jobs end up as works rightly regarded as masterpieces, simple souls like Asilia Guillén, Grandma Moses and Ivan Generalic, altogether lack the neurotic inhibitions that make the sophisticated man turn away from it all in self-disgust. The purposes of art become irrelevant; whether they turn out to be personally therapeutic, socially necessary, or morally significant, is neither here nor there. In the end, we write or paint because we have to: as a celebration or a recompense; for money or for love; as a votive offering or as a means of protection. The bushmen rock painters in the Drakensberg mountains of Natal (who like the painters of Lascaux are odd omissions from the historical section of this essay) painted from a belief in sympathetic magic. If you wanted a woman, the necessary preliminary was to draw her; if you intended to hunt eland or rhebok, your chances of success would be increased by rapid oxidised images of your prey. It is a touching conception, and one, if re-stated, not far from the truth. For if we no longer share the illusion, we accept the relationship between art and the hunt, the dream and the future, the experience and nostalgia. In re-creating we re-live; in imagining we fulfil. ‘Art is memory; memory is re-enacted desire.’

     But in what, precisely, does the charm of modern primitive painting lie? You can dismiss most of it quite simply as bad, if you are so inclined, though such a superior judgement must involve an essential narrowness of sensibility, an incuriosity about, at its simplest, the ‘wild flowers’ of art. One does not need to be perverse or gullible to find many of these pictures of more intrinsic interest than the modish abstractions, sheep-like in their imitativeness, dominating current internationally-mounted exhibitions. It may be true, as has been asserted, that within the abstract idiom personal and national differences are more clearly evident than ever they were before. Nevertheless, the demands of the international market have created an obsession with evolving refinements of style, little removed in impulse from the annually dating details, tailfins, double headlamps, etc., in contemporary motor cars (though, it is worth noting, these latter do not apply to the quality makes which evolve, quite indifferently, according to natural laws of their own).

     The naïve painter, quite simply, stands his ground. The illustrations here, ranging from the works of the Sacred Heart Group in France, Vivin, Bombois, Bauchant, Peyronnet, through the American primitives like Hicks and Hirshfield, the Haitian Hyppolite, the Mexican Posada, to the peasant painters of Yugoslavia, Vivancos of Spain, Metelli, Viva the Italians, the British Wallis, F. Box and Scottie Wilson (but no Lowry, perhaps the outstanding primitive painter in Europe) and finally Pirosmanaschwili of the USSR, all confirm an absorbed fascination with reality, remembered, hankered after, or created through juxtaposition in new dimensions. The Yugoslavs, for example, with their agricultural workers and fishermen may be producing an art that is socially valuable in an obvious way, but they reveal at the same time the eyes’ genuine fondness for what they alight on. The lords of the jungle meekly invading domesticity, as in F. Box’s reversal of Rousseau, Bombois’ weightlifters and heavy-thighed nudes, tattoo-like in their permanence, distorted as Brandt’s antique camera-eye view of them, Vivin’s quaysides and wild boar hunters, Rousseau’s ‘Ballplayers’, jungles and country weddings, Meijer’s ‘Cow-shelter’, Nikifor’s ‘Railroad Tunnel’, Metelli’s ‘My Departure for Military Service’ — these are pictures which make use, in much the same way, of the bushman’s sympathetic magic, his delight in recording. Gypsies, portlife, trains, farmyards, weddings, forests, simple biblical episodes, the circus, women, cattle and flowers, go to make up a world in which everything, however bizarre, is considered and has its place. That perhaps is the clue. Literary painting it may be, crude nearly always, but by it we are restored, as by little else in contemporary art, to a basic awareness of the environment and rituals that in the end absolve us from capitulation.

     It is of some interest, as far as defining the primitive is concerned, that Sir Kenneth Clark should regard the douanier (with Benjamin Britten) as Sidney Nolan’s closest familiar. The sumptuous volume, devised by Bryan Robertson, now devoted to Nolan’s work, (2) reflects various aspects of one of the few genuine image-makers (with Bacon and Vaughan) still around. ‘Although Nolan is a born painter,’ Sir Kenneth writes, ‘he is not at all an exponent of what French amateurs used to call la bonne peinture; that is to say, he does not treat oil paints as a virtuoso pianist treats the piano, as the one and only instrument which with infinite patience can be coaxed into yielding precious qualities at variance with its character. On the contrary, he treats his medium with a certain impatience, and uses any means to secure his meaning.’ Meaning? This, in terms of avant-garde criticism, preoccupied with texture, has almost a reactionary ring about it. Yet Nolan, despite the poster-like quality of some of his bigger can vases, has curiously, as far as the critics go, got away with it. Have those rigid devotees of the self-sufficient painterly gesture, unrelated to natural forms, let alone to figurative or conceptual images, been stunned by Nolan’s sleight-of-hand skill, his disarming cake-eating? For Nolan, despite the move to comparative abstraction in his latest group of Leda paintings, remains one of the dwindling number of important painters concerned, however ambiguously, with something over and above what organized paint alone can communicate. The particularly Australian quality of Nolan’s painting is one thing (‘His figures levitate with surprising ease; his dehydrated horses are so light that a man can pick one up... the forms of gravity are continually defied by flying foxes and bounding kangaroos’) — as Sir Kenneth Clark says, ‘He has extracted its essences: the red desert, the dead animals, the stranded, ridiculous towns.’ His search for an applicable and significant myth — Kelly, Mrs Fraser and Bracefell, Burke and Wills, Gallipoli, Leda and the Swan — is another; his appropriation of landscape, Wimmera, the Queensland rain forests, Greece, for private purposes, is a third. ‘To a certain extent, most of Nolan’s work is both recapitulatory and organic in the sense that the several strands of idea and visual concept in his various groups of paintings are progressively gathered together and combined in fresh juxtapositions.’ By which, Bryan Robertson means that within any one myth, or landscape, be it Greek or Australian, lie the seeds of the others. Fleming, discovering penicillin in the same way, took advantage of what was already there. Genius is a capacity to recognize such flukes, and Nolan’s ‘inspired pictorial opportunism’, in Robertson’s phrase, puts paint itself firmly in its place.

     It is instructive, after the primitives and Nolan, to turn to Werner Haftmann’s two-volume survey Painting in the Twentieth Century, (3) which, despite the lack of elegance in the writing, is a work of admirable organization, scrupulous scholarship and surprising balance. At the end of his introduction to the plates Haftmann, quoting Picasso ‘I do not seek, I find’, and Klee ‘The artist knows a great deal, but he knows it only afterwards’, observes: ‘After what we have said, it seems superfluous to make humanitarian, social or religious demands on art. In a society that is essentially designed to organize, direct and gratify mass impulses, art must minister to the silent zones of man as an individual. Modern art is essentially “l’art pour l’homme” . . . it makes the individual aware of what he is in our time.’

     Has art, whatever its ‘superfluous’ aspects, ever been anything else, ever done anything else? A case can be made out, I suppose, for almost any view of the artist’s function, as he conceived it, from the Renaissance on. Do the paintings of Pollock or de Kooning or Bazaine or Burn, contribute more to the individual’s self-awareness than, say, to take the least likely, those of Stubbs or Constable or Renoir or Sickert? I wonder. Haftmann’s brilliantly documented and illustrated pages offer some unnerving experiences. For example, a relief in wood and metal produced by Vordemberge-Gildewart in 1924 that is virtually indistinguishable from a 1960 Pasmore. Has the new movement in painting, any more than in poetry or music, done any more than elaborate the break-through made, generally, before 1914? Only in inessentials, and not at all in direction, do even the most recent of these canvases encourage one to think so.