Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 41))

work existing, and from it he goes toward the infinite, de-solving without
ever resolving.
In the savage, analysis and discrimination do not exist. He is unable to
concentrate his attention upon a particular thing for any length of time. He
does not understand the difference between similar and identical, between that
which is seen in dreams and that which happens in real life, between imagina-
tion and facts; and that is why he takes as facts the ideas inspired by im-
pressions. As he lives in the sphere of imagination, the tangible form to him
does not exist except under the aspect of the fantastic. It has been repeatedly
proved that a faithful drawing from nature, or a photograph, are blanks to a
savage, and that he is unable to recognize in them either persons or places
which are most familiar to him; the real representation of form has no sig-
nificance to his senses. The many experiments that Europeans have made
with African negroes, making them draw from nature, have proved that the
negroes always take from form that only which impresses them from the
decorative point of view, that is to say, that which represents an abstract
expression. For instance, in drawing an individual, they give principal im-
portance to such things as the buttons of the clothes, distributing them deco-
ratively, in an arbitrary manner, far different from the place which they
occupied in reality. While they appreciate abstract form, the abstract line
is to them incomprehensible, and only the combinations of lines expressing a
decorative idea is appreciated by them. Therefore what they try to reproduce
is not form itself, but the expression of the sentiment or the impression,
represented by a geometrical combination.
Gradually, while the human brain has become perfected under the in-
fluence of progress and civilization, the abstract idea of representation of form
has been disappearing. To the expression through the decorative element has
succeeded the expression by the factual representation of form. Observa-
tion replaced impression, and analysis followed observation.
There is no doubt that, while the human brain has been developing, the
imaginative element has been eliminated from Art. There is no doubt also,
that all the elements for creative imagination have been exhausted. What is
now produced in Art is that which has caused us pleasure in other works. The
creative Art has disappeared without the pleasure of Art being extinct.
The contemporary art that speculates with the work of the savages, is
nothing but the quantitative and the qualitative analysis of that which was
precisely the product of the lack of analysis.
Imagination, creative faculty, is the principal law of Art. That faculty
is not autogenous, it needs the concurrence of another principle to excite its
activity. The elements acquired by perception and by the reflective faculties,
presented to the mind by memory, take a new form under the influence of the
imagination. This new aspect of form is precisely what man tries to reproduce
in Art. That is how Art has established false ideas concerning the reality of
Form and has created sentiments and passions that have radically influenced
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