Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets — John Shaqi
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
own native richness and austerity. The redman will perpetuate himself
only by the survival of his own customs for he will never be able to
accept customs that are as foreign to him as ours are and must always
be; he will never be able to accept a culture which is inferior to his
own.
In the esthetic sense alone, then, we have the redman as a gift. As
Americans we should accept the one American genius we possess, with
genuine alacrity. We have upon our own soil something to show the
world as our own, while it lives. To restrict the redman now would
send him to an unrighteous oblivion. He has at least two contributions
to confer, a very aristocratic notion of religion, and a superb gift
for stylistic expression. He is the living artist in our midst, and we
need not think of him as merely the anthropological variation or as an
archaeological diversion merely. He proves the importance of
synthetic registration in peoples. He has created his system for
himself, from substance on, through outline down to every convincing
detail. We are in a position always of selecting details in the hope
of constructing something usable for ourselves. It is the superficial
approach. We are imitators because we have by nature or force of
circumstance to follow, and improve upon, if we can. We merely
"impose" something. We can not improve upon what the redman offers us
in his own way. To "impose" something--that is the modern culture. The
interval of imposition is our imaginary interval of creation. The
primitives created a complete cosmos for themselves, an entire
principle. I want merely, then, esthetic recognition in full of the
contribution of the redman as artist, as one of the finest artists of
time; the poetic redman ceremonialist, celebrant of the universe as he
sees it, and master among masters of the art of symbolic gesture. It
is pitiable to dismiss him from our midst. He needs rather royal
invitation to remain and to persist, and he can persist only by
expressing himself in his own natural and distinguished way, as is the
case with all peoples, and all individuals, indeed.
WHITMAN AND CEZANNE
It is interesting to observe that in two fields of expression, those
of painting and poetry, the two most notable innovators, Whitman and
Cezanne bear a definite relationship in point of similarity of ideals
and in their attitudes toward esthetic principles. Both of these men
were so true to their respective ideals that they are worth
considering at the same time in connection with each other: Cezanne
with his desire to join the best that existed in the impressionistic
principle with the classical arts of other times, or as he called it,
to create an art like the Louvre out of impressionism. We shall find
him striving always toward actualities, toward the realization of
beauty as it is seen to exist in the real, in the object itself,
whether it be mountain or apple or human, the entire series of living
things in relation to one another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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