Chapter 17

Historical background #2

In Germany at the end of the fifteenth century, two sculptors were outstanding: Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemanschneider. Their wood figures vary in size from 5 or 6 inches to over life-size. Both have a recognizable style which stands out among the somewhat stereotyped works of their contemporaries. Heads and hands are taken from life but formalized, though not idealized. Indeed, many of their figures are character-studies of plain, homely people. In common with all the wood carvers of the time, they were greatly interested in drapery. It is very com­plicated, often drawn forward into a bunch of great angular folds, carved very thin (Fig. 61). Again, it is studied from life but formalized, using to the maximum the resilient quality of the wood. Sometimes the German sculptors carved nude figures, which is rare in Gothic art, and is a sign that they were living at a time when ideas where changing. The beginning of the sixteenth century saw the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval way of living and thinking were dying out, together with their means of expression—Gothic art itself.

Fig. 61. Wood drapery, sixteenth century.

When England became Protestant, church-building stopped and many cathedrals and churches were left unfinished through lack of interest and money. It was a century before it began again, the first church being Inigo Jones's St. Paul's in Covent Garden. It has the first classical portico—with columns and pediment—ever built in Northern Europe. It is not only a gulf of a hundred years that separates this style from that of King's College Chapel in Cambridge which is Gothic. It is a revolution in taste, showing the effect of the Renaissance on England, although it had ended in Italy half a century before, and had already been superseded by the Baroque style.

Beginning in about 1260 with Nicola Pisano's sculpture, gradually rising to its zenith in the fifteenth century, and ending with Michelangelo's death in 1564, the Renaissance may be said to have lasted for three hundred years. It overlapped the Gothic period in other countries, but the Gothic style, being northern in origin, never really took root in Italy. It was Raphael who first used the name 'Gothic', to denote something outlandish and even barbaric.

The Italians were aware that they were living among the ruins of their own former greatness, and the classical style which had never quite died out, was a symbol of it. Everyone, rich and poor alike, was in sympathy with its revival. The architects used Roman forms as a basis and created an entirely new style, light and ele­gant. The sculptors went searching among the Roman ruins for fragments of sculpture, and their admiration for it is obvious in the way it influenced their own work. Unlike the sculptors of earlier periods who had also studied Roman remains, the Renaissance sculptors were technically capable of equalling it and then surpassing it. At the same time, long-neglected Greek and Roman manuscripts were sought out and read avidly, and were later printed in book form. Philosophy and science could now be taken up again from where the Greeks had left them.

Fig. 62. Wings in wood and wing structure.

The re-discovery of antique literature and of Greek writing in particular, caused a kind of ferment of quickened creative thought, in which intellectual advances and art kept pace with one another. By the fifteenth century, Italy resembled Greece of the fifth century B.C., in the extraordinary number of men of genius living and working there, and it is as difficult to account for the sudden upsurge of vitality and brilliance in one as in the other.

In the medieval world any urge to pursue a free and individual line of thought, or to search for rational explanations of human existence and natural phenomena were forbidden as heretical. The church supplied its own solutions to all problems and an answer to every question. But now, in Italy, these dogmas could no longer be blindly accepted. Even though the Pope himself lived in Italy, there was more free thinking and reasoning there than in any other country under his domination. This was partly because the universities were secular, not like those of the rest of Europe which had grown out of cathedral schools, and partly because Italy was receptive to new ideas and had always been in close contact with outside civilizations—the Greeks of Byzantium and the Moslems, from whom they gained knowledge of mathe­matics, chemistry and astronomy.

The church was still the chief patron of the arts but there were now many private patrons, wealthy citizens who were also scholars. They commissioned works of art and kept artists in their employ, giving them much more freedom to try out new ideas than church patronage would allow. The artists were stimulated by the new-found knowledge of anatomy, perspective, foreshortening and chiaroscuro, which gave them a wider comprehension of three-dimensional space, and so transformed their work that it lost all medieval naivety.

Renaissance wood carving

Like the Greeks and the Romans, the Italians used marble and bronze, but there are still some wood carvings to be found among the hundreds of Renaissance works scattered all over the world, as well as those remaining in Italy (plate xrv). One of the most famous is the Mary Magdalene by Donatello in Florence. Less well known is his crucifixion, an early work which was origin­ally painted in bright color, traces of which can still be seen under the brown varnish that now covers it. Its arms were fixed on in such a way that they can be turned round and altered from their horizontal position to hang down, in order that the figure can be placed in the tomb during Easter services.

Another of Donatello's wood carvings is a colossal wooden horse at Padua. It is very simple in form with a barrel-like body and its stance is similar to that of his bronze equestrian also in Padua, the Gattemelata.

Italian churches and cathedrals use more marble than wood for interior furnishing, but there are many stalls and benches enriched with carving to be found in them.

Influences of the Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance made a tremendous impression on the rest of Europe but was slow to make itself felt. Travelling and communication were still difficult between one country and another, so that few indications of what was happening had filtered through. When the French army marched through Italy in 1594, they were astonished and disconcerted by the strangeness of what they saw: the bold and spacious buildings, the round arches, garlands and cupids, so different from the Gothic archi­tecture of their own country.

It was through books that Renaissance ideas first spread abroad. This impulse coming from Italy was a breath of life to the educated people of Europe and they responded to it by travelling to Italy and studying at the universities. They came back loaded with classical, scientific and medical know­ledge.

The effect on England is seen in the spirit of discovery and experiment of the Elizabethan age, and above all, in the wealth of literature produced at that time.

Art in Europe generally was greatly affected; the expansion and enrichment of life and thought were increased by further inventions. Printed maps, ocean-going ships and the mariner's compass, all made it possible to explore overseas, and to bring back treasures and works of art, and all kinds of new materials. Chinese and Indian craftsmanship in particular caused great amazement and admiration.

Influences of the Reformation

Art was equally affected by the Reformation. The prestige of the church had fallen very low, and many of the rulers of northern Europe took the opportunity to break away from Rome. Europe became divided into two camps: Catholic in the south and Protestant in the north, with extremists on both sides.

In the Catholic half—Italy, Spain, Austria and South Germany —a movement known as the Counter-Reformation was started, which increased the wealth of the church once more, and hun­dreds of new churches and cathedrals were built. To impress the people, they were as ostentatious as possible, and contained as much decoration, ornament and sculpture as could be crowded into them.
There was a similar extravagant use of art and craft in France, but for a different reason. In this case it was for the glorification of the Monarchy. In England, and the northern Protestant countries, however, the arts had been brought almost to a standstill. Art and above all sculpture, were associated in people's minds with the luxury of court life, as well as with Catholicism and fears of idolatry.

The Baroque Period: 1600-1780

Although the force and the energy of the Renaissance had died away in Italy, it was there, after an interval of fifty years, that the new style known as Baroque originated, making Italy again a source of great influence.

After the death of Michelangelo in 1564, the artists who followed him had technical facility and assurance, but in imitating him they merely exaggerated his manner into mannerism. Lacking his power and intensity, their works were empty. It was the architects who led the way and evolved the Baroque Style.

In this age of growing technical virtuosity building-construction could be more complex and extravagant, daring and fantastic than ever before. Baroque architecture is plastic, like sculpture. Whole walls curve in and out as if giant hands had moulded them; there are broken pediments and flourishes and columns twisted like barley-sugar. But it is the interiors of the churches in Spain and Italy that are really overwhelming, with their gold and silver, sumptuous ornament, and multi-colored marbles. Not an inch of wall, floor or ceiling is left plain. Concealed lighting, false perspectives and optical illusions—all were used, as if by a theater-designer, to amaze the congregation.

The Baroque style was of great benefit to the Catholic Revival­ists, as it drew the people back into the churches and overawed them with mystery and illusion. The sculptured figures emphasized movement—restless activity and dramatic energy. There were miracles and martyrdoms; saints in agony or ecstasy, with upturned eyes and agitated gestures. Sometimes real hair was used, real eyelashes and teeth, and pearls for tears.

Many of them were carved in wood, to make them light in weight and easier to carry in procession through the streets. Some of these figures are still used today, and may be seen in Easter processions, particularly in Spain. Even the newer ones will probably have been copied from the Baroque originals.

Each church has its own statue—Christ, Virgin, Pieta or Saint—and takes it to the cathedral to be blessed. It is mounted amid a forest of candles, on a wide platform carried by twenty perspiring men. They also have to carry a little boy or two, who scramble about on the platform, keeping the candles alight. The statue is borne along, up and down the hills, swaying and nodding, and the people in the streets clap their hands as they see it pass by. It has been repainted and in some cases dressed in real clothes, and is decked with precious stones, brought out for the occasion from safekeeping. Each one tries to be more glittering and more splendid than the others. Now and again, the procession stops, and is serenaded by Flamenco singers.

The attitude of the people toward their statues is now very much what it must have been when they were first carved. Baroque sculpture still lives in Spain at Easter.

The Italian sculptor Bernini (1598-1680) master of the Baroque in sculpture, dazzled his contemporaries. No technical difficulty stops him from posing his figures as freely as if they were real people caught in a moment of violent action. After the simple static movement of Renaissance figures, his are theatrical and sensational, and the crumpled drapery swirls out at the sides in undulating spirals or flattens itself on to the form, as if caught by the wind.

No one was able to carve marble as freely as he did, but some of his effects could be achieved in wood, with arms, legs, wings and drapery jointed on, and the joins all hidden by gesso and paint.

After Bernini, all sculpture had a greater freedom of move­ment, whether religious or secular, and stucco and wood painted and grained to imitate marble, were often used.

In France, the Baroque was more subdued because of a natural preference for the severely classical. The French kept to a more Renaissance style—they were the first Europeans to introduce it, and to welcome Italian artists. French landowners were buying art-collections of impoverished Italian noblemen— rather as America has been buying European art in the twentieth century—and building large country houses in imitation of Italian palaces. When Louis XIV built Versailles in 1660, it showed Baroque influence only in the extravagance of its enor­mous size. He kept thousands of courtiers there. Its interiors called for such quantities of ornament of every kind, and so many figures were needed for the facades, fountains and gardens, that a vast industry was organized and hundreds of craftsmen were trained to supply them.

During the following century, other monarchs and princes of Protestant countries tried to imitate Louis. They built their own versions of Versailles, and encouraged the arts and crafts of their country.

16th and 11th Century England

England also began to build many large country houses as well as churches but was even less sympathetic than France toward the extreme forms of Baroque.

The Renaissance style introduced by Inigo Jones had hardly been tried out in England when it was followed by Baroque. Both styles were explored simultaneously and Christopher Wren introduced certain Baroque elements into the exteriors of his fifty-three London City churches and of St. Paul's, while his interiors are more Renaissance in type, and are simple and restrained. They are light and open, with rich dark polished woodwork: reredos, pulpit, sounding-board, chancel-arch and screen, all of extreme elegance, and carved with high reliefs of wreaths, swags, flowers and fruit. Apart from small winged cherubs, there is no large-scale figure carving, no saints, Virgins or crucifixions. Puritanism remained strong and no 'images' were required. Even the cross as a symbol was not used again in England until about 1870.

Grinling Gibbons (1648-1720) is the most famous name in English ornament carving. In his own much narrower field, he was as daring and inventive as Bernini, and people marvelled at his work. His swags and drops of flowers, leaves and fruit (Fig. 18, p. 51) are carved to an extreme thinness, and he even carved a lace cravat for his own amusement. Like many of the master-craftsmen working in England at that time, he was of foreign origin. There were refugees from Catholic Flanders and Italians who had been brought over to introduce the Renaissance style of decoration. After the end of Gothic art, a new English tradition had to be started and new craftsmen trained.

English church interiors became more ornate, with colored marbles and a variety of materials; tombs and monuments were no longer in the form of recumbent effigies but were gradually becoming more elaborate. St. Mary Woolnoth, Nicholas Hawks-moor's City of London church (1716-1727), is typically English Baroque, with carved wood barley-sugar columns. Pure white marble was now the favored material, and figures were no longer painted.

A great deal of rich and splendid wood carving can be seen in the English country houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

There are carved chests, screens and coats of arms, lions and griffons, and magnificent staircases and chimney-pieces. There is a lively mixture of styles; as in the elegant linear Renaissance design carved on stout four-sided English balusters.

Rococo: 1720-1780

The eighteenth century is known as the Age of Reason, or the Age of Enlightenment. It was the age of the first encyclopaedias, museums, dictionaries, scientific treatises and historical re­searches. There was speculation about every aspect of life, and it can be recognized as the beginning of the modern age, not only in material advancement and scientific invention, but also in the more humane and liberal attitude to life.

At the same time, life at court and among the aristocracy became more extravagant and luxurious, particularly in France. Its artificiality was satirized by such writers as Voltaire and Rous­seau, and among his many other advanced theories, Rousseau advocated a more natural life in natural surroundings. The sophisticated among his readers liked this novel idea of rural simplicity, and grand ladies dressed up as shepherdesses and milkmaids, though they were doubtless terrified of cows. This fashion is reflected in the sculpture.

The style of interior furnishings, ornament and sculpture became lighter and more frivolous, and the decoration more graceful and delicate. The heavier Baroque scrolls, swags and festoons were replaced by elegant linear designs in shallow relief, with shells, vase-shapes, ribbons and fans. The marble columns and pediments introduced into the interiors by Baroque archi­tects, were now imitated in painted wood, stucco and plaster. The craftsmen of the Rococo period found out the possibilities of plaster as a material in itself—its lightness and fineness. Another advantage was its cheapness; monarchs and dukes were chronically short of money, though as fond of display as ever.

The Rococo style began in France, but was taken up with particular enthusiasm in Germany, and German wood carvings of this time are the very essence of Rococo, both allegorical figures and religious ones. All have a somewhat worldly look, whether the subject is a saint, an 'Autumn', or an Apollo.

While Baroque angels and saints are in arrested movement halfway out of their niches, Rococo figures have stepped out altogether. These strange figures are generally of lime wood, hollowed out, painted and gilded, and are masterly in execution. No other material could serve so well as wood for outstretched arms and hands with outspread fingers, for hair in corkscrew ringlets, fluttering draperies and wings with thin, individually-carved feathers. Many of the figures are perched on the edges of altars and cornices; some are fixed to wall or balcony and seem to be floating free. All the special properties of wood are made use of, where stucco would be too heavy and plaster too fragile. In marble monuments of that period, small projecting parts are sometimes found to be made of wood painted to look like marble and added on afterward.

About 1775" Fig. 63. Rococo ornament.

The chief characteristics of the Rococo style are restless move­ment and avoidance of all symmetry. An ornamental frame will be designed and carved so that its center-line has been shifted and curved to one side at the top (Fig. 63). It is carved very thin, or into a spikiness which is a feature of the style.

In England, decorative motifs are Rococo in feeling, but the dislike of oversumptuous extravagance and exaggeration still prevails. Exteriors retain a classical simplicity, and interiors show that English craftsmen had an unerring taste and sense of proportion in everything they designed and made. The eighteenth century—the Georgian Period—is the apex of English architec­ture and furniture-making.

Interiors of churches and houses are remarkable for their exquisite plasterwork, which enhances the elegance and spacious­ness of the architecture. Some wood carving is to be found, but plaster was quicker as well as cheaper, because moulds could be used for repetition work.

Wood was evidently considered unsuitable for statuary, which was of marble or bronze—to be in keeping with the Roman fragments and Renaissance works that were being imported in great numbers.
Anyone who goes to look at the wood carvings in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a wonderful collection—will not find many English examples. These are still in their original settings in cathedrals, churches and houses, and among them can be found many small reliefs, heads and monuments from all periods, anonymously carved by the local woodworker. In the Museum, the carvings are mostly German, Flemish or Spanish.

Sculpture in Europe generally had lost its foremost position among the Arts. After the Renaissance, when reading and research became more widespread, and the thoughts and ideas of the people more complex and many-sided, the other arts— painting, music, the theater and the novel—were found to be a more suitable and flexible means of expression than sculpture. Painting had developed side by side with sculpture in Italy; literature, drama and music had been encouraged and advanced at Versailles and all the smaller courts; and there were now as many secular patrons as religious ones. Artists' themes were non-religious as often as religious. Handel used some of the tunes originally intended for his operas, which had libretti based on pagan legends, in his religious oratorios.

Neo-Classical and Romantic Periods 1780-1880

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, there were fresh changes. The French Revolution undermined ideas which had always been taken for granted; everyone's attitude to life was shaken and the old system of values was questioned. The Indus­trial Revolution though less violent was equally disturbing. With the invention of the blast furnace and the steam-powered engine, man is said to have taken a step forward in controlling the forces and materials at his command, greater than any since the Stone Age. The immediate consequences, factory building and the mushroom growth of towns, which were beginning to disfigure the English countryside, were indications of the future that was in store.

The resulting response was the Romantic movement which swept like a wave over the whole of Europe, lasting nearly a hundred years. It had much wider implications than the Neo­classical movement, which was purely an art-style. This style arose through a renewed enthusiasm for Classical art which made the sculptors turn against the Rococo style as frivolous. They now aimed to create a more noble and dignified kind of sculpture based on the Antique and exact measurements of ideal form. The Roman sculptor, Canova (1757-1822), was the leader of this movement and in his day he was considered to be 'greater than Michelangelo'. The aesthetic taste of his age may be indicated by the fact that the newly discovered fragments of genuine fifth-century Greek sculpture, including the Elgin Marbles, were not yet appreciated; they were thought to be clumsy and lacking in 'ideal beauty'. Roman copies and late Hellenistic work were preferred. The Neo-Classical style continued into the Romantic movement and became part of it; in the end it was largely a question of using correct Grecian costume and hair-styles.

A school of English-born sculptors at last appeared in England influenced by Canova and working in the Neo-Classical Romantic style. It was they who created the huge marble monuments in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's.

The style of the Romantic movement is essentially literary in origin and English literature was the first expression of it. According to the dictionary a Romance is 'a tale of Medieval Chivalry, or a novel with that kind of subject'. Romantic is defined as 'strange, picturesque, imaginative, sentimental'. It implies a mood of antipathy toward the present and a desire to escape into the past—into some past age, that seems more to resemble the ideal world of the imagination, and the kind of life lived by the Greek hero, the Medieval Knight or the rustic shepherd.

Looking back nostalgically to medieval times was a prevalent mood in the early Romantic period, and for the first time in nearly three hundred years, Gothic art and architecture were admired once more. At first, this admiration showed itself simply as an attempt to evoke the Gothic atmosphere. Country houses were built in the form of sham castles and sham abbeys in the 'Gothick' style (although they often had severe classical interiors), and there were mossy dells, grottoes and 'wildernesses' in the gardens. Individual choice of architectural style became the vogue, in direct contrast to the practice of the previous century, the Georgian period, when all building was in harmony. It was a reaction against that period's great regard for order and reason. However, in casting off these disciplines they also rejected the good proportions of Georgian architecture and thus contributed to the muddled architectural ideas of the nineteenth century and the general deterioration of taste.

During the early phase of the Romantic movement there were two main styles in architecture: the Gothic and the Neo-Classical. The Houses of Parliament are a compromise; a classical shape with Gothic decoration superimposed. The man who designed the decoration, Pugin, was one of the pro-Goths who finally won this Battle of the Styles as it was called. After 1840 hardly a Classical building was put up for a generation.

To Pugin, Classical buildings were 'pagan gin-palaces', and he proved—so he said—that Gothic was the true Christian architecture. Pugin went to work for a very powerful society called the Ecclesiologists, formed to promote Gothic art, and the Gothic Revival began in earnest.

The picturesque Gothic of the earlier Romantics was con­sidered flippant and their light-hearted sham ruins deplored. During this later phase of the Romantic movement, a sober Gothic style was used, not only for churches, but for town-halls, schools and railway stations. But correct Gothic ornament had not been used in England since the sixteenth century and no craftsmen able to carve it successfully could be found. Pugin published engravings of Gothic detail and set up workshops for teaching it.

Other workshops for craftsmen were afterward started by such men as William Morris, a vigorous pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement which still exists in England and has been imitated by many other countries. The movement represents a protest against the harm done by the factory system, which divides the work into a series of small processes and destroys a man's interest. Although it is impossible to put the clock back, such spontaneous protests draw attention to what is happening, if only by pulling in the opposite direction.

The workshops and training-centers meant a revival of wood carving although it was only for ornament. In the places where wood carving had never died out, it was more of a peasant art, with traditions and methods handed down from father to son. Carved wooden crucifixes and saints for wayside shrines and village churches in Catholic countries, and all kinds of figures, animals and toys are still to be found in many of the thickly forested areas of Europe.

Another form of traditional carving—the big, hand-carved wooden figure-heads for sailing ships—can be seen in the splendid collection on board the Cutty Sark at Greenwich, England. They are boldly carved and full of character.

The academically trained sculptors of the nineteenth century still only used marble and bronze, and the marble carvings were executed less by the sculptor's own hand than ever before. The increasing facility in the use of the pointing-machine meant that the sculptor, after making a clay model, would send it away to be turned into marble by expert anonymous 'ghost' workers. The pointing-machine is a means of reproducing a plaster model in stone by drilling hundreds of holes to a correctly measured depth into the stone, and then carving away the surplus. It is a method unsuitable for wood.

Typical of the late Romantic period are the large, grandiose statues of statesmen, generals, admirals and bishops, that stand about our towns and cathedrals, or the sentimental, idealized female nudes which filled the Royal Academy year by year.

The Beginning of the Modern Movement

The first sculptor to react against them and their banality was Rodin. Like his contemporaries, the Impressionists, he accepted nature as he saw it, never deliberately idealizing or beautifying it, or glossing over the fact that it is very seldom 'perfect'. His work was thought to be ugly and therefore shocking. It remained controversial for years, like that of Maillol, another French sculptor born twenty years after him, and was not appreciated until the early years of this century. Maillol's simplification of form, based on early Greek sculpture, made his work impersonal, and it illustrated no subject—unlike the contemporary academic figures which were expected to illustrate a theme, personify a legend, or embody some edifying sentiment.

Maillol had been an assistant in Rodin's studio and three other sculptors who worked for Rodin in their youth also became famous afterwards: Despiau, Mestrovic and Bourdelle. All of them used a variety of materials, including wood; Rosandic, a fellow Yugoslavian of Mestrovic, worked almost entirely in wood.

The gulf between the official, academic art and the work of the individual artists of advanced ideas, was now widening, and from about 1870, when the first Impressionist exhibitions were received with sarcasm and ridicule, the two forms of art have to be differentiated.

The use of a great variety of materials was one of the most important aspects of the change that was taking place in sculpture. It was realized that marble was maltreated through the use of the pointing machine, being forced to imitate clay models without taking into account its own characteristic qualities. In the early decades of this century the younger generation of sculptors began direct hand carving in their studios, and wood finally came back as a sculptor's medium.

Primitive Art

This is perhaps a suitable place to speak of primitive art, as it is the time when it first began to make a strong and lasting impres­sion in Europe.

The nineteenth century saw the first archaeological expeditions to many countries, beginning with Egypt. Napoleon, inspired perhaps by the uncovering of Pompeii in 1760, took scholars and artists with him when his army invaded Egypt in 1800, and the people of Europe were amazed at the drawings, records and works of art that were brought back. Egypt had remained silent and unknown for nearly a thousand years; a few descriptions in neglected Greek and Roman books; a few seemingly far-fetched travellers' tales were all that had been known of her former magnificence.

Excavations were next started in 1840, in Mesopotamia and then in Mexico; Mycenae in 1870 and Crete in 1890. Besides the works of art brought back from these ancient centers of civiliza­tion, other kinds of treasure were accumulating, taken from countries at earlier stages of civilization than our own. From the sixteenth century onward, primitive works of art and craft had been brought home by travellers, explorers and colonizers.

The craftwork—the pottery, weaving, fretwork carving and basketwork were popular and found their way into contemporary drawing-rooms, but the wood figure-carvings and masks were considered to be curiosities—heathen idols, unsuitable for a Christian home, and many of those not put in museums must have been thrown away.

Some of these wood carvings certainly have a frightening appearance. Even behind glass in a museum case, prosaically lit by electric light, they give out their own atmosphere of weirdness and mystery. The fetish figures in particular, still with a forest of nails or knives sticking in them, suggest associations that are grisly in the extreme. How they must have looked in their original settings may be imagined—in the dark huts or temples, in the gloom of tropical forests. That is the kind of lighting they were designed for, each carving having been specially made for its intended position. The rough finish on some, and their sharp, contrasting planes, would be all the better for making a strong effect in such a light.

Seeing these figures in their dimly-lit settings, must have been an overwhelming experience for the first white conquerors; they and the missionaries who followed them are known to have destroyed a great many, in their zeal for converting the natives. Carving died out altogether in some places; in others, it increased again after a pause, to supply the modern tourist with souvenirs. In many cases, this is a question of copying the same pieces over and over again—expertly but mechanically—and the resulting works are not to be compared with the originals.

The impact of the primitive world on the white pioneers was strong, but was more than equalled by the effect of their arrival on the native populations. At first, they thought the white man was a character out of their own legendary past—some mysterious supernatural being, come back from the dead.

But after they had recovered from their fear, they began recording their impressions of him in painting and sculpture, the earliest being the bronze figures of Portuguese soldiers found at Benin, wearing sixteenth-century uniforms and carrying guns. The gun is observed with great accuracy whenever it appears in primitive portraits of the white man, being the source of his most potent magic, and other emblems are treated with great attention—articles which have aroused the natives' curiosity. He may be shown wearing a top hat, smoking a pipe, carrying an umbrella; some­times holding a bottle and glass. His buttons are made much of, and so are his boots and his beard. African tribal chiefs still wear a top hat and carry an umbrella as signs of power and privilege. There are even some African wood carvings of European women—schoolteachers, nuns and missionaries—with long skirts, flat figures and rather plain, earnest faces.

Fig. 64. Ancestral Figure, Toromiro wood, Easter Island.

Other primitive carvings, done after the arrival of the white man, such as the immensely tall totem-poles of British Columbia, were carved with the aid of European tools.

It is in lands where the people live in forests and jungles, that one would expect to find wood carvings, and this is generally true, but there are exceptions. Many wood figurines have been and are still carved on Easter Island, famous for its colossal figures in volcanic rock. At first sight, the island is treeless, and in fact, the only wood available is the Toromiro tree, which grows down beside the lake in one of the volcano craters. The shape of this wood has dictated the curved form of the statuettes made from it (Fig. 64). Even in the Arctic circle, where there are no trees at all, the people carve driftwood.

The places in which primitive wood carving has been most prolific includes ancient Peru, Polynesia, Melanesia, Indonesia, Alaska, Canada, and—the richest source of all—West Africa. Besides decorated objects of use and ornament, they produce figures in the round, animals, reliefs and masks. The training of the wood carvers seems to vary from place to place, but they evidently learned the technique at the same time as they were initiated into the proper magic rituals connected with image-making. The 'art schools' would be more like secret societies where the myths and legends of the tribe were handed on, together with the orthodox ceremonial rites. They were the equivalent of such Western institutions as University, Church, Library, Academies of Music and Dancing, and Art School, all combined into one.

West Africa

Each center had its own characteristics but the West African may be taken as typical. The so-called idols have their counterpart in the religious sculpture of Western civilizations; they do not portray deities to be worshipped. For the most part they represent devotees or—like Catholic saints—they are believed to have the power to intercede with the gods. An image of a woman holding a baby means a prayer for maternity. Many of the masks are for ritual dances, each with its special dance-rhythm and chant, and some are so big and heavy as to be tests of strength and endurance for the wearer.

An ancestor cult is common to many tribes. After someone dies, a figure is carved in which his spirit is supposed to dwell. These are the nearest things to portraits that are ever made. An actual portrait of a living person is considered dangerous, as he will suffer immediately any harm is done to the image.

Instead of a life-like representation of the human form, the carver's intention is to give a generalized version. He never uses a model directly, but always works from memory. The figures vary in size from a few inches to a few feet and are occasionally life-size or over. They may be standing, sitting, squatting or kneeling and the poses are static with no turn or twist of the body or head.

The figures are carved from one block of wood—either a piece of the whole trunk or a segment—and everything has to be fitted into its width. Even if the subject is a rider on horseback, the horse must be compressed and reduced until it is ridiculously small and insignificant. This does not trouble the African carver as he is accustomed to minimizing or even leaving out altogether anything unimportant, irrelevant or taboo, while increasing the size of everything worthy of emphasis.

There is a system of symbolical conventions laid down, as there was in Egypt, and no deviation is allowed. But Egyptian statues, being of stone, stood for centuries serving as models for succeed­ing generations. The African wood carvings had to be continually replaced and this made the traditional style much more flexible and susceptible to change. No one could call Egyptian sculpture naive, and in the same way, African carving is far less naive than it might seem. The carver uses symbols which are easily under­stood by the people, through which he can express innumerable shades of meaning.

These figures may look simple and straightforward but to copy one exactly would be far from easy. Many of the shapes come through the type of tool used, and from habitual muscular move­ments in handling it.

Each tribe has its own style, totally different even from its closest neighbor's. Some favor a rough-hewn type of carving while others put great emphasis on finish and rub palm-oil into the wood to polish it.

The skilled Negro carver knows all the many types of trees in his neighborhood and their special properties, so that he can select the most suitable for his purpose. Sometimes the choice is dictated by ritual but in general, the softer woods are used for masks and the hard woods for figures. His main concern is to find wood that will not split easily and that will be resistant to termites.

These observations are taken from present-day Africa where there are still a few full-time sculptors left, but it may be assumed that they also apply to the past. Some primitive communities are nowadays changing and disintegrating and the educated native begins to reject the tribal customs and beliefs of his ancestors, recognizing that they are rooted in superstition. But they are the source of his art.

It will be interesting to see what the African sculptor, with his great natural talent for carving, will produce in the future, after the inevitable introduction of modern techniques and tools, knowledge of anatomy and perspective, and Western standards of aesthetics.

African Carving and Modern Art

Modern Art—the subject of so much controversy—has grown and evolved from many different roots but its final development was certainly accelerated by the discovery of primitive art at the beginning of this century.

It is true that the more advanced of the artists were already receptive to these totally new and unexpected ways of seeing the human form. Its proportions had been altered and adapted to answer the needs of personal expression and design, in the works of the three outstanding Post-Impressionist painters of the older generation—Cezanne, Gaugin and Van Gogh. C6zanne's famous observation that nature could be represented by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, seemed now to be given con­crete proof by the African figures. Their geometrical forms, cylindrical legs and pear-shaped heads, reducing the figure to its simplest terms, were all that was finally needed to bring into being the new movement—Cubism.

It appears that two painters discovered a Negro carving in a Paris cafe-bar—brought there by a sailor. They persuaded the proprietor to part with it and showed it to Picasso. It so impressed him, that his next painting was partly based on it and contains the first signs of Cubist painting.

For people who take it for granted that 'likeness to nature' is the only criterion for a work of art, and that 'deal proportions' should always be given to the human figure, Cubism is at first incomprehensible. But in fact, neither naturalism nor idealization have ever been universally accepted. The Romanesque and Byzantine artists were unaware of such standards and the Baroque artists ignored them. The Baroque painter, El Greco, was unappreciated in the nineteenth century together with Byzantine mosaics, Romanesque carvings, Greek archaic figures and Italian Primitive paintings.

These works were passed over as crude and childish in the nineteenth century—unworthy to be called art. It is significant that they were all re-discovered at the same time as the Negro and other primitive carvings. They were completely outside the aca­demic standards of the day, but perfectly in tune with the views of the artists already in revolt against those standards.

It is true that every great artist has revolted against accepted standards of form and has broken through them like a pioneer opening the way to future discoveries, but this had never been done so deliberately or so violently before.

Once the primitive works had aroused interest, there was no need to travel farther than a museum to look at them. They still had to be sought out, however, as they were being exhibited as curios, half-hidden among the paraphernalia of craftwork, utensils, weapons and other objects that had been brought back by indiscriminating travellers.

Museum curators have now arranged their ethnographical galleries so that the collections of primitive sculpture can be properly seen. Exhibitions are held in art galleries and are popular with the general public. Roger Fry wrote in 1920: 'One would like to know what Dr. Johnson would have said to anyone who had offered him a Negro idol for several hundred pounds. It would have seemed then sheer lunacy . . .' But Roger Fry himself might have been surprised that the unquestioned accep­tance of African sculpture in our own time should be so complete.

Primitive works are unselfconscious and, being made by hand without attempting to disguise the fact, are an antidote to mass-produced machine objects. Having been made for a serious and definite purpose they are remote from any suggestion of exhibi­tionism to catch the eye of a possible buyer. These may be some of the reasons for their strong appeal. The African carvings are especially interesting to an artist because they are full of inven­tion, with endless variations on the same theme, and they break all the anatomical rules with such conviction as to make it appear a matter of course. Perhaps their most remarkable quality is that they are essentially in the round. Each form is seen as a three-dimensional mass and there is no sign of the 'four-side approach' apparent in early Archaic Greek sculpture and often in the work of beginners. In these cases, each of the four sides is treated as a relief, whereas in a mature work, the contours can be seen to change, merge, free themselves and dissolve, as the spectator walks round it, like a landscape watched from a moving train.

Early in the twentieth century artists were trying to find a com­mon denominator for all art—the indefinable factor which can bridge any gap of time, distance or national frontier. In attemp­ting to isolate this quality, the artists left out of their works anything that seemed irrelevant, superficial or unimportant (unlike the academic artists of the time, who put in everything), thus bringing them down to the bare essentials: form, design, balance and rhythm. It was then a short step from non-realistic art to non-representational art—in other words, Abstract Art. If form and design are all that matter, then logically nothing else should be necessary, and all human associations may be elimi­nated.

The development of non-realistic and non-representational (also known as non-figurative) art has been the most important innovation in the modern movement, and both have given rise to a number of other movements and a great variety of different styles. Of these, Expressionism is the most notable. It may be defined as the expression of the artist's personal inner vision rather than of the world about him. It is therefore the opposite of Abstract Art, which, as we have seen, is an interpretation of the outside world. These two differing points of view, Expressionist on the one hand and Abstract on the other, are the modern equivalent of the divergence between Romantic and Classical art; that is whether the emphasis shall be on subject and emotion or on form and design. All are represented in every work of art but in varying degrees according to the temperament of the artist.

Henry Moore's approach is the Classical one; his abstract and semi-abstract compositions are based on life; not only the human figure, but on the infinite number of forms in nature which have particular significance for him (plate xvii). A study of living plants and trees, the formation of the landscape itself, and the small natural objects to be found in it—fossils, bones, flints, shells and pebbles—have given him an insight into the special qualities of wood and stone. His wood carvings, both large and small, have an elegance of treatment which proves his sensitive appreciation of every type of wood he uses. He always finishes his wood surfaces with a delicate polish which emphasizes the grain.

Epstein was a great sculptor of portraits modelled in clay for bronze, but he never carved wood. It suited his character better to pit himself against a more intractable material—the hardest stone he could find. His carvings were vigorously hewn out of large blocks, leaving the toolmarks still visible, and for them he took timeless, universal themes which he interpreted through the expression of his extremely powerful and personal inner vision. In treatment and style, these carvings may be regarded as Expressionist.

The freedom of the artist to give full rein to individual self-expression and individual choice of style and treatment, has never been greater. This has destroyed any coherence in development and has prevented that slow growth of a tradition which was normal in the past. The confusion of art-styles reflects the growing complexity of this century including its many new ideas, philo­sophies and changes in human thinking. Freud's discoveries in psychology and his emphasis on the sub-conscious part of the mind with its dreams and fantasies, have had a strong influence on art. One of its signs was the Surrealist movement of the thirties, which used the irrational incongruities of dreams as subject matter. This aspect of life had previously been expressed in art, but this was the first time it was used solely as the theme. The interest in child-art in this century is another indication of the preoccupation with psychological ideas, and a more recent sign is the belief that art can even take a step beyond the sub-conscious into the non-conscious regions of the mind. The exhibiting of monkeys' so-called painting was an extreme attempt to prove this. In Action painting, the advanced style typical of the fifties, the painter aims to shut off his conscious mind and in putting on the paint to make the action of his hand as undeliberate and fortuitous as possible, so that self-expression may come unawares. Action painting has its equivalent in sculpture. Abstract shapes are constructed in welded metal or in any material that may be at hand: wire, wire-netting, small wood-blocks, steel rods or old scrap-iron, crushed and welded together, with the bits of machin­ery and machine-parts still recognizable. Many of these sculptures are robot-like and give a sinister impression. Their surface is mechanical, and the hand of the sculptor nowhere in evidence; the sculpture converges toward engineering and is equally im­personal. Paradoxically, the effort to reach the extreme point of personal inner consciousness has produced works which give a sense of complete anonymity, as they lack the individual 'hand­writing' which normally distinguishes the work of one artist from another.

Fig. 65. Bronze animals, (a) Hawk, Egyptian, XXVIth dynasty (c. 650-30 B.C.). (b) Water buffalo, Chinese Chou dynasty (1122-256 B.C.).

This art-form is known as Abstract-Expressionism, which might seem a contradiction in terms. But both types of artist work within it, each borrowing from the other. The Expressionists use abstract forms in their own way, just as the Romantic artists took over the themes, poses and costumes of Classical art. They give their works evocative titles, expecting the spectator to draw on his own imagination and read into them his own meaning and interpretation. But in its true sense, Abstract Art should, like music, be free of associations, and should not raise such questions as: what is its meaning, or what is its purpose, which are obstruc­tions to an open mind. The intention is to be accepted, as architec­ture and ceramics are accepted, where the function is obvious and the abstract quality inherent.

Abstract Expressionism has been widely adopted in America, and it seems to stress an intense reaction toward intricate modern machinery and steel construction work, which may be one of attraction or repulsion. It is essentially a city-dweller's form of art.
Sculpture and painting are not the only arts experimenting in this way. Electronic music is composed by means of a series of purely mechanical sounds recorded on tape; plays are being performed with disjointed dialogue and no plot, for which the audience must find their own meaning and interpretation.

Forms of art change as they have always had to change. If they were used for too long, they became worn out and only resulted in pale and feeble imitations of the great men who originated them. They needed to be revitalized and invigorated, and by drawing on some untapped source of the past, some of the necessary stimulus had been supplied.

Fig. 66. Stone carving on Notre Dame, Paris.

Today, these potential sources are continually multiplying; the choice is so great that new styles follow one another with ever increasing rapidity. Galleries and museums exhibit art from every place and period; books of reproductions are published and widely circulated in all parts of the world. This gives the artist the unprecedented experience of being able to apprehend the whole range of art without even leaving his own country. Every nation may now share the entire world-tradition and this has contributed to the fact that an international style is now appearing again, as it did in the Dark Ages. A new work can be photographed and publicized within a few weeks, through the distribution of periodicals from one end of the world to the other. The tendency for ever increasing speed is apparent in every side of life. Many sculptors prefer to use materials that can be quickly handled and will give quick results. Wood carving is comparatively slow. But the amount of lasting satisfaction a work of art can give, is governed to a great extent by the amount of thought, consideration and feeling that has been put into it, and in this sense, the slowness of wood carving may be a great advantage. The gradual development of a carving may give the modern wood carver a sense of connection with the past, a bond with the early carvers, whether in Europe of the Middle Ages, or Egypt of four thousand years ago.