Per 
 
 2973 
 K38 
 
 v 
 
 1 
 
 00 
 
 C\J 
 
 CM 
 C\J 
 
 UJ 
 >- 
 
 
5.00 THE YEAR 
 
 50 CENTS THE COPY 
 
 
 1 
 
 ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 An Illustrated Monthly Magazine 
 Published by THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
 
 OP WASHINGTON, AFFILIATED WITH THB 
 
 ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA. 
 
 ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY PRESS, Inc. 
 
 FEBRUARY, 1922 
 
 VOLUME XIII 
 
 Number 2 
 
 ART EDITOR 
 WILLIAM H. HOLMES 
 
 EDITORIAL STAFF 
 
 Virgil Barker 
 
 Howard Crosby Butler 
 
 Charlbs Upson Clark 
 
 Albert T. Clay 
 
 Charles T. Currelly 
 
 H. R. Fairclouoh 
 
 Edgar L. Hbwbtt 
 
 Fiskb Kimball 
 
 David M. Robinson 
 
 Helen Wright 
 
 DIRECTOR AND EDITOR 
 MITCHELL CARROLL 
 
 BOARD OF DIRECTORS 
 
 J. Townsbnd Russell, President 
 
 Frank Springer, Vice-President 
 
 Mitchell Carroll, Secretary 
 
 John B. Larner, Treasurer 
 
 R. V, D. Magoffin 
 
 Ex-officio as President of the Institute 
 
 Robert Woods Bliss 
 
 Mrs. B. H. Warder 
 
 Walter C GlEphane, Counsel 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 RUSSIAN NUMBER 
 With the collaboration of Edgar L. Hewett. 
 
 . Nicholas Roerich 
 
 The Joy op Art in Russia— I . 
 
 Fifteen Illustrations. 
 
 The Russian Ballet Frances R. Grant 
 
 Four Illustrations. 
 
 Nationalism in Russian Music 
 
 Russian Literature — General Characteristics .... 
 
 I 
 
 Notes from the New York Galleries 
 
 Four Illustrations. 
 
 Current Notes and Comments . 
 
 One Illustration. 
 
 Book Critiques 
 
 Alexis Kail 
 Alexander Kaun 
 Helen Comstock 
 
 5i 
 
 69 
 
 78 
 83 
 91 
 
 95 
 
 97 
 
 Terms: $5.00 a year in advance: single numbers, ,50 cents, 
 sent two weeks before (.be date they are to go into effect. 
 
 Instructions for renewal, discontinuance, or change of address should be 
 
 
 All correspondence should be addressed and remittances made to Art and Archaeology, the Octagon, Washington, D. C. Also 
 manuscripts, photographs, material for notes and news, books for review, and exchanges, should be sent to this address. ' 
 
 Advertisements should be sent to J. Carlisle Lord, Advertising Manager, 786 Sixth Ave., New York, N. Y., the New York Office 
 of Art and Archaeology. 
 
 Entered at the Post Office at Washington, D. C, as second-class mail matter. Acceptance for mailing at special rate of postage 
 provided for in section 1 103, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized September 7, 1918. 
 
 Copyright, 1922, by the Art and Archaeology Press. 
 
 493706 
 
Mizguir, the young Tartar merchant in "Snegourotchka." Russian fairy opera. Book by Ostrovsky on an old 
 Russian folk-story of "The Snow Maiden." Music by Rimsky-Korsakoff. Painted by N. Roerich for 
 Chicago Grand Opera Company production. 
 
K3$ 
 
 ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 The Arts Throughout the Ages 
 
 Volume XIII 
 
 FEBRUARY, 1922 
 
 Number 2 
 
 THE JOY OF ART IN RUSSIA 
 
 i. 
 
 By Nicholas Roerich 
 
 [We have great pleasure in publishing this article by the world-famous Russian artist, 
 Nicholas Roerich, which doubtless will be greatly appreciated by our readers.]— Ed. 
 
 LITTLE knowledge brings dusk 
 with it ; great knowledge brings 
 light. Spurious art brings the 
 commonplace; genuine art creates joy 
 of spirit and that power on which the 
 building of our future rests. We should 
 now firmly establish everything that 
 can lead Man along a new road. As 
 in pre-historic times Paleolith was re- 
 placed by Neolith, so in our days the 
 "mechanical civilization" is about to 
 be replaced by culture of spirit. The 
 Druids secretly cherished the laws of 
 wisdom; similar to that, in the engen- 
 dering kingdom of spirit, attention is 
 tending towards knowledge and beauty, 
 and many a home is already lighted up 
 by that sacred fire; many are united, 
 each of them a creative atom in the new 
 construction. The same thought springs 
 up in different countries simultaneously, 
 
 [51] 
 
 like a strong plant sending forth many 
 new shoots from the same root. 
 
 Friends, you would like to hear 
 about art in Russia? You seem to be 
 interested in it and kindly expectant. 
 You are right. 
 
 The Russian nation has always been 
 closely attached to art. Since the times 
 of yore all its modes of life have been 
 saturated with self-expression of true 
 art. The ancient heroic epos, the 
 folk-lore, the national string- and wind- 
 instruments, laces, carved wood, ikons, 
 ornamental details in architecture, — 
 all of these speak of genuine, natural 
 artistic aspirations. And, even at the 
 present moment, all exhibitions, con- 
 certs, theatres and public lectures are 
 invariably crowded. 
 
 It was but a short while back that 
 Kuprin wrote : 
 
"The VarEngian Sea." Painted in Petrograd, 1909, by N. Roerich. 
 
 "Russian villages welcome the in- 
 tellectuals. They have become more 
 kindred to the peasants' conception. 
 A new-comer from among the students, 
 man or woman, is trustfully asked to 
 teach small village children, while their 
 elder brothers and sisters are keen on 
 learning not only music, but foreign 
 languages as well. Wandering pho- 
 tographers are met with lots of orders. 
 A painter who is able to produce on a 
 piece of canvas or of linoleum an ap- 
 proximate likeness to a human face can 
 rely upon a long life of safety and com- 
 fort in the country. I say safety because 
 the village bestows its sincere guardian- 
 ship upon these strange artists." 
 
 I, too, could point out numberless 
 instances of love of art and of enlight- 
 enment among the simple Russian 
 people. 
 
 It would be impossible to cover in one 
 article every section of the vast horizon 
 commanded by Russian art. But it is 
 possible to point out the milestones, and 
 to map out the main roads which will 
 lead us from our day into the depth of 
 the ages. 
 
 Besides the modern Russian mas- 
 ters — Serov, Trubetzkoy, Vrubel, So- 
 
 mov, Bakst — you have shown your 
 appreciation of our outstanding na- 
 tionalists, such as Riepin and Surikov, 
 Nesterov and Levitan. You have also 
 come across the names of old masters; 
 the classic Brulov, the religious genius 
 Ivanov, the interpreter of national life 
 Venezianov, and our great portrait 
 painters Levitzky and Borovikovsky. 
 But it is necessary all the same to 
 point out the characteristic national 
 features and movements of Russian 
 art from a bird's eye point of view, as 
 it were. 
 
 What shall we cast away from our art 
 in marking each successive step of de- 
 velopment? What shall we adopt? 
 Which way shall we turn? — towards 
 the new interpretation of classicism, or 
 to the antique sources? Shall we sink 
 into the depths of primitivism, or 
 find new light in the " Neo-national- 
 ism," with its fragrance of Indian 
 herbs, its spells of the Finnish land, its 
 inspiring thoughts of the so-called 
 Slavophilism? 
 
 We are deeply excited over the ques- 
 tion — Whence is coming the Joy of 
 Art? For it is coming, although it 
 has been less perceptible of late. Its 
 
 [S3] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 re-sounding, approaching strides are 
 tangible already. 
 
 Amongst the recent achievements one 
 is notable and bright: the under- 
 standing of the decorative, of the 
 adorning nature of art, is growing 
 rapidly. The original purpose and 
 meaning of art is again coming to the 
 fore, rightly understood as the em- 
 bellishment of life — which makes the 
 artist and the on-looker, the master and 
 the owner join in the ecstasy of creation 
 and exult in its enjoyment. 
 
 We have reasons to hope that these 
 modern aspirations will fling away the 
 dead weights forcibly attached to art 
 in the last century. Already the word 
 "to adorn" seems to be acquiring its 
 renewed meaning among the masses. 
 
 Very valuable is the fact that the 
 cultured part of society is just now 
 keen on studying the birth-springs of 
 art: it is through theseP crystal-like 
 springs, that the great value of embel- 
 lishing human life will be realized 
 again. It may acquire quite a new 
 style and lead to a new era beyond the 
 limits of our present imagination; but 
 one thing is certain, that that new era 
 in its intensity of exultation will be 
 akin to the first human ecstasies. 
 
 But flowers do not grow on ice. In 
 order to mould that new era it is neces- 
 sary that society should follow the 
 artists; people should become their 
 co-workers. The public mind, assisting 
 art work by prompting its creations 
 through the demand for exhibitions, art 
 galleries and private collections, will 
 be that warmth without which no roots 
 can produce plants. Happily, as I say, 
 the interest of the cultured public is 
 veering round to the dusk of the past 
 ages, in the midst of which gems are 
 sparkling : either costly or modest gems, 
 but equally great in the purity of 
 thought which has given them their 
 
 material form. We are trying to dis- 
 cern what we would see if we were 
 transferred into the depth of those 
 times: would we be amazed at the 
 wisdom of an innate artistic instinct, or 
 would we find just gifted children 
 around us? No; we would find not 
 children, but wise men. 
 
 We are not going into the details of 
 various ancient art creations; such 
 measurements and explanations might 
 offend both their masters and their 
 modern possessors. It is the impression 
 of harmony that is essential in art ; and 
 that what still bears the fascination of 
 beauty and purity, of nobility and of 
 singularity, should be counted as art, 
 and need not fear any libel. As it is, 
 judging art creations of our days, many 
 of us are given to dwell on their flaws 
 and drawbacks. This is a sign of youth 
 with a country where it is done. 
 
 Let us look at the Thirties of the last 
 century and further back still. Much 
 of it stirs our heart-strings; the noble 
 bloom of the epoch of Alexander I, the 
 truly decorative sparkle of the times of 
 Catherine the Great and of Elizabeth 
 (XVIII) and the amazing conglomera- 
 tions of art in Peter the Great's time. 
 Happily, a great deal of it all has 
 escaped ruin and vividly speaks for 
 itself. 
 
 What is by far less known and under- 
 stood are the "pre-Peter" times. Our 
 conception of these had been out of gear 
 for a long time due to the admixture of 
 "self-made" knowledge— which is al- 
 ways the result of little knowledge. The 
 safest way to study the homes and 
 churches of the pre-Peter epoch is to 
 transfer into it in our minds the 
 treasures from our museums, the objects 
 of jewelry, clothing, textures, ikons, etc. 
 
 Almost the highest place amongst 
 the ancient Russian art creations should 
 be given to the ikons — applying this 
 
 [55] 
 
Building of Ancient Russian "Warship," X Century, by N. Roerich. Now in Oakland Art Association Museum. 
 
 definition on a large scale. The faces 
 on these "wonder-working" paintings 
 are magically impressive. There is a 
 great understanding of the effects of the 
 silhouette-painting in them, and a deep 
 sense of proportion in the treating of 
 the back-grounds. The faces of Christ, 
 of the Virgin, of some beloved Saints — 
 they seem actually to radiate the power 
 attributed to them: The Face of Judg- 
 ment, The Face of Goodness, The Face 
 of Joy, The Face of Sorrow, The Face 
 of Mercy, The Face of Omnipotence. 
 Yet — still The Same One Face, quiet 
 in its features, fathomless in the depth 
 of colcring. The Wonder-working Face. 
 No one dared until recently to regard 
 the ikons purely from the artistic point 
 
 of view, and only then a powerful deco- 
 rative spirit has been discovered in 
 them at last— in the place of naiveness 
 and crudeness which were supposed to 
 be their characteristics hitherto. A 
 genuine decorative instinct gave their 
 unknown creators, in their days, the 
 complete mastership even over the 
 largest surfaces of church walls. We 
 are still in the dark about the proximity 
 of that instinct in regard to actual 
 technique and knowledge, but the 
 "specialists' " indifferent descriptions 
 of these wall- and canvas-ikons often 
 call forth feelings of pain and offense 
 for those works. 
 
 It is not sufficient to sense the 
 exulting audacity of color in the wall 
 
 [56] 
 
Yaroslavna's Tower Room. Scene for Prince Igor; Diaghileff's Paris and London production, 1914, by N. Roerich. 
 
 paintings of the churches in Yaroslavl 
 and Rostov? I Just have a good look at 
 the interior of John the Forerunner in 
 Yaroslavl. What harmonies of the 
 most transparent azure with bright 
 ochre! What atmosphere of ease and 
 peace in the greyish emerald of the 
 verdure, and how well it blends with 
 the reddish and brownish garments of 
 the figures. Serene Archangels with 
 deep yellow haloes round their heads 
 flying across the warm-looking sky, 
 their white robes looking only just a 
 shade colder against it. And the gold : 
 it never hurts your eye, it is so perfectly 
 placed and so perfectly balanced. 
 Truly, these paintings are the daintiest, 
 the finest silk tectures befitted to clothe 
 
 1 
 
 the walls of The Forerunner ! 
 
 In the labyrinth of the church 
 passages in Rostov every one of the 
 tiny doorways startles you with un- 
 expected beauty of color harmonies?^ 
 Softly outlined human figures are dis- 
 cerned looking at you through the 
 strangely-transparent pale ash-grey of 
 the walls. In some places you seem to 
 feel the heat of the glowing red and 
 chestnut chords; in others, peace comes 
 breathing from the greenish-blue masses 
 of color; and, suddenly, you stop 
 short — as before a severe word from the 
 Scripture — faced by a shadowy figure 
 in ochre. 
 
 You feel that all this has been created 
 consciously, not casually; and that you 
 have been brought to that house of God 
 for some reason, and that you shall 
 
 [57] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 keep the impression of its beauty and 
 benefit by it more than once hence. _ 
 
 These works — to quote from an old 
 book of the XVII century — have been 
 painted "with honest mind and decent 
 purpose, and with noble love for embel- 
 lishment, for the people to see them- 
 selves here as standing before the face of 
 The Highest." ?. 
 
 When the later-on famous "wonder- 
 working" ikon of the Virgin Iverskaya 
 was to be painted, the planks for its 
 foundation were bathed in consecrated 
 water, an exceptionally arduous service 
 was held, the paints were mixed with 
 petrified remains of some Saints, and 
 the painter, while at that work, con- 
 sumed food only on Saturdays and on 
 Sundays. The ecstasy of painting an 
 ikon was great in those days, and it was 
 a real happiness when the lot befell 
 a true artist, elated by the eternal 
 spiritual beauty which he was toy 
 embody. 
 
 Some splendid laws of the great 
 Italians can be traced in the Russian 
 wall paintings, applied from a purely 
 decorative point of view. On the other 
 hand, the Far East has poured, through 
 the Tartars, a tinge of wilfulness into 
 our old art works. Towards the Tsars' 
 period of our history (16th cent.) the 
 decorative element in every day life 
 came to its highest. Whether temples, 
 palaces, or small private dwellings, they 
 all clearly reflected a perfect sense of 
 proportion through which the structure 
 itself blended with its ornamentations 
 into one. Looking at them you find 
 nothing whatever to argue against ! 
 
 The noble character of the arts that 
 flourished in Novgorod and in Pskov — 
 on "The Great Water-way" leading 
 from the Baltic into the Black sea — was 
 saturated with the best elements of 
 Hansa culture. The lion's head on the 
 coins of the Novgorod Republic is 
 
 extremely like the head of St. Mark. 
 Was it not the northern giant's dream 
 of the distant southern queen of the 
 seas, Venice? The now white-washed 
 walls of Novgorod — the "Great Town 
 which was its own Master," to quote 
 its ancient name in full — look as if they 
 could very likely have borne on them 
 paintings of the Hansa character. 
 Novgorod, famous for, and wise with, 
 the incessant raids of his "Freemen," 
 might have turned his face away from 
 a casual wanderer, — but only through 
 wilfulness and not from shame : there is 
 not one stain on the fame of the famous 
 old town; it has kept many of its old 
 features even until the XIX century. 
 
 It is different with the influences of 
 the Far East. The Mongol invasions 
 have left such a hatred behind them 
 that their artistic elements are always 
 neglected. It is forgotten that the 
 mysterious cradle of Asia has produced 
 these quaint people and has enwrapped 
 then in the gorgeous veils of China, 
 Tibet and Hindustan. Russia has not 
 only suffered from the Tartar swords, 
 but has also heard through their jing- 
 ling the wonder-tales known to the 
 clever Greeks and the intelligent Ara- 
 bians who wandered along the Great 
 Road from the Normans to the East. 
 
 The Mongol manuscripts and the 
 annals of the foreign envoys of those 
 days tell us of an unaccountable mix- 
 ture of cruelty and refinement with the 
 great nomads. The best artists and 
 masters were to be found at the head- 
 quarters of the Tartar Khans. 
 
 Besides the adopted view-point of the 
 text-books there can be another one: 
 It was the Tartars' contempt and 
 cruelty that taught the Russian. Princes 
 to give up their feuds and to rally 
 against their mutual oppressors; it was 
 the Tartars that taught them the om- 
 nipotence of merciless victors; but, at 
 
 [59] 
 
"Rostoff the Great" (from collection of Dr. W. Porter), by N. Roerich. 
 
 the same time, those nomads brought 
 from Asia ancient culture and spread it 
 all over the land which they had pre- 
 viously devastated. 
 
 It is more painful to think of the 
 ancient weapons of the Russians them- 
 selves with which they ruined in their 
 quarrels each other's towns even before 
 the Tartars invaded them. The white 
 walls of the Russian temples and 
 towers — "shining as white as cheese," 
 to quote from the ancient annals — 
 suffered many a hard blow from kindred 
 clans. 
 
 Walking through the plains beyond 
 the outskirts of Rome, one is unable to 
 imagine that it was just in those now 
 
 empty places that Caesar's capital was 
 unfolding itself, giving gorgeous shelter 
 to some ten million inhabitants. It is 
 equally unbelievable to imagine the 
 gorgeousness of Kiev — "The Mother 
 of Russian Towns" — where Prince 
 Yaroslav the Wise entertained foreign 
 guests from East and West. The rem- 
 nants of the wall paintings in Kiev ? s 
 cathedrals, all these large-eyed, serene 
 figures of world-wise men interpreted 
 by the brush of real artists, give us a 
 glimpse of what art actually meant to 
 the Russians of those times (about 
 1000-1200 A. D.)- 
 
 A few years ago there were excavated 
 in Kiev some remnants of ancient 
 
 [60] 
 
Church in Sousdal (XVI Century), by N. Roerich. 
 
 walls, frescoes, tiles and ornaments; 
 these are believed to be fragments of 
 the Princes' court-yards. I have seen 
 some of the exquisite frescoes, and I 
 found them bearing the features of art 
 of Asia Minor. The structure of the 
 stone walls in itself indicates a special 
 quaint manner of technique, which 
 usually marks the periods of great love 
 for architecture. I think that the 
 Rogere Palace in Palermo gives an idea 
 of the palaces of Kiev. 
 
 It was really a combination of North 
 and South: the metal sheen of the 
 Scandinavian style beaded with the 
 pearls of Byzantium made the ancient 
 city that place of beauty which led 
 brothers to fight for it. The astound- 
 
 ing tones of enamel, the refinement of 
 miniatures, the vastness and dignity 
 of the temples, the wonders of metal 
 work, the masses of hand-woven tex- 
 tures, the admixture of the finest laws 
 of the Roman style — all these melted 
 into one in giving Kiev its noble ele- 
 gance. Men of Yaroslav's and Vladi- 
 mir times must have had a very de- 
 veloped sense of beauty, or the things 
 left by them would not have been so 
 wonderful. 
 
 Note those paragraphs from the 
 heroic epos where the people's mind 
 dwells on the details of ordinary life, 
 leaving alone for a while the achieve- 
 ments of heroism. Here is a descrip- 
 tion of a private house — a "terem": 
 
 [61] 
 
ri 
 
 •a 
 
 ft 
 o 
 
 ft 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 Around the terem — an iron fence; 
 
 Its spikes — topped with carving; 
 
 Each one of them crowned with a pearl. 
 
 The gate-way — floored with whale tooth. 
 
 Over the gate-way — about seventy ikons. 
 
 In the middle of the court — the terems do rise, 
 
 The terems with their gilt domes; 
 
 The first door-way — in wrought iron work, 
 
 The middle door-way — in glass; 
 
 The third door-way — latticed. 
 
 One can trace in this description a 
 likeness to the images on the Dakian 
 structures on Trojan columns. 
 
 And, here is a description of horse- 
 men: 
 
 Their clothes are of scarlet cloth. 
 
 Their leather belts are pierced with wrought metal 
 
 clasps. 
 Their caps are black and pointed, 
 In black fur, with golden crowns. 
 Their feet are shod with precious green leather, 
 Tilted at the toes like awls; 
 The heels are pointed too: 
 There's room enough for an egg to roll round the 
 
 toes, 
 There's room enough for a sparrow to fly round 
 
 the heels. 
 
 This is an exact, although poetic, 
 description of the kind of garments 
 that can be seen in the Byzantine wall- 
 paintings. 
 
 And, here again is the picture of 
 the hero himself : 
 
 The helmet on his cap shines like fire. 
 
 His plated shoes are in seven shades of silk. 
 
 Each has a golden tack in it; 
 
 Each toe has a precious emerald in it. 
 
 On his shoulders — a coat of black ermine, 
 
 Of black ermine brought from over the seas, 
 
 Covered with embossed green velvet. 
 
 Each button-hole has a bird woven in. 
 
 And each golden button — a furious beast cast in. 
 
 I would suggest to regard such a 
 description not from the view-point of 
 philological curiosity, but as a piece of 
 direct realistic information. The de- 
 tails are an archaeologically-true evi- 
 dence. Thus, in this quaint statement 
 we can see a fragment of a great cul- 
 ture, — one that was not enforced, not 
 strange to the simple people: the un- 
 sophisticated folk, obviously, had no 
 objection to it whatever : they spoke of 
 it without the scorn of the "lower" 
 
 classes for "the elect," but freely ex- 
 pressed a genuine pride in what was 
 beautiful and elegant to their own senses 
 as well. In those days the elaborate 
 arrangements of the Princes' hunts, 
 the merry feasts they gave — in the 
 course of which they would put a num- 
 ber of wise questions before their 
 foreign guests, — the nobility in the 
 construction of new cities, — all this 
 blended together in harmony. Such 
 life did not jar on the poetic mind of 
 the simple people; and it is evident 
 that wise initiators of art have in- 
 habited and ruled The Mother of Rus- 
 sian Towns. 
 
 Here is a quotation from the first 
 historical annals (the exact language of 
 which remains untranslatable, being a 
 mixture of Russian with the Old Sla- 
 vonic which in itself makes it a piece 
 of poetry of the XI century) : 
 
 "Yaroslav founded Kiev the Great, v 
 and its golden gates with it. Also the 
 Church of St. Sophia, also the Church 
 of Annunciation upon the Golden Gates, 
 also the Monastery of St. George and 
 St. Irene. 
 
 "Loving the laws of Church and 
 being a master in books, he read them 
 by day and by night, and wrote them 
 too, thus sowing book- words in the 
 hearts of true men, which we now reap. 
 For, books are rivers that carry wis- 
 .dom throughout the world, and are as 
 deep as rivers. Also, Yaroslav lov- 
 ingly embellished the churches with 
 gold and silver vessels, and his heart 
 rejoiced upon it." 
 
 Yaroslav 's exulting over the gor- 
 geousness of St. Sophia temple is im- 
 measurably removed from the exclama- 
 tions of our contemporary savages at 
 the sight of bright colors. Yaroslav 's 
 was the exultation of a man who sensed 
 in his creation a monument of art that 
 would live for ages. One can envy 
 
 [63] 
 
rf 
 
 .n 
 '9 
 o 
 
 s-, 
 
 o 
 
 pq 
 
 A 
 
 > 
 o 
 
 o 
 Ph 
 
 H 
 
 B 
 H 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 and admire the modes of life where 
 such art was in demand. 
 
 A question may arise: How could 
 Kiev have become a centre of culture 
 at the very start of Russian his- 
 tory? 
 
 But, do we possess any knowledge 
 about the foundation of Kiev? That 
 city tempted Prince Oleg, the Varen- 
 gian — a man of the world, a man of 
 experience. Before him, the Princes 
 Askold and Dir coveted Kiev, and so 
 did many other Normans . ' 'And many 
 Varengians foregathered and came into 
 possession of the Slavonic Land." It 
 should be noted that there are no indi- 
 cations anywhere in the lines of the 
 annals about Askold and Dir being 
 zm-cultured. Thus, the facts about the 
 foundation of Kiev are really pushed 
 back into the depths of the legendary 
 times. Let us not despise tradition, 
 either ; it says that the Apostle Andrew 
 has visited Kiev: why should an apos- 
 tle come to virgin forests? But his 
 appearance in Kiev becomes quite com- 
 prehensible if one thinks of the secret 
 cults of Astarte which have been re- 
 cently traced near Kiev. These cults 
 take us back to the XVI-XVII centuries 
 before Christ. A large centre of mental 
 interest ought to have existed already 
 in order to shelter such cults. 
 
 It is a comfort to know that all of the 
 Great Kiev is still resting within the 
 ground in peace, un-excavated. There 
 are glorious discoveries to come yet. 
 They will open almost the only gate into 
 the depths of the past of our land. Even 
 the Scandinavian period and the Bronze 
 period will have a light thrown on 
 them through those gates. 
 
 There is no doubt that the joy of 
 art has grown in Kiev side by side 
 with the neighboring Scandinavian cul- 
 ture, without being engendered by the 
 latter altogether. Why should the 
 
 birth of the Russian Scandinavia be 
 attributed entirely to the legendary 
 Prince Rurik? The ancient annals 
 mention a fact which is of great sig- 
 nificance, yet it has never been picked 
 up as a key : 
 
 "The Russians pushed the Varen- 
 gians beyond the sea and would not 
 pay duty to them." Now, if the expul- 
 sion of the Varengians took place be- 
 fore Rurik 's name came in at all, when 
 did their first appearance in the Russian 
 land take place? It is quite possible 
 that the Russo-Scandinavian era may 
 have been rooted in the depths of the 
 ages. 
 
 We have a startling illustration of 
 carelessness in the "historical" text- 
 books on the subject : 
 
 The famous phrase attributed to the 
 old Russians which is meant in the text- 
 books as a wholesale invitation from 
 the Russian land to the Varengians 
 "from over the sea" runs thus: 
 
 "Our land is large and prolific, but 
 there is no order in it. Come and rule 
 over us." What is usually given as a 
 sequence to this invitation are the 
 following lines : " There came the Varen- 
 gian Rurik with his brothers Sineus and 
 Truvor (800 A. D.)." 
 
 Now, in the Scandinavian annals, 
 the words "sinhuus" and "truver" 
 mean, "his household" and "his true 
 guard." Therefore I would sug- 
 gest a different explanation of the 
 famous phrase: very probable, it has 
 found its utterance not on the part of 
 the ancient Russians themselves, but 
 among the Scandinavian colonists who 
 inhabited the banks of the northern 
 river Volhov. It is they that must 
 have asked Rurik from behind the 
 Ladoga lake (which is very much like 
 a sea — where he, most likely, used to 
 come from Scandinavia for hunting), 
 to come and organise a military force 
 
 [65] 
 
'The Call of the Bells." Old Pskov (XVII Century). By N. Roerich. 
 
 for them. And that men — with his 
 household and his guards, with his 
 means and his probable love of ad- 
 venture — came to the asking of his 
 compatriots. By and by, his kind of 
 "princes," the warriors hired in the 
 North of Russia, were attracted by the 
 Kiev Principality where the role of a 
 "prince" was more than that of a 
 warrior and included the position of a 
 statesman. 
 
 In the tenth century, northern 
 culture saturated with its influence the 
 whole of Europe. No one denies that 
 the Scandinavian epoch forms one of the 
 most attractive artistic problems. The 
 monumental art of the Scandinavians 
 is exceptionally serene and noble. For 
 a long time it was only the skiffs with 
 their motley sails and carved dragons 
 that used to bring the elements of The 
 Wonderful with them into Russia. 
 Our people adopted these with open 
 hearts. There is no reason to regard 
 
 the Northerners as rough conquerors of 
 the original Novgorod ; in any case, they 
 lived in a way which made them kindred 
 to art — a feature which was a powerful 
 factor in their blending with the in- 
 habitants of the Russian plains who had 
 artistic imagination innate in them. 
 
 We know that the Varengians 
 brought with them the ideas of human 
 deities; but, before that, did the Slavs 
 not deify the powers of nature— one of 
 the most poetic forms of religion? 
 This was the cradle of their creative 
 inspirations. 
 
 Going further into the depths of ages, 
 we find the last frontier of realistic 
 entities. Apparently, only dust seems 
 to be left beyond those frontiers, and 
 an amateur is put hard to believe that 
 it is not merely a theory of dull archae- 
 ology that we are asked to adopt. But, 
 in reality, there survived some atoms of 
 fascinating gorgeousness that did live 
 in the past. Now it is time for every- 
 
 [66] 
 
Winter Group in "Snegourotchka." By N. Roerich. 
 
 one to realise that art has existed not 
 only where this is obvious to all; but 
 that much, much is hidden from us by 
 the veils of time. And what seems dull 
 now will appear one day lit up by the 
 joys of penetration. The onlooker will 
 become a creator. Herein lies the 
 fascination both of the Past and of the 
 Future. He who cannot grasp the 
 Past is unable to imagine the Future. 
 
 The fantastic bas-reliefs on the 
 northern rocks, the tall hillocks along 
 the trade-routes, the long daggers and 
 the attire so rich in design make one 
 love northern life ; tfiey awaken respect 
 for the" primitive forms of beauty 
 beyond which our imagination sinks in 
 the depths of the bronze patines. 
 
 A great deal of art can be sensed 
 even in the mysterious and dusky 
 periods which stand back furthest from 
 us. Can the animal Finnish phantas- 
 magoria be astrange to art? Do the 
 bewitched forms of the far East escape 
 artistic penetration? Are the first 
 adaptations from the antique world 
 hideous in the hands of the Scythians? 
 Are the ornaments of the Siberian 
 
 nomads merely coarse? No; these 
 finds are kindred to art, and one can 
 envy the clarity of conception with the 
 ancients. They incarnated symbols 
 that meant to them so much, and 
 created well-defined, distinct, for mani- 
 fold artistic forms. 
 
 It is in the mysterious cobweb of the 
 Bronze period that we have to look 
 round. Every day brings with it new 
 conclusions. We can discern a whole 
 pageant of peoples. Beyond the shin- 
 ing, gold-clad Byzantines we see the 
 motley crowds of Finno-Turks pass by. 
 Deeper still in time majestically come 
 the gorgeous Aryans. Still deeper, 
 there are only the extinguished bon- 
 fires of unknown wanderers; these are 
 numberless. 
 
 It is the gifts which all of these have 
 left for us that are nowadays building 
 up the Neo-nationalism. The younger 
 generations will heed it and will become 
 strong and sane through it. If the 
 blunted modern nationalism of art is to 
 be turned into a bewitching neo- 
 nationalism, the foundation stone of 
 the latter will be the great ancient 
 
 [67] 
 
Boyars in Summer in "Snegourotchka." By N. Roerich. 
 
 world in its genuine conceptions of 
 truth and beauty. This truth and 
 beauty will find one day its equal in 
 the great future. 
 
 The remotest annals of the Christian 
 era are unable to convey the fascina- 
 tions of the effaced cult of Nature. The 
 so-called "animal" in everyday life, 
 the devilish' ' in merry making, the 
 "unseemly" songs described by the 
 chronicler of the ancient times in Rus- 
 sia, should not be swallowed whole- 
 sale as such: the chronicler was an 
 ordained person, and a partial point of 
 view was unavoidable in his case. 
 Church did not bring art with it : it only 
 rested its foundation upon it; and, 
 although it created some new forms, it 
 crushed the other, equally beautiful, 
 ones. 
 
 All the certainty of assertion ends 
 for us with the Scandinavian period. 
 What remains of the ages that preceded 
 it gives us but approximate indications. 
 We can only see that objects of beauty 
 were necessary in people's life; but all 
 actuality as to the exactness of cen- 
 turies in speaking of the details of 
 home life escapes our searchlights. 
 
 The darkling depths of the Bronze 
 and Brass periods defy us, especially if 
 we try to hold on to the Russian soil. 
 Yet, such countries as Greece and 
 Phoenicia were bound to have made an 
 immense impression on the surround- 
 ing populations. Of course, the tran- 
 sitory moments of history must have 
 effaced the importance of ornamental 
 art even then, as it also happened in 
 Russia at the period of the internal 
 feuds. The unskilful use of a new 
 treasure such as metal must have 
 pushed aside, at the time, real artistic 
 taste. But the dark periods of iron, 
 bronze and brass lasted very long, and 
 we cannot expect any clarity from our 
 researches there. 
 
 In the direction of ornaments the 
 creative spirit of the ancients has been 
 working unfailingly. The love for sym- 
 bolical design was enveloping humanity 
 like a safe-guarding net : and a modern 
 uncultured woman of the tribes Mordva 
 or Cheremissy (in the East of Russia) 
 has no conception of the value of art 
 which has reached her through ages 
 and which she possesses in her orna- 
 ments. 
 
 (To be continued.) 
 
 [68] 
 
THE RUSSIAN BALLET 
 
 By Frances R. Grant 
 
 TO Europe, Russia of yesteryear 
 was an elusive mystery. Great, 
 dark, colorful, it seemed a con- 
 stant enigma. Behind its boundaries, 
 Europe sensed a constant chaos — but 
 it was a chaos of reason, such as pre- 
 cedes the rising of a curtain. 
 
 And the curtain rose. 
 
 It was in 1909 that Paris was aroused 
 to sudden attention by a spectacle of 
 irridescent splendor. A band of ardent 
 Russians, bringing with them the se- 
 crets of a new art, colorful, gorgeous, 
 had appeared at the Theatre du Chate- 
 let. From then on the world knew the 
 brilliance that was the Russian Ballet's. 
 : . Over the Theatre du Chatelet, there 
 had come a resplendent change. The 
 season before it had sheltered "The 
 Adventures of Gavroche." And de- 
 spite its obviousness, Parisian crowds 
 delighted in it. Then appeared this 
 inspired troupe from Muscovy. With 
 a zeal incalculable the interior of the 
 playhouse was transformed; enthusi- 
 asm worked its miracle over every- 
 thing. And when the season of the 
 Diaghileff Russian Ballet began, even 
 Paris the blase sat bewildered before 
 the gorgeousness of "Prince Igor," 
 the splendor of "Armide," the charm of 
 "Chopiniana" and the abandon of the 
 "Bacchanale." 
 
 But the opalesque brilliance of the 
 Diaghileff ballet had not been created 
 in a day, or even in a season. Behind 
 it lay a venerable tradition and its back- 
 ground was interwoven in the history of 
 Russia. 
 
 Dance is an inseparable part of the 
 Russian character. It is as definitely 
 entwined into the life of the nation as is 
 music and is as important a part of the 
 
 people's self-expression. History tells 
 us that the art of ballet was introduced 
 into Russia as early as the reign of 
 Czar Alexis Mihailovitch. Stirred by a 
 desire to bring the ballet to his country, 
 Alexis is said to have dispatched his 
 aide-de-camp Col. Van Staden to the 
 western countries to order a troupe of 
 dancers for his palace. A further record 
 has it that in 1673-74 a group of Ger- 
 man and Italian dancers came to 
 Alexis' capital and diverted the court 
 with performances of "Orpheus and 
 Eurydice" and other performances. 
 
 The actual installation of the ballet 
 as part of the official educational sys- 
 tem, however, can be traced to the 
 reign of the Empress Anna Ivanovna, 
 who opened the Imperial Ballet School 
 in the Royal Palace in 1737. The 
 French ballet master, Landet, was 
 engaged to take charge of the work and 
 with the assistance of a Neapolitan 
 composer and musical director, the 
 school was initiated. Since that date 
 the Imperial Russian Ballet School has 
 continued its undisturbed course. Sup- 
 ported by the court, the choice of 
 Europe's ballet masters and teachers 
 were summoned to the faculty at 
 princely cost and the art of ballet there 
 kept abreast with the highest stand- 
 ards. France, Italy and Scandinavia 
 contributed its teachers to the school, 
 and the leadership of the faculty passed 
 among men whose names were to be 
 conjured with in the contemporary 
 progress of the ballet. 
 
 In the furtherance of their training, 
 the pupils of the school were inspired 
 by the appearances at the Imperial 
 Ballet of the leading dancers of the 
 world. For their illumination the grow- 
 
 [69] 
 
Anna Pavlowa. 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 ing generation of Russian dancers had 
 the privilege of seeing such dancers as 
 Fanny Elssler, Carlotta Grisi, Cerrito, 
 Grimaldi and other representatives of 
 that halcyon decade of ballet dance on 
 the Imperial stage. Nor did the Impe- 
 rial Ballet School have to look long 
 beyond its own lists in emulation of 
 others; it flourished apace and soon 
 its own roster was illumined by famous 
 names. Under the leadership of Marius 
 Petipa, who assumed the head of the 
 ballet in the middle of the nineteenth 
 century, the personnel of the school 
 reflected such names as Mouravieva, 
 Bogdanova, Nikitina, Kchechinskaja, 
 Stoukolkin, Kchesinsky, Gerdt Loukja- 
 noff, and better known to America, 
 Karsavina, Pavlowa, the Fokines, Bolm, 
 Mordkin and Nijinsky. 
 
 It would be well to glance more 
 closely at a system which produced 
 such a wealth of artists of transcendent 
 quality. The Imperial Ballet School 
 had built up a stalwart curriculum, 
 the completion of which might well 
 insure and test the student's ability. 
 Each season, some twenty-three stu- 
 dents were chosen to enter its course 
 out of the several hundreds who annu- 
 ally made application. Beginning at 
 the age of ten or thereabouts, the 
 neophyte would devote some eight 
 years of his life to the training, and 
 under the tutelage and supervision of 
 the school, obtained not only his 
 training in the technique of his art, 
 but a correlative education and culture 
 which could but serve to advance his 
 artistic accomplishments. Thus, the 
 Imperial Ballet School provided its 
 graduate with a knowledge of the 
 dance, but gave him as well a profound 
 insight into the traditions of the cul- 
 tured world. 
 
 The system, by its very thoroughness 
 in training the students to an acute 
 
 artistic judgment, provided them with 
 a weapon. Keenly subtle to the possi- 
 bilities of their own art, they turned 
 the weapon inwardly to probe the 
 limitations of the contemporary ballet. 
 
 Those who have followed the history 
 of the ballet know that in the nine- 
 teenth century, its decadence seemed 
 imminent; interest in it seemed des- 
 tined to languish. Between the con- 
 ceits of the French school and the 
 manifold and grotesque acrobatics of 
 the Italian school, it seemed hopelessly 
 enmeshed and its freedom forever 
 throttled. In Russia, under the leader- 
 ship of Petipa, and of necessity infused 
 with foreign influence, it assumed the 
 form of great and bedizened spectacles, 
 weighted down with innumerable con- 
 ventions. 
 
 It was at the end of the nineteenth 
 century, even as early as 1890, that 
 the younger artists, products of the 
 training of the Imperial Russian Ballet 
 School, began to comprehend the irk- 
 some yoke under which the ballet was 
 stagnating. Hoping to liberate it from 
 its rigid traditions, they formed a circle 
 of young artists all infused with a faith 
 in the future of the ballet, yet still 
 uncertain of the path to follow. 
 
 At this time, Isidora Duncan, who 
 too had been filled with the inspiration 
 to rid the art of dance forever of its 
 imprisoning rules and who had reverted 
 to the Greeks and the Classic Dance 
 for her inspirations, began the tour of 
 Europe. She reached Russia about 
 1907, and at the invitation of this 
 group of younger dancers, gave an 
 exhibition of her work. 
 
 Enthused still further by her art, the 
 band of the faithful in Russia began 
 their labors for the liberation of the 
 ballet. In their vanguard stood Serge 
 Diaghileff, who although not a dancer 
 himself, was a writer and connoisseur, 
 
 [71] 
 
C ' ■:!• "., ■■'•': «i»1i> » ■"/■« ; 
 
 OT 
 
 o 
 
 t/; 
 
 0) 
 
 _rt 
 
 3 
 
 (I 
 
 pj 
 
 •O 
 
 +J 
 
 
 (U 
 
 C 
 
 4-> 
 
 "c3 
 
 y 
 
 H 
 
 CJ 
 
 
 a 
 
 « 
 
 CO 
 
 fa 
 
 o 
 
 43 
 
 h5 
 
 15 
 
 
 M 
 
 
 3 
 
 M 
 
 
 T. 
 
 
 s 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 > 
 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 who was heartiest in his desire to 
 acquaint the rest of the world with the 
 billiance of Russian artistic traditions. 
 A graduate of the Petrograd Conserva- 
 tory of Music, Diaghileff had for long 
 been the editor of the art monthly, 
 The World of A rt. In 1 906, desirous of in- 
 troducing Russian paintings to Europe, 
 he had gone to Paris, rented an art 
 gallery, and therein exhibited to the 
 astonished Parisians the magnificent 
 works of his compatriots. The follow- 
 ing year, Diaghileff again went back to 
 Paris, this time presenting some of 
 Russia's musicians in concert and 
 giving examples of his country's musical 
 equipment. It was natural that the 
 circle of dancers should turn to him for 
 leadership. 
 
 In the matter of artistry there stood 
 at th^ head of this band, Michel Fokine, 
 to whose vision and genius much of the 
 brilliant conception of the present-day 
 Russian ballet is due. Fokine, infused 
 with the ideals of a new ballet, had 
 enlisted the finest musicians of Russia 
 as well as her painters in the cause of 
 his creations. With such men as 
 Stravinsky, Strauss, Ravell and others 
 he talked over his ideas of what the 
 chorographic art should become, and, 
 aided by such grandiose talents as 
 Bakst, Roerich, Benois, Seroff, he pro- 
 ceded to create that magnificent art 
 which was to astonish Europe and 
 America. No longer were the deaden- 
 ing conventions which had prevailed 
 in costume, chorography, and music, 
 to stultify this art. Alive with the new 
 freedom, artists, musicians and dancers 
 combined zealously with Fokine in 
 consummating his visions. 
 
 Immediately, however, an inimical 
 bombardment assailed the liberated 
 ballet. Stars of the old regime, eagerly 
 awaiting their pensions and languidly 
 satisfied with their past triumphs, re- 
 
 fused to join its ranks; old ballet mas- 
 ters; relatives of composers to whose 
 works Fokine sought to provide choro- 
 graphic settings; all joined the line 
 of the reactionaries in attacking the 
 Diaghileff group, which had in the face 
 of such concentrated opposition, to 
 delay its illuminating debut. 
 
 In the meantime, however, Adolph 
 Bolm, one of the younger cynosures 
 and lights of the ballet, having grad- 
 uated from the Imperial Ballet School 
 with honors, had determined for a while 
 to feast himself with the arts of the 
 rest of Europe. Through Austria, 
 Russia, France, Italy and Germany he 
 traveled, absorbing himself in the treas- 
 ures of Europe. The journey left 
 him with one overwhelming impression : 
 the utter ignorance of the rest of Europe 
 of Russia's cultural accomplishments. 
 Immediately upon his return to Russia, 
 although but twenty-one, he organized 
 a company of some twenty-eight danc- 
 ers, including Pavlowa, who in this 
 company made her first appearance 
 outside of Russia, and set out on a 
 month's tournee. Traveling through 
 parts of Russia, Finland, Sweden and 
 Germany, the company met with con- 
 stant and stupendous successes. It 
 was this tour that inspired Diaghileff 
 to undertake his trip to Paris, and in 
 1909 in the French capital, the world 
 first became acquainted with that art, 
 vital, lucent, which had been conceived 
 by Russian genius. 
 
 To America there came echoes of the 
 triumphal tours of these dancers who 
 were reaping honors in Paris and Lon- 
 don. But beyond the encomiums and 
 paeans which reached her through the 
 press, this country remained unac- 
 quainted for many years with the 
 artists. 
 
 The first initiation into this art of 
 Russia came in 1909. Anna Pavlowa 
 
 [73] 
 
Michel Fokine and Mme. Fokina. 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 and Mikail Mordkin were engaged to 
 appear in the Metropolitan Opera 
 House, and in the spring of that year 
 they made their first appearance in 
 "Coppelia." The opalesque art of 
 these two met instant approval and the 
 P a vlowa- Mordkin visit was received 
 with acclaim both in 1909 and the fol- 
 lowing seasons when the two repeated 
 their visits to these shores. 
 
 The success of the Russian ballet 
 abroad, and the anticipation which it 
 had aroused here, did not fail to rouse 
 many of the lesser lights to imitation. 
 Hence the cause of Russian art was 
 somewhat dulled in America by the 
 appearance here of various collections 
 of dancers, who, styling themselves as 
 Russian Ballets, paraded a somewhat 
 hybrid art before the public. The 
 vaudeville stage, the musical comedy 
 theaters and other centers presented 
 to their audiences a conglomeration of 
 ballet numbers by dancers who pre- 
 sented themselves as authentic Russian 
 dancers, but whose tradition had been 
 acquired far from the Imperial Ballet 
 School and some far from Russia. 
 
 Memory of this somewhat ill-odored 
 period of quasi-Russian art was im- 
 mediately wiped out, however, on the 
 arrival to this country of the Diaghileff 
 forces themselves. And it was on 
 January 17, 19 16, that the Russian 
 Imperial Ballet gave its first perform- 
 ance in America. That evening in the 
 Century Theater, America beheld the 
 plastic fantasies of "L'Oiseau de Feu" 
 of Stravinsky, ''Scheherazade" of 
 Rimsky-Korsakoff, "Princesse Enchan- 
 tee" of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Kor- 
 sakoff's "Soldi' de Nuit." And the 
 following morning the critics acquainted 
 the waiting world with descriptions of 
 the luminant new art; of the pregnant 
 subtleties of the settings; of the re- 
 doubtable chorographic genius of Fo- 
 
 kine, and of the powerful dancing of 
 Bolm, Massine, Macklezowa and the 
 rest of the ensemble. 
 
 Followed a series of performances in 
 New York, which brought forth most 
 of the entrancing conceptions that had 
 entranced Paris, "Cleopatre," "Spectre 
 de la Rose," "Petrouchka," "Narcisse," 
 "Apres Midi d'Un Faune," "lies Syl- 
 phides," "Prince Igor" and "Sadko," 
 which had its world's debut here. In 
 addition to its New York performances 
 the Diaghileff Ballet traveled through 
 New England and the Middle West, 
 leaving in its wake audiences astonished 
 and entranced, but convinced of the 
 beauties of this exotic and revelant 
 medium. 
 
 The following year the ballet re- 
 turned to America again, and with 
 similarly brilliant performances re- 
 newed again its triumphs. It was 
 during this second season, that of 19 16- 
 17, that the first alliance of Russian 
 and American art was sealed in the 
 presentation of "Til Eulenspiegel" for 
 which Robert Edmond Jones, the 
 American painter, provided the scenic 
 background. 
 
 It is the Ballet Intime of Bolm that 
 has carried the torch of the Rus- 
 sian ballet throughout the country. 
 Through its work the people have been 
 awakened further not only to the beau- 
 ties of the Russian art, but have per- 
 ceived how that art may be wedded to 
 American conceptions. With this bal- 
 let, composed almost entirely of Ameri- 
 cans, and utilizing the works of Ameri- 
 cans in costumes and setting and music, 
 Bolm has wrought an art of more inti- 
 mate and delicate suggestion. In a 
 manner, the Ballet Intime has gone a 
 step beyond the Russian Ballet; from 
 the spectacular and brilliant, it has 
 advanced to the more subtle. Whereas 
 the pictorial was the great preoccupa- 
 
 [75] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 tion of the former ballet ; the more inti- 
 mate art weds itself to psychology and 
 poetry and a more suggestive humor, 
 satire and philosophy have stolen into 
 the plastics of the dance. 
 
 At the same time interest in the bal- 
 let and in the brilliant theatrical effects 
 which characterized it have so corre- 
 spondingly increased that two years 
 ago Michel Fokine, the original genius 
 of the Russian Ballet, and Mme. Fokina, 
 were invited to this country by a lead- 
 ing producer. Here Mr. Fokine has 
 staged "Aphrodite" and several other 
 glittering spectacular dramas. With 
 Mme. Fokina, herself one of the leading 
 dancers of the Diaghileff forces, Fokine 
 has also toured America in dance re- 
 citals. 
 
 Similarly other ballet movements 
 have begun in this country. The 
 latest of these is the inauguration of 
 what has been called a National Ameri- 
 can Ballet. The movement was begun 
 last February with a meeting at Town 
 Hall, under the leadership of Mme. 
 Lubovska, an American dancer. 
 
 The movement, which is being as- 
 sisted by prominent persons in the 
 artistic and society world, purports to 
 initiate a school for the training of 
 American ballet dancers. The courses, 
 according to present plans, are to be 
 held in the summer, and are to extend 
 for six seasons for the neophyte. The 
 training of the novice is to begin at 
 the age of ten and no pupil will be per- 
 mitted to enlist in professional work 
 before she is sixteen. From these plans 
 it would seem that the American move- 
 ment had looked towards Petrograd 
 of yesterday for inspiration and ideas. 
 The movement has numerous possibili- 
 ties and bears promise of distinct 
 interest. 
 
 Another similar activity is that begun 
 in Seattle this season by Nellie Cornish, 
 
 the Cornish School. There amid in- 
 spiring surroundings, Miss Cornish is 
 attempting to build up a school of the 
 theater, a movement which this season 
 had further impetus in the presence of 
 Adolph Bolm, Maurice Brown and 
 others there who gave master classes. 
 It is the first time Mr. Bolm has taught 
 outside of New York, and it is indica- 
 tive of the new spirit and understand- 
 ing of ballet that its beauties are being 
 appreciated and felt throughout the 
 country. 
 
 Certain it is that a greater under- 
 standing of the ballet has permeated 
 the country and this feeling undoubt- 
 edly had its beginning in the visit of 
 the redoubtable Diaghileff forces. Since 
 their visit a change has come over the 
 arts of this country; a new force; a 
 greater virility has been reflected in 
 their creation. The art of the Russians, 
 which eschewed pallidity, which em- 
 braced the force of color and the fire 
 of freedom, has spread its gospel. Here 
 in America, where our ideas of the dance 
 are not influenced by folk expression 
 and where the traditions of ballet have 
 not been handed down from the crea- 
 tions of a national youth, the Russian 
 art has found fertile soil. And yet the 
 ballet of America is not the ballet of 
 Russia; nor are the arts of America 
 those of Russia. To the freedom taught 
 us by that troupe of the faithful we 
 are learning to add a new spirit, one 
 reflective of this land ; upon that founda- 
 tion, we must continue to build a new 
 art revelant of the soul of America. 
 
 Again the Diaghileff forces traveled 
 across the country, and although suc- 
 cess attended their trip constantly, the 
 tremendous costs of a trans-continental 
 tour forced them to abandon their 
 American visits. Since their return 
 to Europe they have continued their 
 successes in Paris, Italy and London. 
 
 [76] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 With the two seasons here, however, 
 the flashing successes of the ballet had 
 left their mark upon this country's art. 
 There is no question but that the 
 Diaghileff performances brought to 
 American creation a vitalizing force, 
 one which has given to our art a greater 
 resplendence. The unity of chorog- 
 raphy, music and painting, wedded so 
 ideally in the ballet, impressed itself 
 upon all three branches of our native 
 culture and has infused the works of 
 our artists with a more virile force. 
 Especially can this be noted in the 
 theatrical arts of this country, which 
 have reflected greater luminance since 
 the Ballet's visit. 
 
 Following the departure of the Im- 
 perial artists for Europe, the cause of 
 ballet in America was kindled by new 
 forces. 
 
 It had happened that Adolph Bolm, 
 one of the leaders of the Diaghileff band, 
 through an accident, had been pre- 
 vented from returning to Europe with 
 the rest of his fellow-artists. The 
 declaration of war which followed 
 shortly then kept him here. 
 
 In 191 7, Mr. Bolm organized his 
 Ballet Intime. This, made up of 
 American artists, sought to perpetuate 
 the traditions of the Russian art, and 
 at the same time aimed to utilize 
 American material, not only in its 
 personnel, but in the music and settings. 
 At the same time, the Winter Garden 
 and other theaters of America, realizing 
 the force of the new art, invited Mr. Bolm 
 to stage several chorographic scenes. 
 
 The following season a momentous 
 instance of the effect of the Russian 
 ballet was offered in the invitation 
 given to Bolm to stage the "Coq d'Or" 
 of Rimsky-Korsakoff on the stage of 
 the Metropolitan Opera House. The 
 success of the ballet was instanta- 
 neous — one of the really captivating 
 
 successes of the Metropolitan reper- 
 toire. Bolm had taken his dancers 
 from the Metropolitan and among 
 them were many American dancers. 
 Into them he had almost uncannily 
 infused the spirit of the work and the 
 chorography of Fokine was revivified 
 resplendent ly. 
 
 Together with "Coq d'Or," the fol- 
 lowing season Mr. Bolm was asked to 
 stage "Petrouchka," again meeting with 
 similar success. 
 
 Possibly the finest example of this 
 close-knitting of the American and 
 Russian mediums of expression came 
 the following year, with the perform- 
 ances in Chicago and New York of ' 'The 
 Birthday of the Infanta," by John 
 Alden Carpenter, and presented by the 
 Chicago Opera Company. To the 
 work, certainly the most scintillant 
 yet written by the well-known Ameri- 
 can composer, and with the cooperation 
 of Mr. Jones, who had previously re- 
 vealed his understanding of the Rus- 
 sian spirit, Mr. Bolm set a fantas- 
 tic and inimitable chorography based 
 upon the delightful Wilde story. The 
 performance revealed that a company 
 recruited entirely from Americans, 
 might carry on the traditions of the 
 Diaghileff ballet, and at the sams time 
 advance a step further in chorographic 
 subtleties. The work brought to Mr. 
 Bolm further triumph; it indicated 
 that to him had fallen the mantle of 
 leader of maitres de ballets. 
 
 In his Ballet Intime, Mr. Bolm made 
 an epochal performance from "The 
 White Peacock" of Griff es. In the 
 work of this most-gifted of Americans, 
 now unfortunately gone from us too 
 soon, Mr. Bolm perceived splendid 
 descriptive beauties, and to this, his 
 ballet of the "White Peacock" gave 
 evidence. 
 
 New York City. 
 
 [77] 
 
NATIONALISM IN RUSSIAN MUSIC 
 
 By Dr. Alexis Kali, 
 
 WITHIN the last few months here 
 in America, I have read scores 
 of articles treating the same 
 subject of the possibilities and necessity 
 of creating a national musical art in 
 America. Is a great country entitled 
 and expected to have her national 
 music that would be representative of 
 her national ideas and ideals and not 
 only a sum of separate individual 
 talents each one reflecting a single 
 individuality? Is a young country 
 able to create such a national art 
 without decades and centuries spent in 
 preparatory work of self- concentration 
 and gradual assertion of national pe- 
 culiarities and ideas, like we see it, for 
 instance, in Italy, Germany and France ? 
 How does nationalism express itself 
 in music? What are its sources and 
 ways of expression? Instead of answer- 
 ing these questions in the usual way of 
 abstract and speculative reasoning I 
 will try to contribute to the solution of 
 this moot point in a practical, con- 
 crete, purely historical way. I shall 
 speak of the nationalism of music of 
 my country — poor, devasted, godfor- 
 saken Russia. At the present time she 
 is downtrodden, stricken by famine and 
 epidemics, torn asunder by political 
 dissensions and fanatical doctrinism, 
 but in her past, in her short past, 
 being herself like America a young 
 country, she has created a national 
 art of such beauty and so intensely 
 typical of her national soul that it 
 cannot be found perhaps in any other 
 country of the world. 
 
 As a matter of fact national Russian 
 music as a cultured product of con- 
 scious art (and not unconsciously in 
 the folk song) did not practically exist 
 
 until Glinka's first national opera (1836). 
 Since then the national elements in 
 Russian music gradually first con- 
 dense, then crystallize themselves and 
 after a short period of some two scores 
 of years in the eighties and nineties, 
 we feel, they have expressed themselves 
 in all species of musical creative art in 
 the greatest imaginable purity, inten- 
 sity and beauty. The climax is reached, 
 and since then we can watch in Russian 
 music the decline in interest for national 
 tendencies. The Russian national soul 
 has found its adequate expression in 
 music, everything here was said and 
 emphatically repeated ; and new ideas 
 of broader expansion have substituted 
 themselves and with them new goals 
 and new tendencies. And so, within 
 the short limits of much less than a 
 century in a country where the art of 
 music did not practically exist — a 
 national school of music has been 
 founded, had time to create works of 
 undying beauty and worldwide im- 
 portance, to reach its climax and to 
 die gradually in giving place to other 
 broader and more modern tendencies 
 and aims. All that in less than a cen- 
 tury. Is this not an instructive and 
 encouraging example for a young coun- 
 try like America ! 
 
 Everything that is national in the 
 wide meaning of this world, everything 
 that reflects the pulsation of a great, 
 collective heart, that of the nation, 
 may be a source of national art. 
 National history, national legends, 
 epics, folk songs, folk lore, religion may 
 give the right spark to set into sacred 
 fire the creative imagination of an 
 artist, who wants to reflect in his art 
 instead of his own insignificant indi- 
 
 1781 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 viduality , this great [one of a collective 
 soul — a nation. 
 
 For the composer this spark is given 
 primarily by the folk song. I empha- 
 size : folk song, not popular song. Popu- 
 lar song is mostly a product of civili- 
 zation (very often a wrong one), it is 
 mostly "low-brow." Folk song is a 
 sacred thing. It is plain, naive, un- 
 sophisticated, but it reflects a great 
 collective heart of the people. If it is, 
 for instance, a cradle song — any mother 
 of the great nation may sing it as her 
 own. If it is a love song, any loving 
 heart may be moved by it. But real 
 folk songs are seldom popular. In 
 Russia we know wonderful folk songs, 
 known and sung only in one little out- 
 of-the-way hamlet and totally un- 
 known in the neighborhood. Some of 
 those songs were discovered by a lucky 
 chance by some collectioneer of folk 
 songs and so made known to some 
 great Russian composer, who used 
 them in his composition. 
 
 How many of such rare, unknown 
 gems have been gathered, for instance, 
 by Rimsky-Korsakov in his folk song 
 collections and used later on in his 
 operas ! Often such a real folk song 
 is brought by a peasant from a remote 
 village of Russia recruited for the 
 military service, and made known to 
 his fellow-soldiers of the regiment. 
 Sung by them it is deprived of its 
 natural flavour, adapted to their quasi- 
 civilized notions of music and becomes 
 a degenerated popular soldier song. 
 Other songs are in the same way 
 brought into the factories and become 
 popular workmen's songs; others too — 
 bad popular dancing tunes. The real 
 folk-song must be collected and written 
 down before it comes into contact with 
 civilization and loses its purity and 
 natural flavour. In America, for in- 
 stance, with the rapid growth of con- 
 
 ventional civilization the situation is 
 more dangerous than anywhere else. 
 Civilization is crawling steadily into 
 most remote Indian reservations and 
 the great movement of collecting this 
 invaluable source of inspiration for 
 national music — I mean the Indian 
 songs, — this move so valiantly started 
 by Arthur Farwell (the "Wa-Wan" 
 movement), Charles Wakefield Cad- 
 man and others may be very soon 
 frustrated by the intrusion of civiliza- 
 tion or quasi-civilization. 
 
 This opinion, I confess, may be sub- 
 ject to heated argument, but I firmly 
 believe that the progress of civilization 
 among the people being of the greatest 
 value for the furthering of all kinds of 
 manual arts and even for the develop- 
 ment of musical taste, has the most 
 harmful and even killing effect on the 
 folk song. The latter being a great and 
 primordial power, like an element, is 
 primary to any culture and civiliza- 
 tion. Being influenced by it, it be- 
 comes weakened and decoloured; if, 
 on the contrary, the folk song influences 
 art, as the greatest product of culture, 
 it becomes for it a source of great in- 
 spiration, gives to it a tremendous 
 invigorating power and creates a great 
 and truly national art. 
 
 Considering the tremendous area 
 occupied by Russia, the Russian folk 
 songs in their essential features present 
 astonishingly few varieties. We can 
 certainly discern between the songs of 
 the north and those of the south, 
 where (especially in Ukraina) we find 
 more lively and cheerful melodies, but 
 generally in the whole area, occupied 
 by the endless plains of European 
 Russia and of Siberia, Russian songs 
 are sad, dreamy, rather monotonous. 
 Sometimes, in the middle there are 
 sudden outbursts of buoyant gaiety, 
 but of a short duration and of a rather 
 
 [791 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 unhealthy nature, and the sad melody 
 of the beginning resumed seems still 
 more melancholy and hopeless. It is 
 a natural expression of Slavonic dreamy 
 and melancholy national character. It 
 could not be otherwise, in a country 
 where summer is short and winter long 
 and rough, where sunshine is a rare 
 guest and rain and snow are pouring 
 almost incessantly, where people have 
 been always persecuted and taught hu- 
 mility first by the Tartars, then by the 
 Moscow Czars, later by St. Petersburg 
 Emperors, by the church, and by the 
 jails or penal prisons of Siberia. 
 
 Humility and sadness ! That is what 
 Russian people have been taught for 
 centuries and what they have ex- 
 pressed in their folk songs, with all 
 their privations, sorrows, and pains. 
 
 So there is no wonder that more than 
 seventy-five per cent of Russian folk 
 songs are in minor. To be more pre- 
 cise, it is not a real modern minor, but 
 usually some ancient Greek Church 
 key, mostly Hypodorian or Locrian. 
 That accounts for the strange termi- 
 nation of real Russian folk songs, in a 
 fourth below the note that would be 
 the tonic, if the key would be reckoned 
 as a modern minor. In the well-known 
 song of the Volga Boatman, for instance, 
 which is supposedly written in G 
 minor, every phrase is terminated in D. 
 
 In metrical respect, remarkable is 
 the freedom with which the accents in 
 words and in verses can be moved. The 
 same word can be used (as it was in 
 antique metric), with different accents. 
 The word "Louchina," for instance, 
 can be used as "Louchina," "Lou- 
 china," and "Louchina." And the 
 singers of the people understand it with 
 perfect skill, to bring the logical accent 
 in accord with the metrical accent. 
 
 From a rhythmical point of view, it 
 is to be noted that Russian folk songs 
 
 present very often a strange, unsym- 
 metrical structure: a combination of 
 even and uneven rhythms (5/4, 7/8, 
 9/8 and even 11/8). 
 
 In harmonic respect, except a few 
 very ancient songs, that are sung in 
 unison, the greater part of songs of 
 central and northern Russia, are sung 
 in a peculiar free and polyphonic man- 
 ner, the leader ("zapievala") singing 
 the main melody, the chorus "or com- 
 pany" (in Russian, "artiel") joining in, 
 and each group of singers developing 
 the same melody, according to their 
 individual taste. In Russia, while list- 
 ening to such performances of folk 
 songs, I always wondered how it was 
 possible that common peasants, plain, 
 uneducated people, could develop such 
 a fine, polyphonic taste that is usually 
 a symptom of a great musical refine- 
 ment and culture. 
 
 A Russian folk song performed in 
 that way, sounds like a real "fugato," 
 and we feel that it is enough for an 
 educated composer just to slightly re- 
 touch it, and it will turn into a regular 
 fugue. So is, for instance, the folk 
 song "V buriu, vo grosu" ("The Storm 
 Burst Out") in the first act of Glinka's 
 "Life of the Czar" : being quite Russian 
 in character, it sounds like a regular 
 fugue by Bach. 
 
 Not until Glinka did the Russian 
 folk song enter the realm of art-music. 
 
 In Russia, at the close of the eight- 
 eenth and in the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century, the prevailing in- 
 terest in music was chiefly confined to 
 foreign importations. Italian opera 
 and Italian composers reigned supreme 
 on the operatic stage, and the first 
 Russian composers who wrote music on 
 Russian libretti, while using some folk 
 songs, strived to adapt them to the 
 foreign forms, to make regular Italian 
 arias or "ensembles" out of them and 
 
 [SO] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 so totally disfigured them and deprived 
 them of their national flavor. So was 
 Volkoff, whose opera, "Taniousha," 
 is credited with being the earliest work 
 having in any sense a Russian charac- 
 ter; Fomin, for one of whose works 
 Catherine the Great, herself, supplied 
 the libretto, or Verstovsky, the com- 
 poser of an opera which attained con- 
 siderable popularity, "The Tomb of 
 Ascold." 
 
 The same conditions prevailed in the 
 realm of songs. It was the epoch of 
 sentimental or "lacrymous" songs (as 
 they used to be called in Russia), and 
 an amazing quantity of such songs 
 were created in the first part of the 
 nineteenth century by composers, who, 
 at that time, were very popular: like 
 Titov, Aliabyev, Gurilev, Varlamov 
 and others. Some of these songs like, 
 for instance, Aliabyev's "Nightingale," 
 or Varlamov's "Red Sarafan," attained 
 a world-wide popularity and even up 
 to now are wrongly considered abroad 
 as real Russian songs. In reality they 
 contain only a Russian theme, forcibly 
 pressed into the foreign forms of a Ger- 
 man song or a French "Romance." 
 
 It was the genius of Michael Ivano- 
 vich Glinka (1803-185 7), who first 
 understood how impossible and humili- 
 ating for the national pride of Russia 
 were these conditions and who first 
 strived, and succeeded, to make the 
 treasury of national song the fount of 
 national music. 
 
 Born and educated at the village of 
 Novospasskoi, in the very heart of 
 Russia, in the government of Smolensk, 
 he, from his childhood, had embraced 
 opportunities to hear plenty of folk 
 songs, and this timely assimilation of 
 the folk song style was the cause of the 
 germination of his adult passion for the 
 national idea. 
 
 At the age of twenty-seven, feeling 
 
 how insufficient was the musical edu- 
 cation of an amateur that he received 
 in St. Petersburg, he went to Italy to 
 study music and during the three years 
 spent there in continuous learning and 
 self -concentration, he was incessantly 
 haunted by the idea of solving the 
 problem of nationalism in Russian 
 music and creating an opera that would 
 be Russian, not only by virtue of its 
 Russian subject but its musical sub- 
 stance. 
 
 Just in Italy, surrounded by a foreign 
 atmosphere and suffering from a great 
 longing for his country, he understood 
 how thoroughly Russian was his heart 
 and it was there that the idea of a 
 Russian national school of music was 
 generated. It was like in Gogol's 
 case, who also in Italy conceived the 
 idea of the most "Russian" novel ever 
 written: "The Dead Souls." 
 
 Having come back to St. Petersburg, 
 he enthusiastically took to the subject 
 proposed to him by the great Russian 
 poet, Joukovsky, treating the heroic 
 and patriotic deed of a Russian peasant, 
 Ivan Susanin, a subject presenting 
 great potentialities as to national color, 
 both dramatic and musical. The opera 
 was written in comparatively a very 
 short time and was accepted by the 
 management of the Imperial Opera, 
 and so, in 1836, the first Russian 
 national opera, "The Life of the Czar," 
 saw the footlights of the stage. 
 
 It cannot certainly be expected that 
 Glinka could at once get rid of the 
 consequences of his sojourn in Italy: 
 there are in the ' 'Life of the Czar' ' a great 
 many Italian arias (both in melody 
 and in style) ; there are also Russian 
 themes that are treated in Italian 
 style, but there are enough of real 
 Russian folk songs arranged with a 
 wonderful skill in a manner that all 
 peculiarities of Russian folk songs are 
 
 [81] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 thoroughly preserved in melodic, rhyth- 
 mical and harmonic respect. 
 
 Glinka's second opera, "Russian and 
 Ludmilla" (1842), presents a much 
 greater achievement from the point of 
 view of purity of national style. Being 
 rather a failure from a dramatic point 
 of view, owing to its impossibly fan- 
 tastic libretto, this "concert opera," as 
 it is often dubbed in Russia, presents 
 such a great amount of wonderful 
 music, truly Russian in its conception 
 and spirit that through the whole 
 further course of the history of Russian 
 music, even up to now (in Stravinsky's 
 ballets) it has not ceased to be a source 
 of inspiration and learning for the 
 Russian composers. But for its epoch 
 it was too great a revelation; but very 
 few could understand its tremendous 
 value, and the opera was received only 
 half-heartedly. Hurt by this lack of 
 appreciation, Glinka left Russia for 
 Paris and Spain, where he spent several 
 years. 
 
 In Glinka's operas, we find beauti- 
 ful musical characteristics of several 
 greater and smaller nations, spread 
 over the waste area that was occupied 
 by the former Russian empire. There 
 are Caucasian dances and a ballad of 
 a Finn in "Russian and Ludmilla" 
 and there is a whole Polish act in the 
 "Life of the Czar." 
 
 In the last years of his life Glinka 
 was going to devote himself to Russian 
 church music. Here also he wished to 
 create new ways of expression, but a 
 premature death (1857) frustrated his 
 plans. 
 
 The problem of nationalism in Rus- 
 sian music was solved by Glinka for 
 almost all species of musical art. His 
 successors, first Dargomijsky, then "the 
 Invincible Band" of the "great five:" 
 Balakireb, Borodin, Moussorgsky, Cui 
 and Rimsky-Korsakov, could only con- 
 
 tinue Glinka's life-work adding new 
 important features to the ways of musi- 
 cal expression of nationalism that were 
 already found by Glinka. His ideas 
 continued to be propagated with ever 
 increasing refinement and ever broader 
 expansion, and it was in Rimsky- 
 Korsakov's last operas (especially in 
 his "legend of the invisible City of 
 Kitej") that they reached the climax 
 of refined mastership and almost mysti- 
 cal beauty. 
 
 The ways of nationalism began to 
 grow too narrow for Russian composers. 
 Even Rimsky-Korsakov, had he lived 
 longer, would probably turn from a 
 nationalistic idiom to a broader, all- 
 human, musical language. I remember 
 my last talk with him a short time be- 
 fore his death, when he was talking of 
 his plans of a new fantastic opera, an 
 "opera-symphony" as he called it, 
 that would be no more "Russian," 
 but would treat as subject the life of 
 prehistoric humanity. 
 
 The younger generation of Russian 
 composers did not care to continue to 
 walk in the path of nationalism: 
 Glazounov growing more and more cos- 
 mopolitan, Rachmaninoff — a typical 
 individualist, Scriabin having strived 
 to express in music abstract theosophi- 
 cal and mystical tendencies and only 
 Stravinsky incidentally expressing his 
 ideas in Russian musical idiom. 
 
 Nationalism in Russian music has 
 given way to the expression of broader, 
 cosmopolitan, all -hum an and even cos- 
 mic ideas, but in its time it was of 
 tremendous value for the generation 
 of a Russian national school of music 
 that we, Russians, at present time, 
 "in days of doubt, in days of dreary 
 musings on our country's fate" con- 
 sider as one of our most precious and 
 cherished national treasures. 
 
 Los A ngeles, California. 
 
 [82] 
 
RUSSIAN LITERATURE— GENERAL 
 CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 By Alexander Kaun 
 
 (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California) 
 
 IN LITERATURE the national mind 
 of Russia has expressed itself more 
 successfully, more intensely, more 
 quint^ ssentially, than in any other art. 
 The notable achievements of Russian 
 music, painting, plastic arts, are but 
 partial when compared with thejini- 
 versal triumph of Russian letters. The 
 suppressed, pent-up national energy 
 has sought an outlet chiefly in litera- 
 ture, which voiced the sentiments, 
 aspirations, sufferings, hopes of the 
 silent millions. Russian - literature 
 gives expression to the vastness of the 
 country which stretches from the Pacific 
 to the Baltic and from the Arctic to the 
 borders of China and Persia. It gives 
 expression to the complexity of a nation 
 [consisting ^ jjj y f y-fu je races with more 
 than one hunSredTtongues,, and yet 
 possessing the harmony of a many- 
 voiced organ in its basic tones anc 
 motives. It is the voice of Russi 
 
 It is~~"dtnTcuirT6 discuss this subject 
 without employing superlatives, for 
 Russian literature contains the ele- 
 ments of the heroic and of the wonder- 
 ful. What other epithet but "wonder- 
 ful" may be applied to a literature 
 which produces within one generation 
 such a constellation of writers as Push- 
 kin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, De- 
 stoyevsky, Tolstoy, and lesser lights? 
 Of its heroic element we shall speak 
 later; the feeling of wonder at Russian 
 literature is enhanced, when we con- 
 sider that this shower of great artists 
 poured with an overwhelming sudden- 
 ness upon an audience practically un- 
 prepared. Before 1820 Russia could 
 scarcely boast of a single literary work 
 
 deserving to be called national or 
 original. 
 
 This statement needs qualifying, to 
 avoid the impression of modern Russian 
 literature emerging out of a vacuum. 
 To be sure, one must remember the/ 
 inexhaustible treasury of folk-lore songs 
 and fairy-tales, particularly the By liny, 
 the heroic sagas chanted by illiterate 
 bards from generation to generation, in 
 certain parts of Russia to this day. 
 But when it comes to written literature, 
 one finds only a single secular master- 
 piece preserved towards the advent of 
 Pushkin, "The Lay of Prince Igor." 1 
 This epic was composed probably by a 
 contemporary of the battle between the 
 Russian prince and the savage Polo- 
 vtsy, in 1185. By its vividness, force- 
 fulness, serene emotionalism, the epic 
 ranks with the " Song of Nibelung" and 
 with the ' ' Song of Roland . ' ' Curiously 
 enough, the poem contains not a single 
 reference to the Church or to Christian 
 precepts, but it abounds in Pagan 
 similes, names of idols, and anthro- 
 pomorphic descriptions of nature. In 
 the introduction the singer mentions 
 with reverence the great bard, Bayan, 
 who evidently presented a whole cate- 
 gory of composers. Yet nothing has 
 been preserved of such works either 
 antedating or succeeding the "Lay of 
 Igor." Byzantine Christianity, to 
 which Russia was converted by Prince 
 Vladimir in 988, consistently perse- 
 cuted every manifestation of "heathen- 
 ism," whether it were in the form of 
 ceremony, dance, or song, or instru- 
 
 1 Put to music by Borodin. Nicholas Roerich painted the de- 
 signs for this opera. This is characteristic of the cooperative spirit 
 noticeable in Russia among the arts. 
 
 [83] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 mental music. Until the time of Peter 
 the Great the written word was eccle- 
 siastic in form and substance. Of this 
 literature the "Chronicle of Nestor," 
 a history of Russia brought down to the 
 eleventh century, stands out unparal- 
 leled in beauty of style, epic calm of 
 the narrative, and lofty sentiment, 
 though the work is obviously theo- 
 logical by authorship and in spirit. 
 
 From the second half of the seven- 
 teenth century until the early part of 
 the nineteenth, Russian literature (and 
 not only literature) went through a 
 gradual process of adaptation to West- 
 ern ways. Already under Tsar Alexis^ 
 the father of Peter, there began to 
 appear translations and compilations of 
 foreign romances. The breaking up of 
 patriarchal, ecclesiastic Russia, became 
 evident at this time also from the fact 
 that a theatre was established for the 
 entertainment of the Orthodox Tsar! 
 The westernizing process was violently 
 accelerated by Peter the Great, who was 
 impatient with slow evolution, and 
 "spurred Russia on her haunches," 
 in the words of Pushkin. The revo- 
 lutionary activity of this crowned 
 Maximalist laid its stamp on every 
 phase of Russia's life, on customs and 
 costumes, institutions and classes, atti- 
 tudes and beliefs. As most of his 
 reforms bore the label of "made to 
 order, ' ' so also the arts under him and 
 his successors lacked spontaneity and 
 naturalness. Throughout the eight- 
 eenth century Russian literature wore 
 the clumsy garb of pseudo-Classicism, 
 endeavoring to practice the tenets of 
 Boileau, and to emulate Corneille, 
 Moliere, and Racine. Though there 
 were many talents among these writers, 
 as for example Lomonosov, Sumarokov, 
 Derzhavin, they were blighted in the 
 artificial atmosphere of a school whose 
 pompous grandiloquence was particu- 
 
 larly out of place and tune amidst a 
 society that was just learning how to 
 walk, so to speak. Another reason for 
 the ineffectually of the literary efforts 
 during this time lies in the fact that they 
 were stamped with servility to the 
 reigning monarch and the court, with a 
 desire to please and flatter the powers 
 that be. 
 
 Pseudp-XIUassicism was superseded at 
 the close of the eighteenth century by a 
 short reign of Sent iment a lism, under 
 the leadership of Karamzin (1766- 
 1826). His lacrimose effusions were as 
 alien to the native~5oH~"as had been the 
 Gallicized Hellenism of his predecessors, 
 but still Karamzin departed from the 
 artificial Olympus and descended a step, 
 towards reality, via human tears and 
 emotions. Moreover, Karamzin had the 
 temerity to abandon the stilted Church- 
 Slavic style, and began to employ the 
 living Russian prose. What he did for 
 prose, Zhukovsky (1783-185 2) en- 
 deavored to do for poetry. He greatly 
 simplified the language and the struc- 
 ture of the Russian verse, but he used 
 this medium for themes un-Russian. 
 Zhukovsky performed an important 
 service for his country, by transmitting 
 western Ro man ticism, by translating 
 and adapting Schiller, Uhland, Herder, 
 Byron, Thomas Moore, and others. 
 
 Thus we see that before the publi- 
 cation of Pushkin's "Russian and 
 Ludmilla" 1 in 1820, there had appeared 
 in Russia no original, national written 
 literature since the "Lay of Prince 
 Igor," the twelfth century masterpiece. 
 Alexander Pushkin (1799-183 7) leaped 
 out of the slumbering mind of the 
 nation like Athena from the head of 
 Zeus : in full armor. While at school he 
 was graciously noticed by old Derz- 
 havin, and was patronized by Karamzin 
 and Zhukovsky, but the youth safely 
 
 1 Put to opera music by Glinka. 
 
 [84] 
 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 escaped the influences of these cor- 
 yphaei of the three literary movements 
 that dominated Russia for a century. 
 True, he paid his tribute in youthful 
 poems to all these schools, while the 
 spell of Romanticism lingered quite a 
 long time on his lyre, tinging his verse 
 with a Byronic hue. But the signifi- 
 cance of Pushkin lies in his being the 
 first Russian national poet of modern 
 times. National in the same sense as 
 Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, 
 Hugo, were national. "To be a Rus- 
 sian, in the true sense of this word, 
 means to be universal," was the dictum 
 of the nationalist Dostoyevsky. Per- 
 haps this criterion may be applied to all 
 national art: Whatever is truly and 
 genuinely expressive of its own soil and 
 its inhabitants, must needs bear an 
 all- human appeal. Pushkin was a na- 
 tional poet not only because he made 
 use of the fairy-tales told him by his old 
 peasant nurse for a series of delightful 
 folk poems; not only because he made 
 the Russian landscape and his con- 
 temporary society live in word-pic- 
 tures, notably in his novel in verse, 
 "Eugene Onyegin"; 1 not only because 
 he immortalized some historical per- 
 sonages of Russia in his powerful drama, 
 "Boris Godunov," and in his prose 
 tale, the "Captain's Daughter"; not 
 only because he perfected Russian prose 
 and verse to such a degree that his pre- 
 decessors appear to stutter in com- 
 parison with him, while he has remained 
 an ideal model for his numerous emu- 
 lators to this day. 'Pushkin was a 
 national poet because, in addition to 
 his accomplishments just enumerated, 
 he expressed the universality of the 
 Russian mind, the catholicity of its 
 
 1 Opera music by Tchaykovsky. Practically all of Pushkin's 
 long poems were put to music. Among the composers who made 
 considerable use of Pushkin we may mention, beside Glinka and 
 Tchaykovsky, also Rubinstein, Dargomyzhsky, Musorgsky. 
 Borodin, Napravnik, Rimsky-Korsakov. This list is far from 
 exhaustive. 
 
 interests and strivings. This char*^ . 
 acteristic trait of Pushkin is common ' 
 to all great Russian artists, which is to 
 say; — to all genuinely national Russian 
 artists. 
 
 For the Russian mind is intrinsically 
 universal. Geographically and his- 
 torically the Great Plain has resembled 
 an open palm outstretched to the uni- 
 verse for contributions, a broad recep- 
 tacle of ideas and creeds from the Norse 
 and the Finns, from Western Europe, 
 from Byzantium, from Asia. Russia 
 has been overrun by many races, in- 
 vaded by various armies, pervaded by 
 multifarious civilizations, systems of 
 thought, schools of art, religious move- 
 ments. But this arch-borrower among 
 nations has not been a mere imitator: 
 the Russian mind has absorbed and 
 assimilated the world- values, and has 
 recreated and reproduced them in an 
 intensified , uni versalize^^y nthesized 
 form. Witness the RusJI ballet, this 
 synthesis of Egyptian, ^reek,. Persian, 
 Caucasian, Italian, French, Slavonic 
 dances. Or take another illustration — 
 Slavophilism. Derived from the teach- 
 ings of Schelling and Hegel, originally 
 based on the doctrine of "master 
 nations," this borrowed idea has in the 
 main developed not along the lines of 
 its sister-idea, blatant Pangermamsm, 
 but in the direction of universal brother- 
 hood, illuminated by such exponents as 
 Aksakov, Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Solo- 
 vyov. Again, Russian Socialism, if we 
 consider the majority of its adherents, 
 refuses to remain within the Procrus- 
 tean frame of petrified Marxism. To 
 the careful observer it is still in the 
 process of synthesizing the teachings of 
 the Nazarene, of Nietzsche, and of the 
 mouzhik's soil-philosophy. 
 
 We have given so much space to 
 Pushkin in this short paper, for the 
 reason that he was the tone-giver and 
 
 [85] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 exemplar for the galaxy of writers who 
 became the glory of Russia, and all of 
 whom were the poet's contemporaries, 
 or at any rate were born during his 
 ^ life-time. In his footsteps followed 
 Lermontov (1814-1841), who flashed 
 through life like a radiant meteor, seek- 
 ing to reconcile the irreconcilable (in 
 his " Demon"), 1 singing of the pathos of 
 youth and freedom (in "Mtsyri"), 2 
 analyzing the contemporary malady of 
 pseudo-Romanticism a la Byron (in 
 a "Hero of Our Time"). Followed 
 Gogol ( 1 809-1 852), who developed to 
 the utmost the realistic method which 
 Pushkin had suggested not only in his 
 prose, but even in his poetic works, and 
 which became the dominating method 
 in Russian literature, as the most 
 suitable for the national temperament 
 and mind. Abhorring sham and affec- 
 tation Russian literature quite naturally 
 adopted realism, profound realism, one 
 which is concerned not with the re- 
 production of the rejjity__visible to 
 our physical eye, out which strives to 
 ' fathom the complex reality of both our 
 inner and external life, in which mental 
 I adventures and dramas, collisions of 
 ' vague thoughts and of ineffable emo- 
 tions, mystic yearnings and subcon- 
 scious experiences, play at least as 
 important a part as tangible actuality. 
 The genius of Gogol was one-eyed, as it 
 were. It could detect and unearth only 
 the mean and commonplace in life, 
 which it exposed with the descriptive 
 power of Dante, and with the exhaus- 
 tive thoroughness of the Dutch masters. 
 Hence the characters of "Dead Souls" 
 and the "Inspector General" are as 
 convincing and as all-human as I ago or 
 Sancho Panza or Tartuffe. 
 
 Turgenev (1818-1883), too, prided 
 
 1 Put to opera music by Rubinstein. 
 
 2 Put into a "symphonic poem" by Catoire. and also by Senilov. 
 As in Pushkin's case, numerous poems of Lermontov were used by 
 Russian composers, among them by Rachmaninov, Medtner, 
 Cherepnin. 
 
 himself on being a disciple of Pushkin, 
 and indeed, no Russian has approached 
 Pushkin's musical speech as close as 
 Turgenev, one of whose last "Poems in 
 Prose" was dedicated to "the great, 
 powerful, truthful, and free Russian 
 speech." Turgenev 's numerous works 
 are pervaded with a certain rhythm 
 which lends them all a musical unity, 
 so that one may regard them in en- 
 semble as a grandiose symphony, whose 
 "main theme" is Russia, with "varia- 
 tions," such as peasant-Russia ("Notes 
 of a Huntsman," or "A Sportsman's 
 Sketches"), gentry-Russia ("Rudin," 
 "A Nobleman's Nest," and elsewhere), 
 "superfluous" Russia ("Rudin;" "Diary 
 of a Superfluous Man," "Hamlet of 
 Shchigrov District," and elsewhere), 
 Russia of Westerners and Slavophils 
 ("Smoke"), of Nihilists ("Fathers and 
 Sons"), of youthful Narodniki who 
 attempt in vain to merge with that 
 sphinx — the people ("Virgin Soil"). 
 Five decades of Russian public life, 
 with their important currents of thought 
 and social movements, are presented 
 as if in a musical epic. 
 
 No one eulogized Pushkin more than 
 that " cruel talent," Dostoyevsky (182 1- 
 1 8 8 1 ) . Yet there is a striking difference 
 between the two artists. Pushkin is/ 
 serene, rhythmic, proportional, Hel- 
 lenic. Dostoyevsky is — chaos. His 
 life and work bear the stamp of a con- 
 tinuous physical and mental torment. 
 All his works display perennial con- 
 flict — between freedom and morality 
 ("Crime and Punishment") , man and 
 God ("Possessed"), individual and 
 society ("Memoirs from a Dead 
 House," "Possessed," and elsewhere), 
 good and evil ("Brothers Karamazov," 
 the "Idiot"), individualism and col- 
 lectivism ("Possessed," "Notes from 
 Underground"). Dostoyevsky him- 
 self, and his characters, sorely destitute 
 
 [86] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 of peace and harmony, are torn with 
 inner contradictoriness, are tortured 
 with perverse notions. With the clair- 
 voyant power of an epileptic visionary, 
 he penetrates the most hidden crevices 
 of the human mind, and with a sadistic 
 glee he chuckles over vivisecting the 
 inner Ego, and demonstrating its 
 brutishness and morbidity. At the 
 same time, and with equal convincing- 
 ness, he reveals for us the eternally 
 human, compassionate, and good, in 
 the lowest outcasts of society, in crimi- 
 nals and prostitutes, in drunkards and 
 degenerates. He succeeds in destroy- 
 ing the established lines of demarcation 
 between good and evil, sanity and in- 
 sanity, pity and cruelty, reality and 
 hallucination, atheism and religious 
 fanaticism. The one clear leading 
 motive throughout the labyrinth of 
 Dostoyevsky's world sounds the pre- 
 cept of forgiveness and compassion for 
 those whom we are apt to condemn. 
 Thus in the end the "cruel" artist, 
 after turning us inside out and showing 
 our own slumbering instincts and po- 
 tential evil, forces us to refrain humbly 
 from throwing stones at our fellow- 
 beings. 
 
 To the same group and period be- 
 longed Grigorovich (182 2-1 899), who 
 preceded even Turgenev in his peasant 
 sketches and novels, in which he en- 
 deavored to force upon his countrymen 
 the conviction that the serfs' were 
 "human," hence deserving equal treat- 
 ment with the gentry. Goncharov 
 (181 2-1 891), whose masterpiece, ' 'Oblo- 
 mov," has made Oblomovism a generic 
 epithet for the good-hearted, lacka- 
 daisical, will-less, and pathetically fu- 
 tile Russian noble. Ostrovsky (1823- 
 1886), the first and for a long time- the 
 sole playwright, whose subject-matter 
 consisted largely of the merchant class, 
 with their quaint old-Russian ways and 
 
 customs, wilfulness and bovine ob- 
 stinacy. Nekrasov (1821-1877), the 
 poet of "national wrath," whose force- 
 ful verse was dedicated largely to the 
 peasantry, their quotidian sorrows and 
 joys, their perpetual tragedy as a class 
 of serfs. It was Nekrasov who, as 
 editor of a leading monthly, sheltered 
 and encouraged the young military 
 officer modestly signing his first sketches 
 with the initials "L. T." 
 
 Leo Tolstoy (182 8- 191 o) later in life 
 jested that instead of becoming a 
 general in the army, his original am- 
 bition, he achieved the rank of a general 
 in literature. The youngest of that 
 wonderful pleiade which actually is 
 Russian literature, Tolstoy has not only 
 outlived his confreres, but has outshone 
 them in world fame and popularity. 
 He, too, owed allegiance to Pushkin; 
 "Anna Karenin" originated in his 
 mind under the influence of one of 
 Pushkin's prose tales. As an artist 
 Tolstoy stood much closer to Pushkin 
 than Dostoyevsky. In his " Cossacks," 
 "War and Peace," "Anna Karenin," 
 and other works, he resembles the great 
 poet in the serene epic calm with which 
 he unfolds the liieand events of his 
 individuals and masses. - Tolstoy the 
 artist has given us the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey of nineteenth century Russia, 
 gigantic panoramas of human actions 
 and passions, all of them saturated with 
 a luminous joy of life, almost Pagan in 
 its intensity. But Tolstoy the moralist 
 asserted that the only "hero" of inter- 
 est to him was "truth," and that which 
 appeared to him as truth urged him to 
 battle continually the Pagan in him. 
 Tolstoy the Christian renounced his 
 works of art, and gave himself unre : 
 servedly to the practice of his preach- 
 ing — simplification, self-perfection, non- 
 resistance to evil, life according to the 
 Gospel. One may doubt whether he 
 
 [87] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 succeeded in achieving perfection and 
 harmony (his tragic flight from home on 
 the eve of his death showed how poig- 
 nantly conscious he was of contradic- 
 tions and discrepancies in his own life), 
 but to Russia and to the world the 
 personality and career of the sage from 
 Yasnaya Poly ana will ever stand out 
 as a great phenomenon in the history 
 of human quests after truth. Though 
 dead in body, Tolstoy continues to be 
 considered by his countrymen as "the 
 conscience of Russia." 
 
 With the "pleiade" terminates the 
 period of the wonderful and the heroic 
 in Russian literature, giving place to 
 more "normal" achievements. The 
 men we have been discussing were not 
 only endowed with an enormous crea- 
 tive power and with the freshness and 
 vigor of pioneers on a virgin soil; they 
 also possessed the nobility of spirit 
 common to the heroic Intelligentsia. 1 
 For one must remember that the 
 history of modern Russian literature 
 presents a continuous martyrology. 
 Russian literature begins to be worthy 
 of this name as soon as it breaks its 
 servility to the Court, and strikes the 
 note of opposition to the mighty of the 
 earth, a note destined to be its dis-. 
 tinguishing feature to this day. In 
 1790 Radishchev published his ' 'Jour- 
 ney from St. Petersburg to Moscow," 
 in which he described the terrible con- 
 ditions of serfdom, and appealed to 
 his fellow-noblemen "to bethink them- 
 selves." Catherine II, erstwhile friend 
 of Voltaire and Diderot, had Radish- 
 chev sentenced to death for this crime, 
 which sentence she commuted to life 
 exile to Siberia. Though from the 
 literary point of view Radishchev's 
 
 iThe term "Intelligentsia" has been considerably discussed in 
 Russia and greatly abused abroad. In the way of an inclusive 
 though not too concise definition, we may suggest that by Intelli- 
 gentsia we understand those men and women who have struggled 
 and sacrificed themselves for the welfare of the people, regardless 
 of their personal, social and economic interests, and rather to the 
 detriment of these. 
 
 work was of the pre-Pushkin variety, 
 written in a stilted style and after a 
 foreign model (Sterne's "Sentimental 
 Journey"), it struck the keynote of 
 Russian literature, in its sentiment, 
 authorship, and fate. 
 
 The sentiment of abolitionism, from 
 the abolition of serfdom to the abolition 
 of all fetters on the human person- 
 ality — political, social, economic, or 
 ethical, has been the leit motif of the 
 Russian writers, of the "pleiade" as 
 much as of their successors. It rang 
 in the passionate pleas for the emanci- 
 pation of the serfs, of Herzen, Turge- 
 nev, and other "men of the Forties"; 
 in Dostoyevsky's harangues against the 
 tyranny of all bonds; in Tolstoy's 
 criticism of the state of the church, 
 and of other institutions; in the naive 
 vociferations of the Nihilists, during 
 the eighteen-sixties ; in the Narodnik 
 literature which championed and ideal- 
 ized the peasant through the latter 
 third of the past century; in the con- 
 science-waking writings of Korolenko 
 (born in 1853) ; in the stories and plays 
 of Chekhov (1 860-1 904), which form 
 on the whole a powerful plea for the 
 abolition of pettiness and smugness^ 
 'from our life; in the works of Gorky- 
 (born in 1869), who chants hymns to 
 Man (chelovyek), free from conventions, 
 and blinders ; in the harrowing analyses 
 of Andreyev (1 871-19 19), which leave 
 not one of our beliefs and accepted 
 values unexamined, and spur our con- 
 science and consciousness to abolish all 
 sugar-coated half-truths, to doubt and 
 question perpetually; even in the sen- 
 sual novels of Artsibashev (born in - 
 1878) one feels the passionate craving 
 for the abolition of binding principles, 
 of those high ideals which drove Rus- 
 sian youth to sacrifice their life and 
 freedom. The sentiment of abolition- 
 ism pervading Russian literature has 
 
 [88] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 made it largely negative, critical, salu- 
 tarily destructive, since abolition is the 
 preparatory, purgative stage before the 
 dawn of the constructive era, before 
 the pursuance of the positive ideal — 
 the perfect, free individual. 
 
 The authorship of the "Journey 
 from St. Petersburg to Moscow" has 
 also been characteristic of Russian 
 literature. Radishchev was a noble, 
 as were nearly all the writers and 
 leaders of the Intelligentsia and of the 
 revolutionary movements till the latter 
 part of the nineteenth century. The 
 men and women who belonged by birth 
 to the privileged class, who possessed 
 estates and serfs and high positions, 
 and who fought for the abolitionof these 
 privileges, who sacrificed their comfort 
 and freedom and often their life in an 
 effort to undermine their well-being as 
 a class, have permeated Russian litera- 
 ture and public activity with the spirit 
 of unreserved altruism. This idealism 
 naturally implied its concomitant, the 
 fate of Radishchev, prison, exile, at 
 times death, hence the road of Russian 
 literature and of the Intelligentsia in 
 general has been strewn with victims. 
 
 It is evident that a literature which, 
 in the absence of other outlets, serves 
 as the focus of public thought and 
 opinion, and which, furthermore, is 
 created by fervent altruists, cannot 
 serve art for the sake of art. Until the 
 end of the nineteenth century thinking 
 and creative Russians, with very few 
 exceptions, felt duty bound to devote 
 all their faculties and accomplishments 
 to the service of the people. Litera- 
 ture, in particular, bore the stamp of the 
 "repentant noble," the landowner of a 
 sensitive conscience, who felt obliged to 
 atone for the sins of his fathers, and' to 
 repay his debt to the narod, the people. 
 Yet though Russian literature was 
 
 pervaded with a "purpose," with a 
 sermon, it never degenerated into di- 
 dacticism. The writers could not, even 
 if they wished, carry on open propa- 
 ganda anent the burning issues of the 
 day: The threatening red pencil of the 
 bigoted censor dictated reserve and 
 caution, Aesopian language and subtle 
 symbolism, the replacement of the 
 specific and precise by the general and 
 infinite, of the local and transitory by 
 the universal and everlasting. But the 
 universality and permanent value of 
 these writers is due, of course, not so 
 much to the negative effect of the cen- 
 sor, as to their inherent aesthetic sense, 
 to the intrinsically Russian quality of 
 their genius. 
 
 "< Modern Russian literature, in a word, 
 is distinguished by the same character- 
 istics which we have indicated before, 
 and which we may recapitulate as: 
 Focus of the national genius; " Art for 
 l ife's sakej j. y et not didac ticism ; aboli- 
 tionism — ^the emancipation ofthlTin- 
 dividual from all fetters; reserve, in- 
 tensity, universalism, due_ jn pari: to 
 censorship conditi ons, but chiefly to th e 
 inherent qualities ot the Russian mind. 
 Iiris difficult Lo ~garrge~the— state~l)f 
 Russian letters to-day, while the 
 country is going through severe trials 
 and subversive upheavals: Inter arma 
 silent musae. Yet from the scanty in- 
 formation which filters through from 
 Russia one may conclude that even at 
 present, amidst conditions of material 
 misery and mental humiliation, the 
 printed page and the stage continue to 
 pledge the immortal power of the 
 national mind. Russian literature has 
 been, and will continue to be, let us 
 hope, something more than an art : an 
 all-human religion, an evangel, a pillar 
 of fire in the gloomy reality. 
 
 Berkeley, California. 
 
 to 
 
 [89] 
 
NOTES FROM THE NEW YORK GALLERIES 
 
 By Helen Comstock 
 
 Contemporary art predominates in current exhibitions in New York, and there is an unusually 
 comprehensive showing of oils, water colors and sculpture to represent the work of modern 
 artists on both sides of the Atlantic. 
 
 George Laks at the Kraushaar Galleries 
 
 George Luks, at the Kraushaar Galleries, is showing both oils and water colors, equally interest- 
 ing as the expression of entirely different moods. "The White Macaw" among the oils, is a lady 
 who smiles rather insipidly under her bonnet with its drooping white feather. The features, 
 portrayed with infinite softness of outline, are nevertheless vivid in the suggestion that the 
 lady's character may resemble the bird whose plumage she wears. Gray tones dominate with 
 a telling use of white on the. bonnet. 
 
 The "Breaker Boy" has the masterly ease of the artist who is sure of his medium. The boy's 
 face, whose unhealthy whiteness is slightly smudged with grime, stands out from a dark back- 
 ground broken only by the flame in his cap and the glow of the cigarette he holds with such 
 nonchalance in his fingers. "Mike McTeague," in bright orange, is no more than a baby, but 
 shows unmistakable belligerence. "Mary" is a little girl in fancy dress, and in the "Girl from 
 'Tinicus' " there is glowing emphasis on the fish she holds in her hand. In "New York Cabby" 
 the contours of the face are built up as in clay, and there is vivid emphasis on the coloring of nose 
 and cheeks. 
 
 The water colors, fifteen in number and all of New York, are evidently a direct response to the 
 artist's love of color and movement. 
 
 John Marin's Pictures at the Montr oss Galleries 
 
 The growth of John Marin's art since 1908 to the present day is traced in a comprehensive 
 exhibition of his water colors, oil paintings and etchings at the Montross Galleries. Water color, 
 his favorite medium, offers the most significant record of his development. His facility in handling 
 pure wash, evident from the first, has adapted itself to varied methods and points of view during 
 this period. 
 
 The trees, islands and sea near Stonington, Maine, recur again and again as his subjects, seen 
 most frequently from the cliffs, and spread out in an intricate pattern that never neglects a basic 
 unity of design. A glimpse down into the valley to the hills beyond is expressed in the simplest 
 terms, yet all that is fundamental is embodied in the seemingly broken lines, each one of them a 
 key-note to complete form. 
 
 Often his color is subtle and quiet, unobtrusive, yet insistent, and the emphasis is allowed to 
 rest on structure and design, and again, particularly in his most recent work, there is color simply 
 for the sake of color, as in "The Island, Blue and Orange, Maine, 1920," with an appeal direct 
 to the emotion in its glowing spontaneity. 
 
 The oils, only a few in number, include "St. Paul's, New York, 192 1," and "From Brooklyn 
 Bridge, 192 1," expressing his most recent viewpoint, and approaching more closely the field of 
 abstraction. 
 
 Etchings record a growth away from the delicacy, and also the conventionality, of his French 
 and Venetian series to a highly individual technique, characterized by firm, strong lines, in 
 "Brooklyn Bridge, 1913" and "Woolworth Building from River, 1913." 
 
 Andre Derains Paintings at the Brummer Galleries 
 
 In Andre Derain, whose paintings are exhibited at the Brummer Galleries, 43 East 57th St., 
 through February, modern French art finds a particularly courageous exponent. Influenced from 
 the outset of his career by Cezanne, his continued experiment in the inter-relation of form and 
 color has given him leadership among "Les Fauves" — the artists of revolt. An able draughts- 
 man, he is not content to draw outlines, but must create form through the suggestion of the very 
 fundamentals of its structure. 
 
 A still life, "La Table," evinces his mastery of drawing, and has in it the sincerity and sim- 
 plicity that relate it to the classic spirit. 
 
 [911 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 Among the landscapes, "L'Arbre dans l'lle Fleurie" has marked strength of composition and 
 is characterized by deeper tones than he generally employs. The great tree that spreads its 
 branches across a vista of water, island, and deep blue sky, dominates by sheer force of line. 
 Lighter in key is his Italian landscape, "Environs de Castelgandolfo," which employs a delicate 
 green in the foliage of a group of trees that circle a rolling stretch of country. There is a suggestion 
 of an exquisite, lacey quality in the leaves of the trees, while the trunks are emphasized in strong, 
 bold strokes. "La Route d'Albano" is similar in subject and feeling. 
 
 In painting a portrait, Derain insists on the introduction of a purely personal interpretation 
 of his subject. One of these is really a drawing in oil, so simple is its treatment. Another, 
 "LTtalienne," is arresting for its strength and power. 
 
 "Lifting of the Fog." By Eric Hudson. From the Ferargil Galleries. 
 
 Eric Hudson's Marines at the Ferargil Galleries 
 
 It is not often that an artist is able to make you forget his canvas and feel instead the very 
 presence of his subject. Yet Eric Hudson, whose marines are exhibited at the Ferargil Galleries, 
 607 Fifth Avenue, does this and even goes a step further, for he not only makes you feel the sea, 
 but, out of his own experience, increases your knowledge of it. He paints it as Masefield writes a 
 poem, with the authority of intimate understanding. The sea he paints is not the pleasant back- 
 ground to a summer vacation that most of us know, calm under an occasional sail, or only mildly 
 vigorous at most, but has all the might of a primal force, splendid and untamed, that has domi- 
 nated men's lives since the Phoenicians first went exploring and the Vikings set out for unknown 
 lands. The boats he paints are not the trim, white affairs for pleasure and sport, but fishermen's 
 boats that wring men's living from the sea and are built sturdy and strong to stand the buffeting 
 from wind and water alike. 
 
 "Off Shore Breeze" combines many elements, — the blue sea shading down to black in the hol- 
 lows between the waves, a dark boat with sail in shadow, and a dory trailing behind, the high 
 black rocks close by, and, more than that, the tang of the salt air and the sting of a brisk breeze. 
 In the "West Wind," one of the larger canvases, two boats move in opposite directions, one in the 
 background having quite the same effect of movement as the other, more strongly delineated, in 
 front of it. 
 
 [92] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 "Figure Half-Draped." By Abbott H. Thayer. 
 
 Thayer's Exhibition at the Milch 
 Galleries 
 
 Abbott H. Thayer's "Figure Half-Draped," 
 recently exhibited with the remaining pictures 
 in the Thayer estate at the Milch Galleries, has 
 just been purchased by a collector for $40,000. 
 The painting is considered one of the finest 
 examples of the art of the great American 
 figure painter, and is characterized by the firm 
 modeling which links his work with that of the 
 masters of the Renaissance. 
 
 The figure is one of great majesty and poise, 
 with white flesh tones emphasized by the rich 
 olive green of the drapery. In accordance with 
 the wishes of the Thayer family, no other title 
 has ever been given to the picture, although 
 "Muse" has been suggested because of the 
 lyre indicated in sweeping strokes at one side. 
 
 Art lovers will have another opportunity to 
 
 [93] 
 
 see the picture before it passes to its new owner 
 as it is to be loaned for the Thayer Memorial 
 Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum from 
 March 20 to April 30. 
 
 Exhibition of Portraits by Dorothy E. 
 Vicaji at the Ehrich Galleries 
 
 The reports of the splendid work which 
 Dorothy E. Vicaji, a young English portrait 
 painter, did during her unheralded visit to the 
 United States last year, are more than verified 
 by the exhibition of her work current at the 
 Ehrich Galleries from January 30th to Feb- 
 ruary nth, which offers the American public 
 its first opportunity to judge of portraiture 
 which has been hailed with great acclaim by the 
 art critics of Great Britain. The portraits 
 shown by Miss Vicaji, among them recently 
 completed ones of H. R. H. Queen Alexandra 
 and Dame Margaret Lloyd George, prove her 
 to be a master of color and an artist endowed 
 with the power of catching likenesses which are 
 startling in their accuracy. 
 
 Particularly interesting are two portraits of 
 children, one of them a riot of gorgeous color, 
 in which the youngster stands against a back- 
 ground of brilliant rhododendrons. In direct 
 contrast to this is the portrait of the wife of 
 the premier, which is simplicity itself. Easily 
 posed in a dress of dark blue against a sombre 
 background all the interest is concentrated in 
 the face, in which one finds the strength and the 
 ambition which has been of such aid to Lloyd 
 George in the difficult days through which 
 he has passed. The portrait of the Queen, 
 painted as she was at the height of her glory 
 and beauty, presents her wearing the broad 
 blue ribbon of the Garter, the storied crown 
 of England and many of her various orders. 
 Her Majesty was so pleased by it that she gave 
 Miss Vicaji her consent to bring the portrait to 
 America and it is with this permission that it is 
 shown at the Ehrich Galleries. 
 
 The most striking thing in Miss Vicaji' s 
 portraits, in addition to her surprising feeling 
 for color, is the strength with which she paints. 
 At no time does her work suggest that it was 
 done by a woman, for it has none of the pale 
 lightness so often found in portraits painted by 
 women. When one stops to reflect that Miss 
 Vicaji is at the very threshold of her career, 
 having begun to paint professionally only at the 
 end of the war, one realizes how true is the 
 declaration of a leading American critic who 
 said, "America is greatly honored to at last 
 have Dorothy Vicaji painting on this side of the 
 Atlantic." G. H. 
 
CURRENT NOTES AND COMMENTS 
 
 Poncho Indian Ceremonial Dances 
 Indian Night of the Archaeological Society of Washington 
 
 Through the hospitality of Mr. Victor J. Evans, the Archaeological Society of Washington 
 gave, January 2 1 , 1 92 2 , an Indian Night with ceremonial dances by Poncho Indians from Oklahoma, 
 interpreted by Mr. Francis LaFlesche of the Bureau of American Ethnology. 
 
 The President of the Washington Society, Hon. Robert Lansing, former Secretary of State, 
 presided. Mr. Burke, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, was introduced and made a few remarks. 
 Mr. Francis LaFlesche of the Bureau of American Ethnology, was then introduced, having been 
 requested by Mr. Evans to explain the meaning of the ceremony and its regalia. The Indians 
 entered the room in processional form and engaged in the ceremonial dances, which Mr. LaFlesche 
 described as follows : The He-thu-shka is the name of an ancient society of warriors. The name is 
 archaic, it had long ago lost its meaning as well as the history of its origin. Tradition says that 
 the society originated with the Omaha and Ponca tribes, who acted jointly in its organization. 
 The society had two officers, the Nu-don-hon-ga or Commander, and the Wa-gtha, or Herald; 
 these were elected by the members, usually by acclamation. The Commander must be not only 
 a warrior of distinction but a man held in popular esteem, and the Herald must be a man generally 
 liked by the people. Membership in the society was restricted to warriors who had won military 
 honors, which must have been publicly and ceremonially confirmed. 
 
 In ancient times when a season or two had passed, during which battles with the enemy had 
 taken place, the warriors who had fought decided to make formal application to certain tribal 
 authorities for the public awarding of decorations. This ceremony was called, "The Assembling 
 of Military Honors." 
 
 A day was appointed for the ceremony, which was held in the open. Before the authorities was 
 placed a shrine containing the symbolic articles that pertained to war. When the people, at the 
 call of a herald, had gathered around the place of ceremony the applicants for military decorations 
 entered the circle in a body. A man approaches the shrine to recount the deed for which he makes 
 claim to an honor decoration. He holds high above his head, so that all may see it, a little red 
 stick, a symbol of truth. If there are witnesses who can prove that the man speaks falsely they 
 step forward with cries of protest. The authorities, however, give permission to the claimant 
 to drop the red stick upon the shrine, first telling him that he who speaks falsely will be punished 
 by the supernatural powers. The man drops the stick, but if it falls to the ground the people 
 shout in derision. The next claimant comes forward, lifts high the little red stick as he tells his 
 story, drops the stick gently upon the shrine, then a great shout of approval rises from the crowd. 
 In this manner the ceremony proceeds to the end. 
 
 The honor decoration for each of the three highest degrees is, the middle feather taken from the 
 tail of a mature golden eagle. The warrior to whom an honor is awarded must provide himself 
 with this particular feather, but he is instructed by the authorities how to wear the feather so that 
 it shall indicate the degree it represents. 
 
 A warrior who had won more than one of each of the three highest degrees for valorous deeds 
 became entitled to wear, at the dance of the He-thu-shka, a special decoration which is attached 
 to a belt and symbolizes the scene of a battle field after the combatants had left. This decora- 
 tion is called "Crow" because this bird is always the first to find the battle field. The crow's 
 head and neck are attached to the belt. Next to the crow the magpie comes to the scene, then the 
 buzzard, and lastly the eagle. The gray wolf is represented in this symbolic decoration, for that 
 animal also feasts upon the slain. 
 
 The feather war bonnet is the most picturesque of the Indian decorations. The right to make a 
 war bonnet goes with the honor that is publicly and ceremonially awarded to a warrior for his 
 valorous deeds. 
 
 There is a special dance, dramatic in character, for the bravest of the brave. In this dance 
 each warrior reenacts, in a way, his movements as he fought in battle when he won his honors; 
 the crouching positions, the moving from side to side, all of which follows strictly the rhythm 
 of the music and represents the dodging of the arrows of the enemy. The warrior who had been 
 wounded in battle goes through his struggles for his life, but never fails to keep in perfect time 
 with the rhythm of the music. This dance was given by the Poncho Indians with pleasing effect. 
 
 [95] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 A New Memorial to Jeanne D'Arc in Washington 
 
 Meridian Hill Park, in Washington, D. C, so 
 recently signalized by the erection of the new 
 Dante Monument, was the scene on the afternoon 
 of January 6th of another important unveiling 
 ceremony, at which the President and His Excel- 
 lency the Ambassador of France were guests of 
 honor, with Mrs. Harding, Madame Jusserand, 
 and other distinguished visitors. An equestrian 
 statue of Jeanne d'Arc, erected at the center of 
 the Grand Terrace, opposite fashionable 2400 Six- 
 teenth Street, N. W., was dedicated on this, the 
 five hundred and tenth anniversary of the birth 
 of the Maid of Orleans, who was born in the 
 village of Domremy, France, in 141 2. 
 
 The beautiful new Jeanne d'Arc Monument is a 
 gift to the National Capital from the Societe des 
 Femmes de France of New York, presented 
 through their President Fondatrice, Madame 
 Carlo Polifeme. More than five years ago, in 
 May, 19 16, Madame Polifeme wrote to the Com- 
 mission of Fine Arts: "Le Lyceum, Societe des 
 Femmes de France of New York, in a spirit of 
 Patriotism, nurtured by exile, inspired with a 
 deep sense of the friendship that binds our two 
 sister Republics, animated by a sympathy born 
 of closer and closer relations, Le Lyceum intends 
 to perpetuate these sentiments by erecting in their 
 new home a monument to Jeanne d'Arc, emblem 
 of Patriotism, emblem of Love and Peace. The 
 statue of our French heroine will be built to the 
 glory of womanhood, dedicated by the women of 
 France in New York, to the women of America, 
 and offered to the city of Washington." 
 
 "The work is regarded by artists as the finest 
 equestrian statue of modern times," so the Com- 
 mission of Fine Arts informs us. Paul Dubois is 
 a leading French sculptor. This monument is a replica of the celebrated statue of Jeanne d'Arc 
 in front of Rheims Cathedral in France, which it was believed miraculously preserved the Cathe- 
 dral from destruction during the bombardment of the late war. Another copy is in Paris: Our 
 new statue was prepared under the direction of the French Minister of Education and Fine Arts, 
 at Paris. It measures about nine feet in height and ten feet in length, and is supported by a 
 pedestal of about six feet in height, designed by McKim, Mead and White, architects of New 
 York City. 
 
 Modern research often shatters romantic illusions, and now informs us that Saint Joan of Arc, 
 canonized as we all know by the Church, was not, as is popularly supposed, a shepherd girl. 
 She was carefully educated, as all young French girls are, and her parents were neither ignorant 
 nor impoverished people. 
 
 Unique in history stands Joan of Arc, a symbol of patriotic womanhood, of inspiring idealism. 
 So great has become the faith in her that French soldiers swear Joan of Arc appeared to them in 
 the late war, leading them again to Victory. Sceptical American soldiers even admitted a mys- 
 terious influence, bringing magical power. 
 
 It is fitting that her Monument in Washington should crown the hill of Meridian Park, that 
 Jeanne d'Arc should be honored there, with Dante not far away, who has immortalized Beatrice, 
 another incomparable and unknown woman. Gertrude Richardson Brigham. 
 
 [96] 
 
BOOK CRITIQUES 
 
 Olympic Victor Monuments and Greek Ath- 
 letic Art. By Walter Woodbum Hyde. 404 pp. 
 I. 8vo., with 30 plates and 80 figures in photo- 
 gravure. The Carnegie Institution of Washing- 
 ton, IQ2I. 
 
 Here is a stout volume of broadly inter- 
 national scholarship to prove that American 
 exponents of classical studies have not allowed 
 Azerbaijan and Chita to suffocate their 
 memories of Athens, Aegina and Argos. 
 Friends of physical sports will do well to consult 
 the author's initial chapter for the newest and 
 straightest dope on Greek games and prize 
 awards. His researches confirm the opinion 
 that all the greater national games were 
 sepulchral tributes to dead heroes. The 
 Amerindians observed similar rites. There is 
 a fine suggestion here for American Legion 
 holidays. 
 
 Prehistoric researches on Greek soil have 
 acquainted us with many carved and painted 
 portrayals of outdoor sports in the island 
 kingdom of Minos, which the ancients re- 
 membered but dimly. Cretan vessels were 
 freighting cargoes of horses from Africa or 
 Syria as early as 1600 B. C. Mr. Hyde misses 
 none of the Minyan and Mycenaean toreadores 
 and toreadoras. The white skins of the latter 
 establish their sex beyond controversy in spite 
 of their male ring dress, and one may add they 
 do not leave our overrated modern emanci- 
 pations of young womanhood a leg to stand on. 
 Paired boxers on a carved drinking horn in the 
 Museum at Candia use the right arm for 
 attack and the left for defense; some of the 
 contestants wear helmets and cuirasses (a good 
 idea), others wear boxing gloves. 
 
 Further on, the author shows how steadily 
 competitive athletics in Hellas moved away 
 from material prizes like slave women, fatted 
 oxen and mares in foal, silver jars and talents 
 of gold to crowns of pine, celery and wild olive. 
 A writer of Emperor Hadrian's time quotes the 
 very test of an oracle which directed King 
 Iphitos of Elis to award the last of these 
 guerdons of victory at Olympia, nine hundred 
 years before Hadrian; the present author 
 erroneously conjectures that earlier masters 
 of the games in question previously awarded 
 bronze tripods to the victors, for the oracle 
 expressly states the earlier prizes were apples. 
 Prize-winners consecrated the implements of 
 their exercises and models of these implements, 
 such as small bronze chariot wheels, at an early 
 period ; they will presently erect small and large 
 
 [97] 
 
 statues of themselves and of their racehorses 
 near the altars of the gods who have favored 
 them. A stone of 315 pounds' weight now 
 lying at Olympia was hurled furthest by a 
 Greek Siegfried named Bybon, whcse inscrip- 
 tion it bears in an uncouth spiral. One 
 Eumastos consecrates another extant stone 
 weighing 1,056 pounds English, which he has 
 lifted, on the island of Thera. Respectable 
 performances both. 
 
 The author next analyses the characters of 
 victor statues as to size and proportions, cloth- 
 ing or nudity, coiffure, attributes and artistic 
 qualities, in three methodical essays replete 
 with exact information (Chapters II-IV). His 
 account of Greek horseraces and chariot race? 
 and of other contests like music and shouting, 
 in Chapter V, includes the monuments com- 
 memorating victories in these non-gymnastic 
 events . Little or none of the scattered literature 
 of his subject has escaped him. His repudia- 
 tion of the current opinion that Greek statuar- 
 ies executed all their portrayals of athletic 
 victors in bronze, as given in Chapter VII, is 
 cogently fortified with examples of victor 
 statues done in stone and marble. He dares 
 to assign a stunning Fourth Century boxer's 
 head in the Museum of Olympia to no less an 
 artist than Lysippos of Sikyon, a master for- 
 merly reputed the greatest of all Greek 
 statuaries. Hyde's examination of the marble 
 in question is rightly based, not on the pseudo- 
 Lysippian Apoxyomenos of the Vatican Mu- 
 seum, but on a statue which Preuner has proved 
 to be certainly a plagal, if not a wholly au- 
 thentic piece of sculpture by no other than 
 Lysippos (plate 28 and figure 68). This frontal 
 portrait statue of the Thessalian nobleman and 
 champion wrestler Agias at Delphi and the 
 three dimensional man-with-the-strigil of the 
 Vatican (plate 29) were never modelled by the 
 same eye, or even in the same century. Our 
 critic would have done well to throw the 
 Victorian misattribution of the latter statue to 
 Lysippos altogether to the discard, as he stops 
 short of doing. Professor Hyde's discovery of 
 this new original by Lysippos, which he names 
 Philandridas, deserves to rank with Eugenie 
 Sellers' assignment of the Aberdeen head in 
 London to Praxiteles. He connects another 
 head of a young hero wearing a lion scalp, 
 found at Sparta and now in Philadelphia, with 
 the manner of Skopas. 
 
 It is mere foolishness to demand documen- 
 tary evidences before conceding the value of 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 The European Summer School 
 
 A SUMMER COURSE IN 
 
 HISTORY, ARCHAEOLOGY AND ART 
 
 STUDIED ON THE SPOT 
 UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF 
 
 UNIVERSITY SPECIALISTS 
 
 Dr. H. H. Powers 
 Dr. L. E. Lord Oberlin College 
 
 Dr. Walter Miller University of Missouri 
 Dr. Theodore Lyman Wright, Beloit College 
 Dr. Elizabeth Haight Vassar College 
 
 and others 
 
 FIFTY SCHOLARSHIPS 
 
 of $200 each 
 
 are offered in 1922 in connection 
 
 with the above 
 
 The European Summer School costs no 
 more than an ordinary tour. It is more of 
 an education than a year in the university. 
 It excludes no legitimate travel interest. 
 
 WRITE FOR INFORMATION TO 
 
 BUREAU OF UNIVERSITY TRAVEL 
 
 10x Boyd St., Newton, Mass. 
 
 Wk 
 
 r' r. 
 
 -9> 
 
 THE ENGRAVINGS *•*» 7( 
 ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY t 
 ARE THE EXCLUSIVE WORK OF 
 THE STANDARD ENGRAVING CO. 
 
 THE EXPRESSION OF YOUR BOOK 
 OR ADVERTISEMENT IS FIRST 
 REGISTERED IN PICTORIAL ART 
 THAT WILL CONVEY YOUR THOUGHT 
 CLEARLY ; ', AS SPECIALISTS IN 
 DESIGNING AND PHOTO ENGRAVING 
 WE ARE FULLY CONSCIOUS OF 
 THESE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES 
 
 STANDARD ENGRAVING CO. 
 
 121?. G STREET \ \ \ WASHINGTON. D. C. 
 HALF TONES ICOLQR WORK.UNC PLATES 
 
 
 constructive criticisms like these, as indolent 
 British scholars used to do to save themselves 
 the trouble of following "the conjectural 
 vagaries of the Germans." 
 
 All but one of the illustrations are good, and 
 are judiciously chosen. There is a telling 
 juxtaposition of three antique copies of 
 Myron's famous diskthrower accompanied by a 
 correct plastic restoration of that last master- 
 piece in plates 22, 23 and figures 34, 35. This 
 demonstration renders the familiar misfit of the 
 London and Vatican Statues with a non- 
 pertinent head turned the wrong way utterly 
 intolerable. It is time American teachers hit 
 the Fifth Grade with the correctly headed 
 Diskobolos Lancellotti, discovered in 178 1. 
 Several other plates and figures will direct 
 scholars and connoisseurs to superb heads of 
 young athletes they may have overlooked, in 
 Constantinople, Naples, Dresden, Paris, Boston 
 and New York. 
 
 A capital index of nearly thirty pages com- 
 pletes this noteworthy connected discussion of 
 the reciprocal relations of manly sports and the 
 fine arts in ancient Greece. 
 
 Alfred Emerson. 
 
 A History of European and American Sculp- 
 ture from the Early Christian Period to the 
 Present Day, by Chandler Rathfon Post. Vols. 
 I, II. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 
 IQ2I. $20.00. 
 
 The author states that his purpose in writing 
 this book was to meet the need of a history of 
 the sculpture of our own era for collateral read- 
 ing by students outside of the lecture room and 
 at the same time to gratify the demands of the 
 general interested public. His intent was not 
 only to give a comprehensive idea of the various 
 epochs but also to trace the evolution of the 
 several national schools and briefly to criticize 
 the sculptors in those schools as revealed in 
 their chief works. His plan has been to dis- 
 tribute the space according to the esthetic sig- 
 nificance of the epochs and masters under dis- 
 cussion. The greater length given to the 
 sculpture of the last two centuries is due to the 
 fact that it has hitherto been less satisfactorily 
 treated than the production of the earlier cen- 
 turies. Fortunately, particular emphasis is 
 placed upon American sculpture, illustrated 
 by specimens in American collections, and its 
 relations to European sculpture have been 
 carefully considered. 
 
 It is gratifying to see, after a careful perusal, 
 how adequate a work the author, starting out 
 with these fundamental ideas, has produced — 
 one which will be for long years to come an 
 
 [9S] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 indispensable book of reference for every stu- 
 dent of sculpture whether specialist or layman. 
 It bears the stamp of careful study and literary 
 excellence on almost every page; it is an ably 
 Written, and on the whole, a well proportioned 
 contribution to scholarship. 
 
 Volume L discusses Early Christian Sculp- 
 ture (21 pp.), the Middle Ages (130 pp.), the 
 Renaissance (122 pp.); Volume II, the Baroque 
 and the Rococo (82 pp. }, Neoclassicism (32 pp.), 
 Modern Sculpture (155 pp.). There follow 
 an extensive bibliography, in which articles 
 from Art and Archaeology arc several times 
 iiA.-:*i.voii<'d, an inchx to names of sculptors 
 and an index *> pfcwes mentioned 
 
 The two volumes contahi a 5 :,, i 1-page illus- 
 tration:-., carefully chosen and admirably re- 
 produced in half tone. They give a compre- 
 hensive list of the most important sculptures of 
 the Christian era from all the European coun- 
 tries and the tJni ted States. Haeh part con- 
 tain- :ni historic;)! introduction, then follows a 
 treatment >>f the general character of the sculp- 
 ture of each country arid of ii^ national schools 
 in the ■• arious periods. 
 
 In part III, devoted to the Renaissance, it 
 is gratifying to see that the author, like Taylor 
 in his "Thought and Expression in the ;6th 
 Century tsee A. & A.. Vol. XI . p. 2S3) retards 
 "Pjgnaiss-ance" as a misnomer if Understood 
 asa"Rei.Miu" :':-■'" the Mid^h Ages. Both 
 periods po. sc-M'd 1 heir <••> ■•.: :,!i.t and peculiar 
 qualities, an-! the "di\vsity • t'-tv een the two 
 ages manifested Itself in two prjij^rpjj.] rhan- 
 nels — in hitmauis.Pi, tiie more- ;;..;•■»' and intulli 
 gent comprehend >n of anticjuit;/; and hi indi 
 vidualism, the greater eii-phasi- upon frerson 
 ality." In his interpretation of the 16th 
 century, Mr. Posi adwurabh supplements the 
 work of Taylor in hi- dj^cussroii of the general 
 field of sculpture. 
 
 Part IV, devoted to the Baroque and Rococo, 
 is of especial value because the author rehabili- 
 tates these by emphasising their excellences. 
 He shows how the Baroque is a inatiifc station of 
 Italv's marvelous genius for esthetic invention 
 in accordance with the spirit of the age, and 
 that the rococo is the lighter and more n lined 
 form 01 the baroque that took r: • in France. 
 The crowning virtu, of the baroque c ?b 
 grandiose impressive -ness; of the rococo, its 
 "individualism and even intimacy" of feeling 
 and its desire for sensitiveness in art. Though 
 applied primarily to the greater exuberance 
 of architectural decoration, the rococo in sculp- 
 ture, by its extreme nicety and subtlety, re- 
 flects the ultra-refinement of the French Court. 
 
 Part V, Neoclassicism, represents a spouta? 
 neous reaction against the extravagances of the 
 
 American Paintings 
 
 of Distinction 
 
 Specially selected examples of 
 the work of Albert P. Ryder, 
 George Innes. Homer Martin, 
 Ralph Albert Blakelock, Wins- 
 low Homer, John H. Tteacht- 
 man, Robert L. Newman, 
 W. Gedney Buv.ce, and other*. 
 Landscapes, figures, marine':, 
 st-Vlkife, and mhet tubwrls. 
 
 Special Exhibition 
 
 January 16th to the 2o':k, in- 
 clusive, „_,' / liftine* by Albert 
 Pinkham Ryder, nios,. u f ' •'' 
 June nezcr before been shown. 
 
 FREDERIC FAIRCH1LD SHERMAN 
 
 S West 47th Street New York City 
 
 (Studio knurs 9.30 a. m. xc 12.30 noon) 
 
 American Artists Series 
 
 StnaU Quarto. Beautifully printed from type on handmade 
 
 paper in limited editions and illustrated 
 
 in photogravure.. 
 
 ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER 
 
 By FrbdSRIC Fairchild Sherman 
 
 11 ilk reproductions of 33 representative paintings. 223 
 copies only at $ag.oo net. 
 
 A monograph of the highest interest to students of 
 Arr.eiM.an Art It cho ractenz.es the artist enthusiastically 
 and aft the same time justly. Mr. Sherman adds to his 
 illuminating text an invaluable catalogue, following this he 
 gives us a useful bibliography and then lists the paintings 
 shown at the Academy, at the Society of American Artists 
 and at the memorial exhibition held at the Metropolitan 
 Museum in 1918. — New York Tribute. 
 
 Previously Published 
 
 Alexander Wyant. By Eliot Clark $15.00 
 
 Winslow Homer. By Kenyon Cox 15.00 
 
 Oeorge In ness. By Elliott Daingerfitid 7.50 
 
 Homer Martin. By Fyjnk J Mather 15.00 
 
 It* \. biakelock. .•>}• tStliott Danigefjidd 2.50 
 
 Fifty Paintings by George Inness . 25.00 
 
 Fifty-eight Paintings by Homer Martin 15.00 
 
 :<\xi\ Paintings by Alexander Wjant 25. 00 
 
 O'.'tN'iONS OF the Series 
 A series of excellent monographs on American artists. — 
 Boston Transcript. 
 
 A splendid series of monographs. — The Dial. 
 
 FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN 
 
 8 West 47th Street New York 
 
 [99] 
 
ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 Printers 
 
 QF HIGH-GRADi. 
 
 maga;--nes, 
 
 SCIEN IC 
 
 BOOKS, aND 
 COMMERCIAL 
 WORK 
 
 acrannn 
 
 Gibson Bros. 
 
 INCOR PORATBD 
 
 13 12 Eye St. N. W. 
 
 WASHINGTON, I\ <~. 
 
 Established 1862 
 
 ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY 
 
 And many ether high grade 
 magazines, catalogues and 
 booklets ere printed with 
 Doubletone INKS (registered 
 trade maik) made only by — 
 
 THE SIGMUND ULLMAN 
 COMPANY 
 
 Park Avenue and 146th Street 
 NEW YORK CITY 
 
 baroque and rococo, brought about largely by 
 the discovery of the buried treasures of Her- 
 culaneum and Pompeii and the literary propa- 
 ganda of Winckelmann. The cardinal prin- 
 ciple was thft study of the ancient masterpieces 
 rather than of nature, and Rome became the 
 world's aesthetic capital. 
 
 Space does not permit us to dwell on the 
 excellence of Part VI devoted to modern sculp- 
 ture. Suffice -t to say that the section devoted 
 to the United States gives us a brief and com- 
 prehensive treatment of the development of 
 American sculpture and of its present status. 
 These two large volumes possess all the per 
 fections of the printer's art, for which Harvard 
 University Press is famous. M. C. 
 
 Arts of the World, by Edwin Swift Balch 
 and Eugenia Marfarlane Batch. Philadelphia. 
 Press of Allen, Lane and Scott. IQ20. 
 
 Comparative studies of the arts of the human 
 race in their bearing upon ethnology, beginning 
 with the earliest examples exposed in art and 
 archaeological museums and in the authors' 
 ™* rr < j*llection, purs ed during a number of 
 years by Edwin Swift Balch and Eugenia 
 Macfarlane Balch, are published in a handsome, 
 clearly printed volume from the press of Allen, 
 Lane and Scott, bearing the title of "Arts of the 
 World,'' and should be regarded as a valuable 
 addition to the list of works upon a subject 
 that is daily growing in interest. The point 
 of view taken by the authors is rather different 
 from that of most of our American writers, 
 although quite often encountered in the works 
 of many distinguished foreign archaeologists. 
 
 Covering the field from what is known as 
 Pleistocene period when implements of stone 
 are the principal" objects remaining to us of 
 the handicrafts, i<> the cinque cento revival in 
 Italy, the arts of man in all parts of the world 
 from prehistoric times are touched upon and 
 compared with each other, broadly, scientific- 
 ally and with absolute impartiality. 
 
 The book is especially interesting through 
 the information conveyed in reference to the 
 primitive arts such as the Negroid wood and 
 bronze sculptures, the drawings and ivory 
 carvings of the Eskimo and Chuk-chee tribes 
 of the. north-west Pacific, the pottery and 
 decorations of the cliff dwellers of Arizona and 
 New Mexico. The monoliths and bas-reliefs 
 of the Maya art and the architectural monu- 
 ments of the Aztecs and their decorated pottery 
 and textiles are given their true classification 
 as examples of an advanced stage of culture in 
 the arts. The geographical distribution of the 
 racial arts are shown in a series of maps. 
 
 Eugene CasteUvO. 
 
 < [100] 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 Zhn'57Fp£ 
 
 7May»60EF 
 
 REC'D LD 
 
 KECTD LD 
 
 DEC 11 1956 APR28l9 6o 
 
 j^AprB'/BK 
 
 RECTD LD 
 
 /IPR l Sfltt 
 
 MJan y 59J T 
 
 <v 
 
 ^Ol 
 
 ***"•• 
 
 etc 
 
 2/1, '$& 
 
 T22Apr'60TD 
 ftgCT) LP 
 
 WW 8 1960 
 
 LD 21-100m-6,'56 
 (B9311sl0)476 
 
 General Library 
 
 University of California 
 
 Berkeley 
 
f 
 
 IE 22128 
 
 •6 
 
F