SPECIAL CAPACITIES OF AMERICAN INDIANS 161 



In their recent "Introduction to American Indian Art," published in 

 connection with the Indian Tribal Arts exposition, John Sloan and Oliver 

 LaFarge give similar testimony: 



The American Indian race possesses an innate talent in the fine and applied arts. 

 The Indian is a born artist, possessing a capacity for discipline and careful work, and a 

 fine sense of line and rhythm. ... He has evolved for himself during many thousands of 

 years a form and content peculiarly his own. 



Of the recent water colors by Pueblo and Kiowa artists Sloan and La- 

 Farge remark: 



In these pictures we see the object combined with the artist's subjective response to it 

 — a union of material and technique both symbolic and intelligible. These young Indians 

 have applied to the painting of their pictures the discipline of line and color developed 

 through many centuries of decorating every imaginable object of daily or sacred use with 

 designs innately suited to the objects decorated and charged with traditional cultural 

 concepts. Simplicity, balance, rhythm, abstraction, and unequalled range of design 

 elements, and virility, characterize the work of the Indian of today. 



Tribute has been paid by many observers to the persistent union of the 

 useful and the artistic in Indian life and art. The same qualities will be 

 found in any good examples of Indian basketry; for instance, "from the 

 basketmaker work of four thousand years ago to the present-day Hopi and 

 Jicarilla weaves with their joyous colors." Neil Judd, reviewing remains 

 of earlier Indian life on the American continent, regards it as particularly 

 remarkable that "the inherent artistic genius of these dissimilar tribes should 

 have persisted through four hundred years of alien domination and remained 

 so little modified by exotic ideas and materials." As artists and as crafts- 

 men in stone, wood, and shell, he says, "the prehistoric American Indians 

 are only now winning the appreciation their work has long merited." The 

 California Indians, according to Spinden, though having no agriculture and 

 only the simplest of needs, "made the finest basketry of either hemisphere 

 and set a standard of thorough sincerity and intricate perfection in a uni- 

 versal craft." Navajo jewelry, still safe despite modern commercial viola- 

 tion, has as its keynote "mass, simplicity, smooth surfaces of pure, soft 

 silver, set off by the repetition of quiet and rather inert designs." The 

 marvelous pottery of the Southwest was a wholly native development, Chap- 

 man thinks, the knowledge of firing having apparently been acquired by the 

 accidental contact of clay objects with great heat, and with no aid from per- 

 manent kilns or the potter's wheel. Yet the Coronado expedition found 

 pottery-making the principal craft in nearly a hundred Indian villages and 

 it is still an important craft in more than a dozen Pueblos, each with a dis- 

 tinctive art. 



