CONRAD AIKEN ART The problem of American Art is unlike that of any other country of the present or the past. We have not here the racial and historical foundation on which, until now, every art has been built and so our striving (it is far too soon to speak of success or failure) must be judged from another standpoint than the one to be taken in viewing an art that originates with its people or is directly transmitted from an older race. Egypt and ancient Mexico furnish examples of the first case, Italy and France of the second. When the latter countries were colonized by the Greeks, Phœnicians and others, they received a culture which could take on fresh vigour when grasped by a new race. We did not start as a new race, but as Europeans possessing the same intellectual heritage as the men who stayed in the parent countries. Our problem was not one of receiving the ancient tradition from an invading or colonizing people who brought with them an art already formed. Ourselves the invaders and colonizers, our problem was to keep alive the ideas that we had had in Europe, or to take over those of our new home, or to evolve an art of our own. To begin with the second possibility, the question of our relation to the ideas of the Indians may obviously be disposed of very briefly. The tribes encountered by the early settlers were in a state of savagery, and this fact, together with the constant warfare between the two races, is a sufficient explanation why we find no influence from the red men. Even where the Europeans encountered culture of a very high order, as in Mexico and Peru, the remoteness of the native ideas from those of the invading race prevented for centuries a just appreciation of the earliest and unquestionably the greatest art produced in the Western Hemisphere. It is only in quite recent years that we have realized its merit, and it is unlikely that even our present-day interest in the exotic arts will bring about any important influence from the Indians, although in regions such as our Southwest and the parts of Mexico where “Americanizing” has not yet killed their art-instinct, they are still producing beautiful work.