98 
House & Garden 
KNAPE&VOGT 
uive 
Your Modern Clothes 
Modern Closets 
G ive your expensive clothes a 
chance to look their best. This 
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fashioned closet. You can keep your 
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comes from the shop or presser if you 
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& VOGT Garment Care System will make. 
The carriers are full nickeled, roller bearing, 
and operate easily on a telescoping slide. 
The cost is only a fraction of that required 
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hotels, clubs, lodges, etc. Installation in old 
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top of door casing and to rear wall. A screw 
driver is the only tool required. Carriers 
are made in all sizes from 12 to 60 inches 
in length. 
On sale at hardware and department stores. If not 
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dimensions and we will see that you are supplied. 
KNAPE & VOGT MFG. CO. 
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN 
New York. 168 Church Street Chicago. 546 Washington Blvd. 
St. Louis, Title Guarantee Bldg. Boston, 86 High St. 
San Francisco. Rialto Bldg. Minneapolis, Soo Line Bldg. 
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... 
The Art of the Golden Age 
{Continued from page S3) 
great heroes of antiquity who strug¬ 
gled against tyranny of old. 
The arts of ancient China and Japan 
and India may make their subtle ap¬ 
peal to those who like subjective ideas; 
those of Egypt and Assyria and old 
Persia to those who love abstract de¬ 
sign. But the art of ancient Greece and 
Rome makes its appeal because it is a 
part of ourselves; because artistically 
we have always been nurtured upon 
it; because it is Occidental and origi¬ 
nated in Europe, not in Asia or Africa; 
because it is the expression of the lib¬ 
erty-loving race that for centuries has 
been nurtured in Northern Europe, 
pouring its hordes southward, first to 
destroy and then to build anew—be¬ 
cause, in short, it is an evolution of our 
very selves that, in all integrity, has 
been traced back for more than 60,000 
years! 
Primitive Art 
Sixty centuries of our own art 1 It 
sounds almost unbelievable, yet it is 
true. There are paintings on the walls 
of certain caves in France that were 
done by our western ancestors 60,000 
years ago. There are carvdngs of ani¬ 
mals in motion, exquisitely incised on 
bones, that have been found in these 
caves that were made when southern 
Europe was still in the glacial period. 
These paintings and carvings were 
done almost exactly in the manner of 
the old incised sculptures that mark the 
beginning, so far as we know, of art 
in Greece, four thousand years ago. 
This kinship is made binding from the 
fact that the style of these prehistoric 
works is utterly different from that 
which marked the beginnings of art in 
other continents and among other races. 
It sought to depict objects in life, as 
they really looked and acted, rather 
than as geometrical symbols and de¬ 
signs, as was the case with the pre¬ 
historic arts of Egypt and of Asia. 
This 60,000 year old art, belonging to 
what geologists call the “quatenary 
period,” was the product of the rein¬ 
deer hunters, a race of men that lived 
by hunting and fishing, and that by 
the very nature of their lives were 
enemies of despotism, men who were 
as free as the dashing rivers and the 
fleet-footed deer that they hunted; men 
who did not exist in droves, to gain a 
living under the whip of the task¬ 
master, but who lived together merely 
to help each other in the struggle for 
existence. It is not inconceivable that 
our reindeer hunting ancestors went 
north with the reindeer itself, and when 
southern, Europe became warm and 
damp, and afterward acted as the great 
reservoir which, for countless centuries, 
sent its Caucasian hordes southward to 
destroy and to rebuild, to become the 
ancestors of the Greeks and the Ro¬ 
mans and the founders of Occidental 
civilization itself. 
The First Ornamentation 
The people who lived in masses, and 
led gregarious existences, made their 
first essays at ornamentation by using 
geometrical lines. They found it easier 
to work in this static manner, than to 
attempt the realism of the reindeer 
hunters. Quick eyes had these free an¬ 
cestors of ours, for they depicted, by 
lamplight, in their ancient caves, the 
'positions of animals in flight which are 
too quick for the eye of modern man 
to record, and which have only been 
verified by the use of instantaneous 
photography. 
Of course, the art of our ancestors of 
60,000 years ago is far too precious and 
rare to be thought of in terms of mod¬ 
ern decoration. It is a pity that this is 
so, for, in all seriousness, it has a beauty, 
a grace, a “virtuosity” seldom found 
even, in the works of the greatest of 
modern masters. The reindeer hunters 
were marvelous draughtsmen and they 
were thoroughly “modem” in their 
hatred of superfluous detail. They could 
incise a simple line that was wonder¬ 
fully beautiful and expressive. 
Early Greek Art 
Available objects of decoration in the 
Occident date back only a matter of 
four thousand years, to the so-called 
“Minoan” period of Greece (2000-1SOO 
B. C.). This was succeeded by the 
Mycenaean period (1500-1100 B. C.), 
which was ended by a terrific invasion 
of northern barbarians that drove early 
Greek civilization off the mainland to a 
few fortified islands. After this art had 
to have a new beginning, a rebirth that 
transpired from 1100 to 550 B. C. (the 
Hellenic “Middle Ages”)—a period com¬ 
monly given the term “archaic”. Count¬ 
less specimens of this archaic art sur¬ 
vive. It had purity of design and a 
certain stiff formalism, although never 
the formalism of Egypt and Assyria, 
and some of our modern sculptors have 
taken it as a motive, notably the Amer¬ 
ican, Paul Manship. It had a spiritual 
element, somewhat akin to the Gothic 
art of our own “Middle Ages”. 
Greek classical art began with the 
year 550 B. C., and it came in with a 
smile. This is literally true, for the 
first time that a human smile appeared 
in art, so far as we know, was in a 
piece of sculpture to which the experts 
have assigned that date. Greek artists 
all of a sudden began to express human 
sentiment, and henceforth development 
was rapid. Heretofore sculpture had 
been confined to the depiction of types, 
but now came the age of the athletes, 
and representation became truly indi¬ 
vidual. Human emotions rather than 
the fixed symbols of character began to 
be depicted. 
Phidias 
Only sixty years passed from the time 
the first smile appeared in art until 
Greece was plunged into the Persian 
wars, and had to fight for its existence. 
The struggle lasted eleven years, when 
Greece drove out the hated invader, but 
not until her temples had been razed 
and much of her old monumental art 
destroyed. This combined victory and 
catastrophe brought the golden age of 
sculpture to Greece. The first great 
name was Phidias, the friend of Pericles, 
into whose charge was given the orna¬ 
mentation of new Athens, and the 
building of the Parthenon on the Acro¬ 
polis, which, under his direction, be¬ 
came the most beautiful building that 
was ever erected by human hands. 
It was with singing souls and mighty 
spirits that Greece rebuilt itself. Art 
became living and triumphant, and 
entered on a period of development that 
produced besides Phidias, the immortal 
Myron, Polyclitus, Praxiteles and 
Scopas. 
It may be retelling an old story, but 
it is absorbingly interesting to the stu¬ 
dent of art to trace this development. 
The works of Myron, Polyclitus and 
Phidias, beautiful as they were, retained 
some of the austerity and coldness of 
the archaic period. It was not wholly 
human. It took another war and an¬ 
other period of suffering to bring about 
the change that made it thoroughly 
human. Sparta fought Athens, con¬ 
quered her and humiliated her, and then 
Praxiteles and Scopas produced sculp¬ 
ture that portrayed spiritual suffering 
and human thought. The prominent 
eyes that had heretofore characterized 
Greek sculpture were put further back 
into the head and art became thoroughly 
expressive of the human mind and the 
human soul. 
Another war brought still another 
{Continued on page 100) 
