اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

In art, as in everything living, there is no progress, but only varieties of one stimulus.

HEBBEL

INTRODUCTION

If on my returning after more than twenty-five years to my original artist-problem, I am able to put forward my conception of artistic creativity in a comprehensive form, I owe it not merely to the course of my own development, but also to the advances that have been made in the most varied departments of knowledge. For it was precisely in the period following the turn of the century, during which I struggled through to my own world-outlook, that the branches of knowledge bearing particularly on the study of art made such enormous progress as to necessitate a re-orientation of the whole artproblem. But without the asset of the experience I had gained in winning through to an independent outlook, I should, as a layman in the domain of art, hardly have been entitled to compete with the array of prominent specialists (above all, German) who, during that period, raised modern art-history to a level never before thought of. To me, however, the whole science of art seems to be permeated, as I have said before, with a far-reaching dualism, which not only comes out in differences of opinion among different scholars and the divergences of their schools, but reflects the dualism inherent in the problem of art itself. Now, my view of psychological problems included from the first the knowledge and acknowledgment of a dualism inherent in the individual and not dependent on any external opposition for its existence. It seems to me, therefore, that my whole conception of man should not only lead to a better understanding of the dualist nature of art, but also, to a great extent, help to overcome the contradictions arising from that dualism in the history of art-criticism. The comparative method of treatment, which we have to use in studying the genesis of the creative impulse, may at the same time be used to clear up satisfactorily a number of contradictions, not intrinsically part of the problem of art itself, but brought into it from neighbouring spheres, and in the course of applying these to the understanding of art. If we reject those methods of psychological investigation which, from time immemorial, have assumed two types of artist and played off the one against the other, we are left with three important provinces of knowledge, all of which have disappointed expectations as to the value of their specialized advances to the science of art. These provinces are: cultural history, which, since the turn of the century, has opened up practically a new world of prehistory through archzology; then, in its wake, the study of race and the migration of peoples, the ethnological problems of which have been revived as determining the rise, decline, and supersession of the cultures; and, lastly, the Azstory of style, the revision of which had become imperative since the materialistic conception of art that prevailed in the nineteenth century, culminating in Semper’s “ Styl.” In this last branch, thanks to Riegl, there was definitive progress in the attitude towards, and understanding of, art. But, considering the recent date of all these scientific achievements, we need not wonder that the historical treatment of the positively overwhelming mass of cultural and ethnological material provided by archeology in recent decades has not yet arrived at a uniform interpretation. Too much preliminary work had to be done by the specialized experts before they could arrive at any but provisional conclusions as to the significance of their excavations and discoveries. Casual and most incomplete as are the data provided by the archeologists’ recent discovery of prehistoric art when we try to survey them, in conjunction with the contemporary work of ethnologists on the practice of art by primitive peoples, we see not only that an immense amount of work has been achieved in a comparatively short time, but also that unsuspected problems have come up along with these results." Conze, indeed, had dealt with prehistory as early as 1871, but when we remember that it was not until 1879 that the Spaniard de Santuola published his first report on the European cave-paintings of the ice age, we realize the scope of the task which prehistoric research has set the men of our own time. Moreover, if we consider that the authenticity of this earliest report of the incredible artistic skill of palzolithic man was at first disputed, and that it took the discovery of the cave at La Mouthe, in the south of France, to convince the prehistorians and lead them to continue their researches, we shall realize how young our knowledge of this hitherto unsuspected art-world is. It was much the same with the art of the primitives: this was really only included officially in the general scheme of arthistory in 1900, with K. Woermann’s Geschichte der Kunst aller Zeiten und Volker, after Ernst Grosse had written the first comprehensive study of it in 1894.” Even the preliminary monographs by Hildebrand (Eskimo, 1885), Hain (Dyaks, 1890), Stolpe (Hervey Islanders, 1892), von den Steinen (Brazilians, 1894), Schurz (Indians, 1895), and Frobenius (Africans, 1895) appeared only just before the turn of the century, although there have been innumerable publications since. The same applies to the archzological discoveries in the prehistory of civilized races. Take, for instance, Schliemann’s excavations in Mycenz in 1874, which were only brought to a successful conclusion after the turn of the century, by Dorpfeld at Troy. It was only in 1895 that Sir Flinders Petrie started on the excavations in Egypt which gave an entirely new picture of its early times; it is the same with Crete, the quite recent

____________

1 While reading the proofs, I come across a very helpful survey of archzological discoveries in the twentieth century by Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski: Archaologische Entdeckungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1931).

2 It is hardly necessary to refer to the very cursory treatment of primitive art, written under the influence of Romanticism, by Franz Kugler in the first history of art (1842).

It was only in 1895 that Sir Flinders Petrie started on the excavations in Egypt which gave an entirely new picture of its early times; it is the same with Crete, the quite recent archzological exploitation of which by Sir Arthur Evans is of incalculable significance for the history of art. (Excavation was begun there in 1899.) * Equally recent is the information that we have obtained about America’s pre-Columbian art and particularly the magnificent Mayan monuments in the south. Once the late palzolithic wall-paintings of Spain had been discovered, in 1908, an incredibly large number of them were found in succession. The very similar cave-paintings of the South Africans, commonly called “ Bushman art,” have, again, only been revealed to us in the present century by the untiring research of Frobenius. As we shall frequently have occasion to refer to the contributions made to art-history by these various discoveries and the research connected with them, in which leading prehistorians — Hornes, Obermaier, Hauser, Klaatsch, and others — have also taken part, we turn for the moment, in this general survey, to the cultural-historical and ethnological problems on which some new light has been thrown by these glimpses into prehistory. In particular, prehistoric Europe has been elevated from its role of Cinderella by the abundant stone-age discoyeries that have been made within its limits. For Europe has long been overshadowed by the ancient high cultures of the East, from which all the light which illuminated our old continent was supposed to come. And although, in the first joy of rediscovery, the new princess may have been acclaimed to excess, the fact remains that now any intelligent history of Europe that is not a mere relic of the school-books must be begun long before the great Migrations. So that, even after discounting the unnatural, but rather too subjective, nationalist enthusiasms of certain Germanic researchers for the newly discovered prehistory of Europe, we still have enough sure material to account for a Northern cultural circle with potentialities of influence similar to those of the better-known cultures of the South and particularly the East.

_________

1 The third and last volume of Evans's gteat work on Crete appeared while the present book was being written, in the winter of 1930.

As we shall have to deal with various special investigations of this description (such as Krause’s Trojaburgen, 1893; Muchau’s Pfahlhausbau, 1909; Scheltema’s Altnordische Kunst, 1923) more thoroughly later, we will here refer to one only: namely, Carl Schuchhardt’s Alteuropa — not only a basic work, but one of particular value for the cultural-historical aspect of art, in that it has kept fairly clear of the pitfall of national bias. The first edition (1918) bears the sub-title: “in its cultural and stylistic development ”; the second edition, considerably altered and enlarged, appeared as: A Prehistory of our Continent (Eine Vorgeschichte unseres Erdictls; Berlin, 1926). The fact that Schuchhardt’s conception of art is still the purely technical-mechanical Semperism of last century does not lessen the value of his observations on cultural- and folk-history, for there is only one of his opinions which essentially need concern us here: namely that, even in prehistoric times, he finds definite evidence of the same contrast between North and South which is found in the historical periods of artistic development, as, for instance, in the struggle between Gothic and Renaissance. And this dualism is not limited to Europe, at any rate as the term is understood in our present historical geography. Southern France, for instance, shows a stone age similar to that of North Africa, and, in the East, the radiation from the Southern cultural zone of the Mediterranean races did not stop short at the borders of Asia. If, for a start, we admit the distinctiveness and independence of the three culture-zones— Northern, South-western, and Eastern — as they are indicated by nature and established by archeological discoveries, we get a new picture of cultural development which will be full of significance for the understanding of the forms and styles of art as well. These three great culture-zones, differentiated even in prehistoric times, were bound, sooner or later, to meet in the Mediterranean and create a mixed culture, which in its turn was quite distinctive and, as is not surprising, brought forth a human type of many and varied talents. The culture which we have recently come to know as the Cretan-Mycenzan leaves us in no doubt that historic Greece also was a result of these cultural mixings in “the Balkans,” although at the same time we see something greater, too—the birth of a new and more harmonious type of human being which was at once the end-product and the conqueror of the old. Whether the now undeniable existence of Northern influence side by side with that of the South-west and the East is a justification of the theory of an Indo-Germanic penetration of Hellas is of little importance, compared with the fact that the influences of Northern and South-western cultural elements are now taking their rightful place along with those of the once unchallengeable East. All the same, it would be premature to throw the old formula Ex oriente lux overboard without more ado; rather does it seem that a new meaning can be given to it if we limit its application to a particular world-outlook which with good reason we may call the pre-scientific. For that which has undeniably enlightened our culture from the East is the intellectual penetration of phenomena with the tendency to bring them into a system, whether it be of a mythological, religious, or philosophical nature. In other words, it is intellectualism that we have taken from the East, while the North shows the opposite tendency towards the mystic, the nebulous, and the spiritual as against the intellectual. The South, again, shows a pretty definite leaning towards naturalism, which is alien to both the other cultures, in its direct association with nature; Nay, more in the oneness of its human type with nature, which climatic reasons, not to mention others, cause the Northerner to reject, while the East is antipathetic to nature precisely on account of its hyper-intellectuality. Be this as it may, there is one point on which almost all our scholars, writers of cultural history, and art-critics are agreed: that the North has produced an abstract, geometrical style of art, whereas the peculiar characteristic of the Southern style is naturalism. Only the East has proved difficult to “ place”; for, from having been over-estimated as the prime source of all human culture, it is now denied any influence whatever. And so it comes about that we have Pan-Babylonians and Pan-Germanics opposing each other, each school trying to prove the superiority or independence of its own culture instead of taking trouble to analyse its specific characteristics. We shall presently be able to demonstrate, in connexion with a particular problem, not only how each of the three cultural zones excelled in the production of different art-forms, but how even today an intelligent comparison of the respective cultural materials may throw light on one and the same problem from different sides. For instance, in accounting for the widespread spiral ornament, we shall find the most and the best historical data in the North, while the South will contribute the nature myths necessary to its interpretation, and the East an explanation of it which borders on the scientific. While art- and culture-history are, quite rightly, interested in the succession in time of the phenomena and the different influences under which they come into being, we, on the other hand, regard it as our task to establish, not the spatial “whence” or the temporal “since when,” but the spiritual why. This does not imply any intention of denying the effect of culture-drift or the importance of historical sequence; we merely think that the problem as to how the phenomenon in question arose at all—no matter when and where —is entitled to be considered at least as worthy of an attempt at solution. We have discussed the cultural-historical aspects of the artproblem somewhat in detail here, because by implication they contain the style-problems within themselves. For if we identify the North with abstract and the South with naturalistic art, we present at the same time the psychological characterization of a corresponding human type who will produce just this kind of style. It is true that “ North” and “South” are terms essentially referring to climate and the economic conditions dependent on climate; but these things do, after all, contribute definitely to the production of the human type concerned. And we must not forget that man is not only a product of his natural environment, since the essence of every culture is determined by the greater or less degree of its domination of nature and independence of her influences. In looking at art from the ethnological or economic standpoint, we are apt to overlook the fact that art is produced by man and not by Nature, although it is Nature that helps to form and educate man. Here, again, the artist with his creative personality is almost eliminated, as he is from the spiritual and scientific history of art and the zsthetic which borders on psychology. Not only does this apply to the prehistoric age, for which no report on the individual man can reach us; it applies also to the artistic development which works itself out in the full light of history. When writers on art speak of a Gothic artist or an Impressionist, they refer of course to the laws of style revealed in his work. But the individual artist who employs this style as a form of expression is something more than a mere representative of this tendency; and one often wonders what psychological significance such an esthetic classification really has. To put it in another way, does the Gothic artist stand for a particular type of man? And, supposing that he has found his expression in the North, what is his spiritual structure, and can it perhaps take root elsewhere than in Northern mother earth — as was the case, we take it, with Michelangelo? And will not a strong personality, like Michelangelo in the South, or Goethe in the North, be inclined in any case to take over the given art-forms, indeed, and even to develop them, but also to break through, to overcome, these forms, to mix them with others, to supplant them by others? The fact that this not only is possible, but does actually occur in the case of almost every great artist-personality, brings us back to our spiritual dualism and to the experience that at any rate the two tendencies — call them what one will — must be potentially present in the artist, even though both do not always find expression. In mentioning the following treatises on the derivation of the creative impulse from this conflicting dualism, I would remind my readers that even cool-eyed art-historians are forced in the end to some such conception of the transmutation of the laws of style. Two important critical studies on art which appeared in the same year (1923) arrive from totally different starting-points at the one conclusion: that the two opposing tendencies of style (which Scheltema in Altnordische Kunst calls “ mechanical” and “ organic,” and Herbert Kuhn in Kunst der Primitiven “imaginative” and “ sensory”) coexist side by side and even develop one out of the other. Kihn starts from economic factors — wherein he had been anticipated by Grosse and to some extent Hornes — and connects naturalistic art with the nomadic hunter’s existence, and the abstract art-form with that of the farmers and cattle-breeders who have settled on the soil. These simple parallels between economic forms and art-forms, which have been extended by others to the family organization (matriarchal — naturalistic; patriarchal — abstract), are applied by Kuhn to a psychological opposition of consumption and production on the basis of the Marxian theory. He sees the hunter as leading an existence which mainly absorbs from outside and having in consequence a naturalistic conception of art-forms; whereas agrarian culture is one of fruitfulness in creative art as in other respects. Kuhn does not, indeed, as we have seen, accept any opposition of principle between the two tendencies, but deduces the one by a dialectical process from the other. But in one culture-zone it will be a development from the sensory to the imaginative, as in the South Seas or in Africa, where the natural model becomes geometricized; and another time — say, in the North — it will be the other way round, a development from the geometric style to the organic. A similar process of development is recognized by Scheltema in his deep and subtle analysis of the style of specifically Northern art-forms. These he does not derive from economic forms, like Kuhn, or technical-practical motives, like Schuchhardt, but accounts for on a principle of spiritual development. While Scheltema, who has confined his special research to a strictly limited and definite field, sees the same development from abstract to organic repeated in every single phase of development of Northern art, from the stone age to the bronze and iron ages, Kiihn, with a wider scope, has managed to establish the recurrence of one law of development at different times and different places almost throughout the history of art. Thus in Crete a peak period of imaginative art was followed by frank sensorialism. “ Altered in form, and yet quite similar, was the change which took place under the same laws, thousands of years afterwards, in America among the Aztecs and Incas, and again, centuries later, in Africa among the conquering races of Benin and Yoruba. In all these cultures the way leads unmistakably from imaginative to sensorial art, from collectivism to individualism, from the dualist outlook to the unitary, and from the strongly religious world to the practical everyday society.” * The only exception to this rule that development leads from abstract to concrete appears to occur in the case of palzolithic man’s naturalistic art. Scheltema excludes this art from his survey on the ground that no further artistic development from it is possible, and that the abstract art-form of the neolithic age is primary and intrinsic in the North. But I do not think the question can be disposed of so simply. For one thing, we cannot divide off the Northern neolithic so sharply from the Southern, for all their differences; and, for another, it remains doubtful whether the naturalism of the glacial age really represents the beginning of all artistic activity, whether, in fact, there are not more abstract art-forms, completely lost to us, which preceded it. It is risky to reconstruct the mentality of these people on no other evidences than the artistic remains of the glacial age which have been accidentally preserved. But it is nevertheless noteworthy that the sole explanation of the appearance of such highly developed drawing and pictorial art as this palzolithic has handed down to us comes from a physiologist, Max Verworn. In his book: Zur Psychologie der primitiven Kunst (1908) the scholar declares this art to be a “ physioplastic ” reproduction of nature which, in contrast to the later “ ideoplastic ” treatment, has a certain spontaneity, instinctiveness, and nonreflectiveness.

_____________

1 Herbert Kiihn: Kunst der Primitiven, p- 20.It does not seem to me that this view does much more than give us a terminology that strikingly expresses the dualism which lies at the base of all artistic production, although it does at least imply an attempt at evaluation instead of a mere description. For even if we accept Verworn’s terminology, we are still obliged to assume that glacial man, although in the main physioplastic in his rendering, must also have had ideoplastic possibilities of no rudimentary order; otherwise he would not have been in a position to produce a work of art intuitively. All art, whether primarily naturalistic or primarily abstract, unites both elements within itself, and indeed itself arises (as we shall see) from a conflict between the two tendencies, of which first one, then the other, gains the upper hand. The decision does not, however, depend only on the culture and its economic environment, but equally upon the creative individual, in whom the same dualistic conflict exists, whether, as at a primitive stage, between life and death, or, at a later one, between body and soul, matter and spirit, individual and society. Leaving aside, therefore, for the moment all attempts such

as those above mentioned to assign values to the style-contrasts, and looking at the problem from its psychological aspect, we may say (following up an idea of Kuhn’s) that naturalistic art has always flourished where and when individualism was the order of the day or had obtained the mastery. This was not the case only in definite master-cultures with whose structure we are familiar, such as Crete, Mycenz, Classical Greece, and the Renaissance; it applies also to primitive man — at least in the wider sense of the term. For even if this primitive man was no individualist in the sense in which those masterful natures were so—or even in the sense of our decadent psychologism — he was a lordly person relying upon his own strength before he became sedentary and united to collective bodies of men through agriculture. In any case, abstract art, in contrast to sensory or organic art, is usually collective, as is demonstrated by Northern and also primitive ornamentation as well as by religious Gothic. In these facts a paradoxical phenomenon discloses itself, which will not startle the psychologist and indeed will facilitate our approach to the understanding of the spiritual dynamism in artistic creativity. The autonomous individualism of primitive man, as well as that of the lordly masters appears to be more dependent on Nature in its artistic creativeness than is the sedentary collective type of man, who, though depending to a great extent on nature’s moods and his own environment (of commerce), can yet rise to abstractions in art which are quite independent of reality. We shall see presently how this compensatory function of the art-form brings the development of personality and its dynamic need of equalization into unison. Here I would merely point out—in pursuance of an idea already put forward — that in neither of the two art-forms is it a question of an absolute style-principle, but only of a more or a less, while at the same time both style-forms alike possess the tendency to reproduce something absent, which in certain cases happens to be a natural object, while in others it pictures an idea. The obvious purpose in this tendency is domination, whether this takes the form of a naturalistic representation of an animal as a hunting spell or of the symbolic representation of a human abstraction. Behind both there is the creative will of the personality, which only now and then manifests itself directly, and at other times reacts to the compulsion of collective society and gives expression thereto. Undoubtedly this second art-form — here one agrees with Scheltema — is more capable of development, not only for stylistic and esthetic, but for psychological reasons as well. For the abstraction at the base of this mechanical art represents even in itself a rising above nature, and it can be still further intensified and varied, whereas in naturalistic or organic art the objects within a given cultural environment are limited, so that the artistic effort to deal with them otherwise than in their natural setting does not find them very malleable. In a word, art consists in the latter case of arbitrary recreation (not copying) of the given objects; in the other, of the new creation of ever changing ideas. Nevertheless, for both we must assume a creative force in the individual himself, which has to be studied in its various forms before we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the art-forms produced by it.