About the Genuine Author of the Magical Hypothesis of Art Origins

Abstract

The paper deals with the history of formation of the “magical hypothesis” of art origins, which replaced the “art for art’s sake” one at the turn of the last century and dominated the field till the middle 1960’s. The birth of the magical hypothesis is usually dated to 1903, when Salomon Reinach published his “L’art et la magie”. However, contrary to the traditionally held view, the magical hypothesis was first formulated and substantiated not by S. Reinach but by the Russian journalist and popular science writer L. K. Popoff. In 1880 he published a book entitled “From the prehistoric life of man”. One of its chapters was devoted to the question of functions of the drawn and sculptured animal images dated to “l’age du renne”. Popoff used ethnographic evidence to suggest that these images were “inspired by belief in the existence of a material relation between a being and its image and in the possibility of acting on the first through the second”. Though he presented his ideas and arguments also in French (1890) and English (1891), his hypothesis, born before its time, went unnoticed and received no recognition. The author gives account of Popoff ’s works devoted to the problem of art origins and assesses the degree of their novelty in comparison with works of his West European predecessors (E. Tylor) and contemporaries. Some consideration is given to the question as to whether S. Reinach had known of the hypothesis of his Russian forerunner. In addition, the paper includes a biographical essay containing little known facts of Popoff ’s life.