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F O R E W O R D

When man first awakened toward the arts he had only a fragment of stone with which he etched in the very rock the great figures of animals, the mammoth, the bear, the giant stag. Here precisely we have the first examples of direct carving. We have seen the great Egyptian and Chaldean stone sculptures and bas-reliefs, and the indescribable beauty of the oriental, of the Chinese, the Indo-Chinese, the Javanese. All primitive peoples practised direct carving because it allows the spirit to reveal itself with the greatest emotional intensity. It was in the XIIth and XIIIth centuries that we find the flowering of stone sculpture in Europe; the work of those skilled anonymous artisans who, carving with love and reverence, achieved the great statues on the cathedral of Chartres. 

As civilization became more complex the tendency among sculptors has been to abandon the noble virtues of the artisans, and to make up for a deficiency of technical knowledge by cleverness in modelling, and by giving their work over to some other hand; that of caster, stone pointer, or worker in marble to bring it to its final form. Thereby much of its primary intention has been lost. 

To the modern sculptor is given the task of revivifying his art; and in America, I feel, are great potentialities for creating a return to a stronger and more direct expression, and of arresting a tendency toward decadence and commercialism in the art of sculpture today.