Ancient art and ritual / by Jane Ellen Harrison.

  • Jane Ellen Harrison
Date:
[1913]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ancient art and ritual / by Jane Ellen Harrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    245/264 page 241
    begin with, as we saw, the whole collection of initiated tribesmen, linked by a common name, rallying round a common symbol. Even to-day, when individualism is ram- pant, art bears traces of its collective, social origin. We feel about it, as noted before, a certain “ ought ” which always spells social obligation. Moreover, whenever we have a new movement in art, it issues from a group, usually from a small professional coterie, but marked by strong social instincts, by a missionary spirit, by intemperate zeal in propaganda, by a tendency, always social, to crystallize conviction into dogma. We can scarcely, unless we are as high-hearted as Tolstoy, hope now-a-days for an art that shall be world-wide. The tribe is extinct, the family in its old rigid form moribund, the social groups we now look to as centres of emotion are the groups of industry, of pro- fessionalism and of sheer mutual attraction. Small and strange though such groups may appear, they are real social factors. Now this social, collective element in art (is too apt to be forgotten. When an artist i claims that expression is the aim of art he is too apt to mean self-expression only— Q
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3