Form: a quarterly of the arts (N.S. 1.1921/1922)

WOODCUT BY NORA WRIGHT

SCULPTURE

and ARCHITECTURE

HerterbFursh

P to the threshold of the Twentieth
Century all artists, and therefore the
sculptor, worked in more or less gener-
ally understood traditions. When we
look upon a piece of sculpture of any
people, until that date, we are seeing be-
fore our eyes not only the evidence of a
man’s mind, not only the work of a single individual,
but in as much as tradition was everywhere a factor, also
the vrork and working of the group-mind.

THE Egyptians’ simple solidity of form is the
result of tradition and this tradition itself the
consequence of the material in which theEgyp-
tian sculptor had to work, granite and basalt.

THE less solid, or as one might perhaps say, the
more fanciful form of Greek sculpture is like-
wise the result of tradition based on material.
We can, in fact, clearly follow the transformation of the
early Greek “ wood’ ’ culture signifying a northern origin
of Greek art into the “marble” culture of the later

THE point is that what distinguishes and
cbaracterises national arts is not a difference
in assthetic principles and appreciation, but
ethic and ethnic traditions caused by differences in
the material of experience and experiment to hand
(and to mind) which result from the differences in
habitation.

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