Matière

Where English texts say "material" for the simple physical stuff (wood, bronze, terracotta, brass, ivory), the French Arts Premiers discourse uses matière with an alchemistic charge. Matière is not the profane raw stuff — it is the fleshly, energy-laden substance of art.

The early colonial critics who spoke of vulgarité de la matière (vulgarity of the matter) of African work entirely missed the carvers' intent: it was precisely the rough, unprocessed, unpolished matière that the European avant-garde of the 1910s sought, to break the polished, lifeless smoothness of academic salon marble.

The related concept of matière fétiche or matière magique refers to the additions and ingredients that load a wooden object with ritual force — skull bones, cemetery earth, crushed shells, seeds, fabric scraps — sealed into cavities in the wood. Without the matière, the most masterful carving is only a hollow piece of wood.