Гео Милев и Сирак Скитник – (а)синхронен примитив
Geo Milev and Sirak Skitnik – (A)Synchronic Primitive

Summary/Abstract: In his article „Native Art“, published in 1920 in the magazine Libra (Vezni),Geo Milev for the first time juxtaposed „art as a temple“ and „art as a street“, or tendentious art. He constructed an elitist conception of native art,in which the idea of art as a temple, as an expression of Universal Spirit, took a central place. The temple is the place of universal or native art, while thestreet is the place of people’s art. The mass production of art in the 1920s gave rise to the necessity to bring back its sacred meaning. If for Geo Milev, massor people’s art is tied to the village, with village life and strives to juxtapose itself against the universal art of the big cities, for Sirak Skitnik, the big city is precisely the place where mass art arises. Milev’s idea that art should return to„man’s primordial spiritual essence, man apart from his material transfigurations,re-evaluations and possessions, freed of everything that we today call material culture and civilization“, finds in Sirak Skitnik it’s continuation in the concept of returning to a contemporary primitive. The return to this primitive offers Bulgarian modernists from the 1920s the opportunity to rehabilitate certain artistic characteristics that were suppressed in the 19th century, namely irrationalism, spontaneity, naiveté, and the magical function of art.

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