Los Angeles herald., 1891-05-15
ART oE PRIMITIVE MEN.
Two Totally Distinct Types Are Found
Among Uncuitured Races.

Two Totally Distinct Types Are Found
Among UncuItured Races.
Whoever has examined the handicraft
of savage peoples knows well that from
a very early age two totally distinct
types of art arise spontaneously among
uncultured races. One is initiative, the
other decorative. Paleolithic mentor
example, the cave dwellers of prehistoric
Europe before the glacial epoch-had an
art of their own of purely initiative
and pictorial character. They repre-
sented ON fragments of bone and man.
moth ivory realistic scenes of their own
hunting existence.
Here, naked and hairy brave, flint
spear in hand, stalks wild horses undls-
mayed in the grassy plain; there, cou-
pie of reindeer engaged in desperate
fight with their antlers hard locked In
deadly embrace; yonder, again, man.
moth charges unwieldly with wide open
mouth, or a snake gGdes unseen beneath
the shoeless feet of an unsuspecting saw
age. All their rude works of art repro
duce living objects, and tell, in their
naive way, distinct story. They are
pictorial records of things done, things
seen, things suffered.
Paleolithic men were essentially
draughtsmen, not decorators. But their
neolithic successors, of a totally different
race-the herdsmen who supplanted
them in post glacial Europe-had an art
of an entirely different type, purely and
solely decorative. Instead of making
pictures they drew concentric circles
and ornamental curves on their boats
and dwellings; they adorned their weap-
ons and their implements with knobs
and nicks, with crosses and bosses; they
wrought beautiful patterns in metal
work as soon as ever they advanced to
the bronze using stage, and they de-
signed brooches and bracelets of ex-
quisite elegance, but they seldom intro
duced into their craft any living object;
they initiated nothing, and they never
in any way told a pictorial story.
Now these two types of art-the essen
TALLY initiative or pictorial and the es-
sentially decorative or esthetic-persist
throughout in various human races, and
often remain as entirely distinct as in
the typical instances here quoted. The
great aim of the one is to narrate fact;
the great aim of the other is to produce
beautiful object. The first is to speak
historical, the second ornamental.
In developed forms you get the ex-
treme case of the one in the galleries at
Versailles; you get the extreme case of
the other in the Alhambra at Granada.
The modern Esquimau and the modern
Bushman resemble the ancient cave
dwellers in their love of purely pictorial
or story telling art; man in kayak
harpooning whale; a man with an
assegai spearing springbok; these are
the subjects that engage-I will not say
their pencils = but their sharp flint
knives or their Jumps of red ocher.
On the other hand, most central At
rican races have no initiative skill. They
draw figures and animals i'll or not at all,
but they produce decorative pottery and
other ornamental objects which would
excite attention at Versailles, and be
well placed at the arts and crafts in the
new gallery. Everywhere racial taste
and racial faculty tend most in the one
or the other direction. A tribe, horde,
a nation, is pictorial, or else it is deco
rative. Rarely or never is it both alike
in an equal degree of native excellence
-Fortnightly Review.