Primitive to Primitivism

    Primitive cave renderings of our ancient ancestors adorned the rock floors, walls, and ceilings of ancient homes long ago. This first

system of art, dubbed so because of the unity shared among them, was called the "Magdalenian art system"; the first in human history, 40,000-10,000BC. Qualities of later systems of art, such as composition, proportion, and refined color, simply were not developed to apply.

      Beginning in the 1700's a new 'system' came into being, in some ways reminiscent of the Magdalenian. The term Naive art applies to art created by those outsiders from the art community of the times, whom had not the luxury of practiced study and quality education of the artists at the time. Their work was characterized by the apparent 'abandonment' of fundamental

artistic qualities. The reality was that the lack of fundamental study gave rise to breakthroughs not available to the 'stuck in the box' artists. In fact, this style has been labeled 'primitivism' because of its resemblance to primitive art.