Abstract
THE anthropologist, when confronted with some of the more extreme pronouncements of æsthetic judgment on the primitive artist, was at one time perhaps a little too apt to regard them as unwarranted apotheoses, of what was after all a phase and no more in a process of æsthetic development or ‘evolution’, differing in this relation in no essential from any other cultural element depending upon technical achievement. He was, however, so far justified in that each example of the artist's skill and taste was to be regarded with reference to its social and religious background; and while it might, and very often did, afford satisfaction to a judgment habituated to European canons, to award it the highest mark as an expression of æsthetic principles, as, for example, in the better-known specimens of West African sculpture, seemed to attach a false value to characters which were, in historical perspective, faults of technique rather than an outcome, conscious or unconscious, of any theory of artistic balance, selection or composition. A saner method of approach to the products of primitive art was illustrated by Dr. Leonard Adam in a recent lecture delivered before the Royal Society of Arts (J. Roy. Soc. Arts, June 28, 1940) in which he briefly directed attention to certain of the main principles of primitive art which emerge from its study in accordance with the evolutionary or cultural methods elaborated by the late Dr. A. C. Haddon, Prof. Franz Boas and others. Incidentally Dr. Adam stressed the interest and importance of the art of the American Indians of the north-west coast of America, which has suffered neglect in favour of the culturally less illuminating art of Africa.
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Primitive Art: Past and Future. Nature 146, 518–519 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/146518d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/146518d0