View the scanned original illustrations
WHILE official art, the great decorative and religious art, was losing sight of its wellsprings, intimate art remained near them and continued to drink from them. The hero, who came up from the people, has disappeared, but the people is still there, and in it the Greek soul survives. The people undergoes the corrosive influence of intellectualism and of gold more slowly, and the flame of life smolders in it even when it is entirely extinguished on the upper levels. Even at the times of the worst decay the instinct of the multitudes contains all the elements of the higher life; only the awakening of new desires through the appearance of new needs is required to call forth the great man and to ripen in him that instinct which the dead mass of his ancestors and the living mass of mankind have intrusted to him. Brutal animal power and the power of the intelligence are our only weapons for the conquest of our organization. The average civilized man, however, is as far from spiritual order as he is from direct possession. He has not yet attained the former; he has lost the latter. We are in the desert.
WHILE official art, the great decorative and religious art, was losing sight of its wellsprings, intimate art remained near them and continued to drink from them. The hero, who came up from the people, has disappeared, but the people is still there, and in it the Greek soul survives. The people undergoes the corrosive influence of intellectualism and of gold more slowly, and the flame of life smolders in it even when it is entirely extinguished on the upper levels. Even at the times of the worst decay the instinct of the multitudes contains all the elements of the higher life; only the awakening of new desires through the appearance of new needs is required to call forth the great man and to ripen in him that instinct which the dead mass of his ancestors and the living mass of mankind have intrusted to him. Brutal animal power and the power of the intelligence are our only weapons for the conquest of our organization. The average civilized man, however, is as far from spiritual order as he is from direct possession. He has not yet attained the former; he has lost the latter. We are in the desert.
It is
the people throughout the whole extent of the Greek world who gather up the
scattered elements of the soul of antiquity. The workman of art takes the place
of the hero. The uprooted tree is to cover the earth with leaves. From the
pavement of the Greek cities emerges a world of trinkets, figurines of metal
and of terra cotta, jewels, engraved stones, furniture, coins, and painted or
incised vases. Yesterday the man of genius was at the service of the people.
To-day the man of the people is at the service of the man of means.
The
bond that unites the great artist with the artisan, the passage from the great
sculpture to popular art, is the industry of terra-cotta figurines which were
manufactured by thousands at Tanagra, among those Boeotian peoples whom the
Athenians so greatly despised. The industry is not new. It had existed since
Archaic times. But in the fourth century, influenced by the diffusion of taste,
it was to perfect and extend itself. Like a little timid reflection it follows
the evolution of the great focus. Archaic, when the latter is so, it becomes
powerful and luminous with the focus; in the Praxitelean period the figurine is
frankly intimate. But before Praxiteles, the reflection is totally lost in the
blaze of the focus. From Praxiteles onward, when the focus is growing pale, the
little reflection, on the contrary, becomes a shining point of light in the
gathering shadow. The great sculpture which was made to decorate the temples
and to live in space fails when it attempts to turn to too intimate things. The
figurine, made to decorate private dwellings and to follow its owner to the
tomb in order to win the gods over to him, is essentially intimate in
inspiration and in destination. It was quite natural that it should attain its
apogee in the century that brought the gods back among men. There are not many
gods among the Boeotian sepulchers. There are men, and. above all, women and
children, and even animals, toys, and obscene figures.
It has
been said that Greek art lacked character. To assert this is to know it
inadequately, and perhaps only by the calumnies which the academies, the Roman
copies, and the retrospective novels have spread about it. What is character?
It is the placing in evidence not of the picturesque, but of the descriptive
elements of a given form. The art of the fifth century, which has been said not
to have character, goes beyond individual character. It expresses the entire
species, it describes it by insisting upon the dominant character of every
individual. But the intimate art of Greece does not aim so high. With its charming
wisdom it follows individual character. People have forgotten the Greek
portraits—so rare, it is true, but so penetrating—they have forgotten the
Tanagras, the Myrinas, the vase paintings, the whole of Pompeiian painting, and
those statuettes, those studies which perpetuate the cruel satire on the life
of the sick, the hunchbacked, the lame, and the infirm of all kinds. They
forget that there are even caricatures in the sepulchers of Tanagra. The
popularity which the comedies of Aristophanes enjoyed is explained when we know
their spectators. There was plenty of laughter in Greece, the philosophers
laughed at the gods, the people laughed at the philosophers. The coroplasts
(figure makers) of Tanagra and the potters of Ceramica were wholly joyous.
Did
they imitate the great contemporary statues as often as has been said? It is
improbable. There were occasional reminiscences, at the most. Imitation, close
or loose, is death. Now these things live. All the qualities of Praxitelean
sculpture are in them. and more acutely. They are modern. They will always be
modern. It is because they are eternal. To make a living piece is to make
something of eternity, to surprise the laws of life in their permanent
dynamism. Walking, dances, and games; the toilet, repose, gossip, attention,
revery, immobility; the fine shadings of life, its impressions, and its
memories—pass into these charming things, or flee, or hesitate, or halt. They
are a living crowd of unseizable moments, these candid little creatures, with
their red hair and their tinted dresses. They are the flowers that Greece
gathers for a crown as she looks at herself in the water, runs under the
willows, stands on tiptoe to reach the lips of the gods, and lives an animal
life so ingenuous that her singers and her sculptors could not help deifying it
and succeeding—as they followed its direction, without revolt and without a too
laborious effort—in illumining its spirit.
These
gracious creatures did not know their power of fascination. Greece loved and
let herself be loved in an admirable innocence. If the grandiose sensualism of
the Orient created the musical drama and inundated the sculptor of Olympia with
its sacred frenzy, it did no more than graze the masses of the people and the
artist-workmen who interpreted their needs. It is this that always separated
Dorian and even Attic art, at least, in their average manifestations, from the
art of the Greeks of the Orient. The women of Myrina, the Tanagra of Asia
Minor, knew their power of love. The true soul of Asiatic Greece, ardent to the
point of voluptuousness, the soul whose flame streams into the Hellenic
intelligence, is in the art of Myrina, far more than in the decorative
sculpture of the time. The richness of language is less disturbing in it than
in the hands of the artist of Pergamos, for this little art—colorful, ardent,
and impulsive—is made to be seen close by. There is not the least emphasis in
this art; it is rich, almost brutal, a thing made to communicate the ardor of
these beautiful, alluring women with their plump backs, their round arms, their
heavy hair, their trailing dresses. They paint their questionable faces and
adorn themselves and load themselves with jewels. One thinks of Hindoo
sculpture which is soon to be stirring in the shadow of the caverns, of the
idols of Byzantium with the gems glittering around them; one thinks of the
splendid death, in the purple of Venice, of Oriental paganism. The conquest of
the Occident by the woman of Asia is on the point of completion.
No comments:
Post a Comment