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The Arts of Painting and Sculpture SYNOPSIS In this article an attempt is made to gain some idea ofthe conditions under which paintings and sculptures have been made by man at different periods and in different countries, and also of the different purposes which those who made them had in view. We find that a great many ofthese works were made in response to certain vital needs imposed on men by the complex conditions ofhuman societies-these needs, for the most part, coming under the heading of publicity. Such works are, in effect, weapons in the struggle for social predominance, means employed by men to increase the importance of their own personalities. Other works of art, we find, were created in response to supposed needs arising out ofsuperstitious or religious beliefs. In both ofthese cases the labour expended upon these works of art is analogous to man's ordinary activities in response to the struggle for existence. But we find a whole class ofworks of art in which no such biological aims are envisaged-works due to a gratuitous impulse which we call the aesthetic impulse. We find here a purely spiritual activity analogous to that which impels men to search for truth. It is this pure, free and biologically useless activity which has produced those works which are among the most cherished possessions of mankind. The arts ofpainting and sculpture have been practised by man since paleolithic times, for a period which has been estimated at more than twenty thousand years. One of the marks which distinguish the human species from the rest of the animal kingdom is the amount of time and energy which man expends on useless activities. By useless activities I mean those which are not dictated to him by his biological needs, either real or supposed . Play, the most universal of such useless activities, is the one, and almost the only one, which he shares with many animals. As far as we can tell from the records left by prehistoric man, painting and sculpture came next in regard to their early inception and wide distribution. In the life of the individual we find a similar precocious emergence of these arts, a From An Outline ifModern Knowledge, edited by William Rose (Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1931). Art and the lvlarket passion for drawing being almost universal among children from about four years of age. And yet, deeply rooted as is the impulse to painting and sculpture in human nature, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the average adult citizen of to-day would get through life with no appreciable difference if these arts had never come into being, nor is it unusual for him to look upon the artist as one of the least respectable drones in the social hive. To be perfectly frank, one must admit that it would be no easy matter to persuade anyone who looked at life from a purely practical or ethical angle that there was any justification for the economic waste implied by these particular useless activities. Play he might admit as necessary to recuperate our forces for the work of the world; scientific research, though he would have regarded it as idle curiosity in its earlier stages, might be justified in his eyes by the advantages to our powers of production which are the fortuitous outcome of an activity that is, in aim, almost as useless as the arts. Such, certainly, was a very common attitude among many serious men throughout the nineteenth century, and the suspicion with which Puritans have always regarded the arts is far from extinct to-day, although it is less freely expressed. We have then to face this fact, that throughout the immense period of human history and a great part ofpre-history, the figurative arts have been practised in one form or another almost continuously and universally and yet that we have no very complete or cogent explanation of why man acts thus, with what precise aims, or impelled by what particular needs. Impulses to make objects-to create, as it were, in play, animals or men which are objects of interest; impulses to imitate; impulses to relieve the stress of emotional states by outward expression; the desire to obtain a magical control of the forces of nature; the interpretation oflife in terms of desire; an inherent love ofbeauty (whatever that may mean)-all these and other causes for this activity have been at various times adduced as explanations . It is...

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