primitivistn.adj.

1910 I. Babbitt New Laokoon iv. 83 The romantic primitivist is curiously different in his ways of playing from the genuine child.

1914 Lincoln (Nebraska) Daily Star 9 Jan. 3/2 The topsy-turvydom of the post-impressionists, primitivists, futurists, cubists, of today—..chaotic color, chaotic light and chaotic thought.

1949 B. Willey in Ideas & Beliefs of Victorians (B.B.C.) 43 Perhaps as Rousseau and other primitivists had urged, civilisation was a monstrous aberration, and men were happier and better when fresh from the hands of God or Nature in some primeval Eden.

1975 Nature 20 Mar. 219/1 Attacked by the new school of linguistics and cognitive epistemology as an ignorant primitivist, Skinner not only maintains his position but makes it more dogmatic.

1992 Times Higher Educ. Suppl. 27 Mar. 21/2 This leads to the familiar emphasis on Lawrence as a primitivist who yearns for the supposed wholeness of an earlier lost-Atlantean civilisation.

1914 B. F.-R. Hale What Women Want viii. 128 We are now in the full tide of the propagandist novel—naturalist, socialist, feminist, or primitivist.

1934 Musical Q. Apr. 213 Three currents are left in the wake of the Modern Movement—Primitivist, Classicist, Popularist.

1959 Times 30 Mar. 9/5 So far, and not surprisingly in young practitioners, this second, Primitivist reaction dominates new drama.

1977 D. Watkin Morality & Archit. i. ii. 25 He [sc. Viollet-le-Duc] has..a related ‘primitivist’ notion that Roman and Renaissance architecture lost contact with the pure fount of Greek truth, and is thus morally and stylistically in questionable taste.

2005 Daily News (N.Y.) (Nexis) 16 Jan. 17 [She] extends her primitivist view of eros and love in the new songs.