Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and PoetsHartley, Marsden
History
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
Hartley, Marsden
Art; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism; Vaudeville
In the instance of the buffalo dance of the Tesuque Indians, contrary
to what might be expected or would popularly be conceived, there is
not riotry of color, but the costumes are toned rather in the sombre
hues of the animal in question, and after the tone of the dark flanks
of the mountains crested and avalanched with snows, looking more like
buffaloes buried knee deep in white drifts than anything else one may
think of. They bring you the sense of the power of the buffalo
personality, the formidable beast that once stampeded the prairies
around them, solemnized with austere gesturing, enveloping him with
stateliness, and the silence of the winter that surrounds themselves.
Three men, two of them impersonating the buffalo, the third with bow
and arrow in hand, doubtless the hunter, and two women representing
the mother buffalo, furnish the ensemble. Aside from an occasional
note of red in girdles and minor trappings, with a softening touch of
green in the pine branches in their hands, the adjustment of hue is
essentially one of the black and white, one of the most difficult
harmonies in esthetic scales the painter encounters in the making of a
picture, the most difficult of all probably, by reason of its limited
range and the economic severity of color. It calls for nothing short
of the finest perception of nuance, and it is the redman of America
who knows with an almost flawless eye the natural harmonies of the
life that surrounds him. He has for so long decorated his body with
the hues of the earth that he has grown to be a part of them. He is a
living embodiment in color of various tonal characteristics of the
landscape around him. He knows the harmonic value of a bark or a hide,
or a bit of broken earth, and of the natural unpolluted coloring to be
drawn out of various types of vegetable matter at his disposal. Even
if he resorts to our present-day store ribbons and cheap trinkets for
accessories, he does it with a view to creating the appearance of
racial ensemble. He is one of the essential decorators of the world. A
look at the totem poles and the prayer robes of the Indians of Alaska
will convince you of that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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