Purposes of Art: An Introduction to the History and Appreciation of Art —— An Introduction to the History and Appreciation of Art

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ISBN: 9781330296165 出版年：2018 页码：525 Albert Edward Elsen Forgotten Books

That a man's individuality could be expressed through his hand has been known for centuries; even in ancient times, it was customary to refer to a work of art as coming from the hand of some artist. To our knowledge, not until the twentieth century did an aftist actually affirm his identity in his work by means Of his handprint. The American abstract painter jackson Pollock not only applied his paint covered hand to the upper right corner of his canvas, but he repeated the gesture several times — perhaps in view Of the absence of any other single readily comparable shape in his entire painting (fig. Rarely used by Pollock, the handprint was, needless to say, the best possible guarantee against forgery of his abstractions. The absence of evidence other than the works themselves confounds us when we try to discover why the Indian and Altamira artists made their objects and chose their motifs. Despite the fact that Pollock, who died relatively recently, had-many friends and made personal statements about his art, modern research methods still cannot disentangle and decide the psychological motives or the purposes that impelled his response to life through. His art. Every serious artist has, in a sense, been the pupil and rival of artists who came before him, and the twin motives of continuing and sur passing art Of the past were certainly not un known to Pollock. More surprisingly, perhaps, present-day studies of Stone Age peoples suggest that these same incentives, though tied in with religion, magic, and other purposes, may have obtained from the earliest periods of human history in which art was made.