Art in America, Before the Revolution

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Excerpt from Art in America, Before the Revolution: Address Before the Society of Colonial Wars in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, March 12, 1908This art rose to its greatest heights in Peru and Mexico. In Peru it is principally found in the shape of potteries, in many cases admirably sculpted into human heads or human figures, or into animals. Many of these are sculptural, many are caricatural, some, showing the effects of disease, are pathological. These P'eruvian heads, curiously enough, often resemble European heads, and one might ascribe them to Spanish in¿uence had not such quan tities been dug up in prehistoric graves. In Mexico, besides potteries, there are some pictures and many stone sculptures. Some of the heads are grandly done and resemble Egyptian heads. Much of the Mexican art, unfortunately, is loath some and hideous. The motives are snakes and death's heads. It is not art which has evolved in these carvings, but an attempt to bring out in stone some ghastly super stitions which must have been rampant through Central America. There is some evidence that the death's heads were related to cannibalism. At any rate, a study of their art has made me feel that Cortez did a rather good work when he wiped out old Mexican civilization, and that it is useless to waste sympathy on such a gang of toughs as Montezuma and the Aztec priests. I consider some phases of Mexican art as the lowest and most degraded ever reached by any art.Along the Arctic we find the art of the Eskimo, a race probably allied to the North Asiatics, and along the shores of Alaska, we find an art which, while it has some Mexican traits, showing some cousinship to Mexican art, yet in themain is related closely to the art of the Brown races, the Polynesians and the Australasians generally, to the art of New Zealand, of Rapa Nui, of Papua, and of Hawaii.The second division of my subject is the art of the intrusive white races of Europe, which its makers brought with them across the Atlantic into the New World. This is the ems, which cannot be termed correctly Colonial art, because it is really nothing-but-transplanted European art.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.