Fairbanks, Arthur: Greek art: the basis of later European art (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1933)

THE SPIRIT OF GREEK ART
Nor is the Chinese or Japanese painter con-
cerned with forms as the eye sees them, when
in a landscape he reproduces the feeling of high
mountains and dashing streams and gnarled
trees and misty distances; or when, like Sessiu,
he paints not detailed forms of monkeys, but
the life of monkeys as they sport over the trees;
or again when he seeks to draw a bamboo
branch in such a way that the observer would
feel the wind bending and rustling it. On the
contrary, the first point which impresses a stu-
dent when he begins the study of Greek sculp-
ture is inevitably the progress toward accurate
representation. It belongs to the realm of
scientific fact with which he is familiar.
Whether or not he eventually comes under the
spell of the objects he is studying and yields
to their charm, he begins with the true obser-
vation that the method of Greek art is the rep-
resentation of the object as seen.
Representation has been the keynote of
western art now for centuries, till at last the
“ modernists ” have revolted. Certainly in
America we tend to think of art first as repre-
sentation, plus all the complex of suggestion
and emotion that goes with the subject. A pic-
ture is a picture of something, or people do not
[113]