EARLY ART

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1044, 7 August 1930, Page 11

EARLY ART

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION The paintings and carvings of early' man were made not for pleasure, but for the performance of magic to obtain success in the chase and were thus strictly utilitarian. This was stated by Mr. Gilbert Archey, director of the Auckland Museum, in an address on the origin and development of early art-forms before the anthropology and Maori race section of the Auckland Institute. Early man was led by necessity’ to practise the useful arts, said the speaker. Agriculture. house-building, pottery-making and weaving were practised and oven in palaeolithic times ornamental articles of no practical use were produced. The earliest art was entirely representative or pictorial. Carvings upon horn and bone, and the paintings found deep in certain Spanish caves, all depicted animals which palaeolithic man was wont to hunt—bison, deer and boars. As magic deepened into religion, art tended more toward symbolism, which might possibly exist even in geometrical patterns such as were found on the work of neolithic man and his successors. Later, articles were ornamented in order to indicate ownership or to increase their value. Ornamentation for its own sake, or in other words for the purpose of producing aesthetic emotion, was a comparatively late development. Mr. Arc'hey illustrated his lecture with a number of lantern slides of Maori carvings and other objects and with blackboard drawings.