Free from Fetters

...Inevitably, the young men who began to develop their individual styles between 1900 and 1910, were drawn to the "Primitives...

...The same simplicity, straightforwardness, and magical symbolism that we admire in the sculptures, are inherent in the mythology of the Dark Continent...

...Reviewed by Alfred Werner IT IS not surprising that, about 1900, some of the best painters and sculptors turned to African sculptures, to Japanese prints, and to folk art in general for inspiration...

...But Radin warns us against the notion that "some rudimentary delight in the telling of a story for its own sake" is entirely absent...

...But they had the admirable skill which comes from years of unrelenting practice, and they inherited from their nation a sense of pattern unsurpassed Hn the annals of art...

...Warner remarks that to early Japanese sculptors the tree, even before it was felled, suggested the cylindrical statue that was hidden within it, and that the finished statue recalled the tree...

...University of Pennsylvania Press...

...But today, with fidelity to real appearance of less value than pure design, and creative energy of more importance than technical ability, Hicks is-appreciated as a master approaching Rousseau...

...Young men like Vlaminck, Matisse, and De-rain revolted against Impressionism which, though it seemed to be revolutionary, aimed at a scientifically accurate representation of nature...

...Most of the artists were farm boys, and the sons of laborers...

...Contemporary art critics, had they seen Hicks' work, would have dismissed it as amateurishly crude...

...It is easy to understand that neither the literature nor the sculpture of these aborigines was Vavt pour Vart in the accepted sense of Western civilization, and that the "functional design" of Negro art can be traced to its utilitarian origin...

...These wooden death masks and ancestral figures, these bronze and ivory heads that exerted such a profound influence upon Fauvism, Cubism, and German Expressionism, are as exciting today as they were when "discovered" a half century ago...

...Picasso actually incorporated African forms into some of his works...

...In this country, the astonishing genius of Nippon was recently re-emphasized by the display of Japanese ancient art in five of America's leading museums...

...They believed that the essential truth could be better caught by an artist when he pierced through, or even neglected, externals...

...161 pp...

...Although most of the 165 samples of Negro art shown in African Folktales and Sculpture have been reproduced before, it is a joy to see them here assembled, this time in superb photography, and introduced by James Johnson Sweeney...

...His longing for peace is expressed in "The Peacable Kingdom," a painting based on the 11th chapter of Isaiah, where a Utopia is envisaged in which a little child plays safely with wild animals...

...Warner puts this succinctly when he writes, in The Enduring Art of Japan: "The wise Orientals long ago discovered the danger of becoming engrossed in accuracy at the expense of significance...

...Many of the 19th Century European sculptors knew astonishingly little about the relation between medium and form, but in this century the wisdom that guided anonymous Japanese folk artists was rediscovered by John B. Flanagan, the American who considered it the sculptor's goal to preserve the identity of the original rock "so that it hardly seems carved...

...Edward Hicks, the Bucks County (Pennsylvania) Sunday painter (1780-1849), was also a folk artist...

...Miss Ford has rendered us a service by giving lengthy quotations from the artist's delightfully "naive" religious poetry and from his posthumously published Memoirs...

...Entirely at the mercy of nature, and prostrating himself to all of her whims, Monet led painting into a cul~desac, while Rodin's Impressionism, with its denial of the integrity of stone, and the textural softness of his marbles, produced what was, in the last analysis, three-dimensional painting...

...Encompassing in little more than a hundred pages Japanese art from the 6th Century when Buddhism came to Nippon by way of Korea through the age of the "Great Decorators" (1573-1750), the author puts stress on the fact that much of the best Japanese art was, not plutocratic art, but folk-art, unsigned, undated, without insistence upon individuality, pictures and carvings done by common people and sold to the man in the street...

...To understand the spirit of the anonymous artists, the reader can do no better than first study the collection of African folk tales that are offered in the same volume with a fine introduction by the anthropologist Paul Radin...

...But while Rousseau, living in Paris and mixing with the foremost artists of his time, was uninhibited as an individual, and, as an artist permitted his imagination to run wild, the small-town Quaker preacher Hicks concentrated on religious and patriotic scenes, and often incorporated in his paintings motifs found in Bible illustrations or the works of contemporary artists, such as Richard Westall and Benjamin West...

...Art had reached its climax in technical perfection, and, in the process of competing with photography, then relatively new, many artists lost their sensitivity to design...

...Edward Hicks : painter of the peaceable kingdom, by Alice Ford...

...6.50...

...Likewise, we should assume that the woodcarvers and metal workers, too, performed their tasks, not merely to serve religious needs, but also to derive and to spread what more sophisticated cultures call "aesthetic pleasure...

...In her exhaustive study, Miss Ford compares him to the French customs inspector, Henri Rousseau, who was also untutored...

...They admired the African faculty of expressing emotions through purely sculptural means, with a minimum of naturalistic description...

...That simple man who was utterly unacquainted with the accomplishments of Western art, and who, as a Quaker, was not always sure that art was a permissible occupation, had an innocence of vision that allowed him to develop, in an age of extreme naturalism, remarkable qualities of abstract design, and a personal style which lifts him high above hundreds of 19th Century academicians...

...The Japanese always knew what was often forgotten by European artists: that design cannot be obtained by copying, however adeptly, from nature, that, in other words, design is just the opposite of the verisimilitude treasured in naturalistic art...

...II It was Japanese art that helped such post-Impressionists as Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec to free themselves from the fetters of naturalism...