When and how did art originate? Folk art of Russia: types, genres, examples Folk craftsmanship

Collective artistic creative activity, reflecting the life of the ethnic group, its ideals, its views, has absorbed the folk art of Russia. Epos, fairy tales, legends were created and existed among the people from generation to generation - this is a genre of poetry, original music sounded - plays, tunes, songs, theatrical performances were a favorite festive spectacle - mainly it was a puppet theater. But dramas and satirical plays were also staged there. The folk art of Russia also penetrated deeply into dance, fine arts, arts and crafts. Russian dances also originated in ancient times. The folk art of Russia has erected a historical foundation for modern artistic culture, has become a source of artistic traditions, a spokesman for the self-consciousness of the people.

Orally and in writing

Written literary works appeared much later than those oral gems that filled the precious casket of folklore since pagan times. Those very proverbs, sayings, riddles, songs and round dances, spells and charms, epics and fairy tales, which the folk art of Russia cut to a brilliant shine. The ancient Russian epic reflected the spirituality of our people, traditions, real events, features of life, revealed and preserved the exploits of historical characters. So, for example, Vladimir the Red Sun, everyone's favorite prince, served as a prototype for the real prince - Vladimir Svyatoslavovich, the hero Dobrynya Nikitich - the uncle of Vladimir the First, the boyar Dobrynya. The types of oral folk art are exceptionally diverse.

With the advent of Christianity in the tenth century, great Russian literature, its history, begins. Gradually, with its help, the Old Russian language was formed, which became unified. The first books - handwritten, were decorated with gold and other precious metals, gems, enamel. They were very expensive, because people did not know them for a long time. However, with the strengthening of religion, books penetrated into the most remote corners of the Russian land, since the people needed to know the works of Ephraim the Syrian, John Chrysostom and other religious translated literature. The original Russian is now represented by chronicles, biographies of saints (lives), rhetorical teachings ("Words", one of them is "The Tale of Igor's Campaign"), walking (or walking, travel notes) and many other genres that are not so well known . The fourteenth century produced a whole series of monuments of folklore of exceptional significance. Some types of oral folk art, such as epic, passed into the category of written ones. So there were "Sadko" and "Vasily Buslaev", recorded by the storytellers.

Examples of folk art

Oral creativity has served as a storehouse of people's memory. The heroic opposition to the Tatar-Mongol yoke and other invaders was sung from mouth to mouth. It was on the basis of such songs that the stories that have survived to this day were created: about the battle on Kalka, where "seventy great and brave" get our freedom, about Evpaty Kolovrat, who defended Ryazan from Batu, about Mercury, who defended Smolensk. Russia kept the facts against the Baskak Shevkal, about Shchelkan Dudentevich, and these songs were sung far beyond the borders of the principality of Tver. The compilers of epics conveyed to distant descendants the events of the Kulikovo field, and the old images of Russian heroes were still used by the people for folk works dedicated to the fight against the Golden Horde.

Until the end of the tenth century, the inhabitants of Kiev-Novgorod Rus did not yet know writing. However, this pre-literary period has brought to our days the golden verbal works passed from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation. And now festivals of folk art in Russia are held, where all the same songs, tales and epics of a thousand years ago are heard. Epics, songs, fairy tales, legends, riddles, sayings, proverbs can be attributed to the ancient genres that still sound today. Most of the folklore works that have come down to us are poetry. The poetic form makes it easy to memorize texts, and therefore, for many centuries, folklore works were passed down through generations, changing to expediency, polished from one talented storyteller to another.

Small genres

Small-scale works belong to small genres of folklore. These are parables: puns, tongue twisters, proverbs, jokes, riddles, signs, sayings, proverbs, what oral folk art gave us. Riddles are one of such artistic manifestations of folk poetry, which originated orally. A hint or allegory, a roundabout, roundabout speech - an allegorical description in a brief form of an object - this is what a riddle is according to V. I. Dahl. In other words, an allegorical depiction of the phenomena of reality or an object that is to be guessed. Even here, oral folk art provided for multivariance. Riddles can be descriptions, allegories, questions, tasks. Most often they consist of two parts - a question and an answer, riddles and riddles, interconnected. In terms of subject matter, they are diverse and closely related to work and life: the animal and plant world, nature, tools and activities.

Proverbs and sayings that have survived to this day from the most ancient times are well-aimed expressions, wise thoughts. Most often, they are also two-part, where the parts are proportionate and often rhyme. The meaning of sayings and proverbs is usually direct and figurative, containing morality. Often we see in proverbs and sayings multivariance, that is, many variants of a proverb with the same morality. generalizing meaning, which is higher. The oldest of them date back to the twelfth century. The history of Russian folk art notes that many proverbs have survived to this day shortened, sometimes even losing their original meaning. So, they say: "He ate a dog in this case," implying high professionalism, but the Russian people continued in the old days: "Yes, he choked on his tail." I mean, no, it's not that high.

Music

The ancient types of folk musical creativity in Russia are based primarily on the song genre. A song is a musical and verbal genre at the same time, either a lyrical or narrative work, which is intended purely for singing. songs can be lyrical, dance, ritual, historical, and all of them express both the aspirations of an individual and the feelings of many people, they are always in tune with the social inner state.

Whether there are love experiences, thoughts about fate, a description of whether social or family life - this should always be interesting to listeners, and without adding a state of mind to the song, as many people as possible will not listen to the singer. The people are very fond of the technique of parallelism, when the mood of the lyrical hero is transferred to nature. "Why are you standing, swaying," The night has no bright moon, "for example. And almost rarely comes across a folk song in which this parallelism is absent. Even in historical songs -" Ermak "," Stepan Razin "and others - it is constantly found. From As a result, the emotional sound of the song becomes much stronger, and the song itself is perceived much brighter.

Bylina and fairy tale

The genre of folk art took shape much earlier than the ninth century, and the term "epic" appeared only in the nineteenth century and denoted a heroic song of an epic nature. We know the epics that were sung in the ninth century, although they certainly were not the first, they simply did not reach us, lost in the centuries. Every child knows epic heroes well - heroes who embodied the ideal of national patriotism, courage and strength: the merchant Sadko and Ilya Muromets, the giant Svyatogor and Mikula Selyaninovich. The plot of the epic is most often filled with life situationality, but it is significantly enriched with fantastic fictions: they have a teleport (they can instantly overcome distances from Murom to Kiev), defeat the army alone ("as it waves to the right - there will be a street, as it waves to the left - lane" ), and, of course, monsters: three-headed dragons - Gorynychi Serpents. The types of Russian folk art in oral genres are not limited to this. There are also fairy tales and legends.

Epics differ from fairy tales in that in the latter events are completely fictional. Fairy tales are of two types: everyday and magical. The most diverse, but ordinary people are depicted in everyday life - princes and princesses, kings and kings, soldiers and workers, peasants and priests in the most ordinary setting. And fairy tales necessarily attract fantastic forces, produce artifacts with miraculous properties, and so on. The fairy tale is usually optimistic, and this is what distinguishes it from the plot of other genre works. In fairy tales, only good usually wins, evil forces always fail and are ridiculed in every possible way. A legend, unlike a fairy tale, is an oral story about a miracle, a fantastic image, an incredible event, which should be perceived as authentic by the narrator and listeners. Pagan legends about the creation of the world, the origin of countries, seas, peoples, about the exploits of both fictional and real heroes have come down to us.

Today

The contemporary folk art of Russia cannot represent precisely the ethnic culture, since this culture is pre-industrial. Any modern settlement - from the smallest village to the metropolis - is a fusion of various ethnic groups, and the natural development of each without the slightest mixing and borrowing is simply impossible. What is now called folk art is rather a deliberate stylization, folklorization, behind which stands professional art, which was inspired by ethnic motifs.

Sometimes this is both amateur creativity, like mass culture, and the work of handicraftsmen. In fairness, it should be noted that only folk crafts - arts and crafts - can be recognized as the purest and still developing. There is still present, in addition to professional, and ethnic creativity, although production has long been put on the conveyor and the possibilities for improvisation are scanty.

People and creativity

What do people mean by the word people? The population of a country, a nation. But, for example, dozens of original ethnic groups live in Russia, and folk art has common features that are present in the sum of all ethnic groups. Chuvashs, Tatars, Maris, even Chukchis - don't musicians, artists, architects borrow from each other in modern art? But their common features are comprehended by the elite culture. And that is why, in addition to nesting dolls, we have a certain export product, which is our joint business card. A minimum of opposition, a maximum of general unification within the nation, this is the direction of the modern creativity of the peoples of Russia. Today it is:

• ethnic (folklore) creativity,
• amateur art,
• creativity of the common people,
• amateur creativity.

The craving for aesthetic activity will be alive as long as a person is alive. That is why art flourishes today.

Art, creativity hobby

Art is practiced by the elite, where extraordinary talent is required, and works are an indicator of the level of aesthetic development of mankind. It has little to do with folk art, except for inspiration: all composers, for example, wrote symphonies using the melodies of folk songs. But this is by no means it, not a folk song. The property of traditional culture is creativity as an indicator of the development of a team or an individual. Such a culture can develop successfully and multilaterally. And the result of mass culture, like a template of a master, donated to the people for feasible repetition, is a hobby, an aesthetic of this kind, which is designed to relieve tension from the mechanicalness of modern life.

Here you can see some signs of the primordial beginning, drawing themes and means of expression in folk art. These are quite common technological processes: weaving, embroidery, carving, forging and casting, decorative painting, embossing, and so on. True folk art did not know the contrasts of changes in artistic styles for a whole millennium. Now it is greatly enriched in modern folk art. The degree of stylization changes, as does the nature of the comprehension of all the old borrowed motifs.

applied arts

From the most gray-haired antiquity, the folk applied art of Russia has been known. This is perhaps the only species that has not undergone fundamental changes to this day. From time immemorial and to this day, these objects have been used to decorate and improve domestic and social life. Rural craft mastered even rather complex designs, quite suitable for modern life.

Although now all these items are not so much practical as aesthetic load. This includes jewelry, whistles, toys, and interior decorations. Different areas and regions had their own types of arts, crafts and needlework. The most famous and prominent are the following.

Scarves and samovars

The Orenburg shawl is both warm and heavy shawls, and weightless scarves and gossamer shawls. Knitting patterns that came from afar are unique, they identify eternal truths in the understanding of harmony, beauty, order. The goats of the Orenburg region are also special, they give unusual fluff, it can be spun finely and firmly. To match the eternal knitters of Orenburg and Tula masters. They were not pioneers: the first copper samovar was found in the excavations of the Volga city of Dubovka, the discovery dates back to the beginning of the Middle Ages.

In Russia, tea took root in the seventeenth century. But the first samovar workshops did appear in Tula. This unit is still in honor, and tea drinking from a samovar on pine cones is quite an ordinary phenomenon in summer cottages. They are extremely diverse in shape and decoration - barrels, vases, with ligature painting, embossing, decorations for handles and taps, genuine works of art, moreover, extremely comfortable in everyday life. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century, up to 1200 samovars were produced in Tula a year! They were sold by weight. Brass cost sixty-four rubles a pood, and red copper ones cost ninety. This is very big money.

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17 most beautiful types of Russian folk art.

Folk crafts are exactly what makes our culture rich and unique. Painted objects, toys and fabric products are taken away by foreign tourists in memory of our country.

Almost every corner of Russia has its own type of needlework, and in this material we have collected the brightest and most famous of them.

Dymkovo toy

The Dymkovo toy is a symbol of the Kirov region, emphasizing its rich and ancient history. It is molded from clay, then dried and fired in a kiln. After that, it is painted by hand, each time creating a unique copy. No two toys are the same.

Zhostovo painting

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Vishnyakov brothers lived in one of the villages near Moscow in the former Troitskaya volost (now the Mytishchi district), and they painted lacquered metal trays, sugar bowls, pallets, papier-mâché boxes, cigarette cases, tea caddies, albums and other things. Since then, artistic painting in the Zhostovo style began to gain popularity and attract attention at numerous exhibitions in our country and abroad.

Khokhloma

Khokhloma is one of the most beautiful Russian crafts, which originated in the 17th century near Nizhny Novgorod. This is a decorative painting of furniture and wooden utensils, which is loved not only by connoisseurs of Russian antiquity, but also by residents of foreign countries.

Intricately intertwined herbal patterns of bright scarlet berries and golden leaves on a black background can be admired endlessly. Therefore, even traditional wooden spoons, presented on the most insignificant occasion, leave the kindest and longest memory of the donor in the recipient.

Gorodets painting

Gorodets painting has existed since the middle of the 19th century. Bright, laconic patterns reflect genre scenes, figures of horses, roosters, floral ornaments. The painting is done with a free stroke with a white and black graphic stroke, decorates spinning wheels, furniture, shutters, doors.

Filigree

Filigree is one of the oldest types of artistic metal processing. Elements of a filigree pattern are very diverse: in the form of a rope, lace, weaving, Christmas trees, paths, smooth surface. Weaves are made of very thin gold or silver wires, so they look light and fragile.

Ural malachite

Known deposits of malachite are in the Urals, Africa, South Australia and the USA, however, in terms of color and beauty of patterns, malachite from foreign countries cannot be compared with the Urals. Therefore, malachite from the Urals is considered the most valuable in the world market.

Gusevskoy crystal

Products made at the crystal factory in the city of Gus-Khrustalny can be found in museums around the world. Traditional Russian souvenirs, household items, sets for the festive table, elegant jewelry, boxes, handmade figurines reflect the beauty of native nature, its customs and native Russian values. Colored crystal products are especially popular.

Matryoshka

A round-faced and plump cheerful girl in a scarf and a Russian folk dress won the hearts of lovers of folk toys and beautiful souvenirs around the world.

Now the nesting doll is not just a folk toy, the keeper of Russian culture: it is a memorable souvenir for tourists, on the apron of which game scenes, fairy tale plots and landscapes with sights are finely drawn. Matryoshka has become a precious collectible that can cost more than one hundred dollars.

Enamel

Vintage brooches, bracelets, pendants, which have rapidly “entered” into modern fashion, are nothing more than jewelry made using the enamel technique. This type of applied art originated in the 17th century in the Vologda region.

Masters depicted floral ornaments, birds, animals on white enamel using a variety of colors. Then the art of multi-colored enamel began to be lost, it began to be replaced by monochromatic enamel: white, blue and green. Now both styles are successfully combined.

Tula samovar

In his free time, Fyodor Lisitsyn, an employee of the Tula Arms Plant, liked to make something from copper, and once made a samovar. Then his sons opened a samovar establishment, where they sold copper products, which were wildly successful.

Lisitsyn's samovars were famous for their variety of shapes and finishes: barrels, vases with chasing and engraving, egg-shaped samovars with dolphin-shaped taps, loop-shaped handles, and painted ones.

Palekh miniature

Palekh miniature is a special, subtle, poetic vision of the world, which is characteristic of Russian folk beliefs and songs. The painting uses brown-orange and bluish-green tones.

Palekh painting has no analogues in the whole world. It is made on papier-mâché and only then transferred to the surface of caskets of various shapes and sizes.

Gzhel

Gzhel bush, a district of 27 villages located near Moscow, is famous for its clays, which have been mined here since the middle of the 17th century. In the 19th century, Gzhel masters began to produce semi-faience, faience and porcelain. Of particular interest are still products painted in one color - blue overglaze paint applied with a brush, with graphic rendering of details.

Pavlovo Posad shawls

Bright and light, feminine Pavloposad shawls are always fashionable and relevant. This folk craft appeared at the end of the 18th century at a peasant enterprise in the village of Pavlovo, from which a handkerchief manufactory subsequently developed. It produced woolen shawls with a printed pattern, very popular at that time.

Folk crafts are exactly what makes our culture rich and unique. Painted objects, toys and fabric products are taken away by foreign tourists in memory of our country.
Almost every corner of Russia has its own type of needlework, and in this material we have collected the brightest and most famous of them.

Dymkovo toy

I love you Russia


The Dymkovo toy is a symbol of the Kirov region, emphasizing its rich and ancient history. It is molded from clay, then dried and fired in a kiln. After that, it is painted by hand, each time creating a unique copy. No two toys are the same.

Zhostovo painting


At the beginning of the 19th century, the Vishnyakov brothers lived in one of the villages near Moscow in the former Troitskaya volost (now the Mytishchi district), and they painted lacquered metal trays, sugar bowls, pallets, papier-mâché boxes, cigarette cases, tea caddies, albums and other things. Since then, artistic painting in the Zhostovo style began to gain popularity and attract attention at numerous exhibitions in our country and abroad.

Khokhloma


Khokhloma is one of the most beautiful Russian crafts, which originated in the 17th century near Nizhny Novgorod. This is a decorative painting of furniture and wooden utensils, which is loved not only by connoisseurs of Russian antiquity, but also by residents of foreign countries.
Intricately intertwined herbal patterns of bright scarlet berries and golden leaves on a black background can be admired endlessly. Therefore, even traditional wooden spoons, presented on the most insignificant occasion, leave the kindest and longest memory of the donor in the recipient.

Gorodets painting


Gorodets painting has existed since the middle of the 19th century. Bright, laconic patterns reflect genre scenes, figures of horses, roosters, floral ornaments. The painting is done with a free stroke with a white and black graphic stroke, decorates spinning wheels, furniture, shutters, doors.

Ural malachite




Known deposits of malachite are in the Urals, Africa, South Australia and the USA, however, in terms of color and beauty of patterns, malachite from foreign countries cannot be compared with the Urals. Therefore, malachite from the Urals is considered the most valuable in the world market.

Gusevskoy crystal


Products made at the crystal factory in the city of Gus-Khrustalny can be found in museums around the world. Traditional Russian souvenirs, household items, sets for the festive table, elegant jewelry, boxes, handmade figurines reflect the beauty of native nature, its customs and native Russian values. Colored crystal products are especially popular.

Matryoshka


A round-faced and plump cheerful girl in a scarf and a Russian folk dress won the hearts of lovers of folk toys and beautiful souvenirs around the world.
Now the nesting doll is not just a folk toy, the keeper of Russian culture: it is a memorable souvenir for tourists, on the apron of which game scenes, fairy tale plots and landscapes with sights are finely drawn. Matryoshka has become a precious collectible that can cost more than one hundred dollars.

Enamel




Vintage brooches, bracelets, pendants, which have rapidly “entered” into modern fashion, are nothing more than jewelry made using the enamel technique. This type of applied art originated in the 17th century in the Vologda region.
Masters depicted floral ornaments, birds, animals on white enamel using a variety of colors. Then the art of multi-colored enamel began to be lost, it began to be replaced by monochromatic enamel: white, blue and green. Now both styles are successfully combined.

Tula samovar


In his free time, Fyodor Lisitsyn, an employee of the Tula Arms Plant, liked to make something from copper, and once made a samovar. Then his sons opened a samovar establishment, where they sold copper products, which were wildly successful.
Lisitsyn's samovars were famous for their variety of shapes and finishes: barrels, vases with chasing and engraving, egg-shaped samovars with dolphin-shaped taps, loop-shaped handles, and painted ones.

Palekh miniature


Palekh miniature is a special, subtle, poetic vision of the world, which is characteristic of Russian folk beliefs and songs. The painting uses brown-orange and bluish-green tones.
Palekh painting has no analogues in the whole world. It is made on papier-mâché and only then transferred to the surface of caskets of various shapes and sizes.

Gzhel


Gzhel bush, a district of 27 villages located near Moscow, is famous for its clays, which have been mined here since the middle of the 17th century. In the 19th century, Gzhel masters began to produce semi-faience, faience and porcelain. Of particular interest are still products painted in one color - blue overglaze paint applied with a brush, with graphic rendering of details.

Pavlovo Posad shawls


Bright and light, feminine Pavloposad shawls are always fashionable and relevant. This folk craft appeared at the end of the 18th century at a peasant enterprise in the village of Pavlovo, from which a handkerchief manufactory subsequently developed. It produced woolen shawls with a printed pattern, very popular at that time.
Now original drawings are complemented by various elements such as fringe, created in different colors and remain a great accessory to almost any look.

Vologda lace


Vologda lace is woven on wooden sticks, bobbins. All images are made with a dense, continuous, uniform in width, smoothly wriggling linen braid. They clearly stand out against the background of patterned lattices, decorated with elements in the form of stars and rosettes.

Shemogoda carved birch bark


Shemogod carving is a traditional Russian folk art craft of birch bark carving. The ornaments of Shemogoda carvers are called "birch lace" and are used in the manufacture of caskets, boxes, tea caddies, pencil cases, tuesov, dishes, plates, cigarette cases.
The symmetrical pattern of Shemogoda carving consists of floral ornaments, circles, rhombuses, and ovals. Images of birds or animals, architectural motifs, and sometimes even scenes of walking in the garden and drinking tea can be inscribed in the drawing.

Tula gingerbread




Tula gingerbread is a Russian delicacy. Without these sweet and fragrant products, not a single event took place in Russia - neither cheerful nor sad. Gingerbread was served both at the royal table and at the peasant table. The traditional form is given to the gingerbread with the help of a board with a carved ornament.

Orenburg downy shawl

Shawls are knitted from natural goat down and are amazingly delicate, beautiful, warm and practical. Openwork shawls are so thin and elegant that they can be threaded through a wedding ring. They are valued by women all over the world and are considered a wonderful gift.

The cradle of art. About 30 thousand years ago. among the Cro-Magnons there were already people with extraordinary artistic talent. This is obvious from the pictorial, graphic and three-dimensional images that are quite widespread around the planet, which were created over a period of more than 20 thousand years between 32 and 10 millennia BC. There are many such images. In France, more than 160 caves with paintings, drawings and bas-reliefs on the walls are known. In Spain there are 120 such caves, in Italy - 21, in Russia - 2, in Serbia and in England - one each.

Rice. 3.20. "Animal Parade" Chauvet cave, south of France. 31 thousand liters n. The "column" of cave lionesses is a successful attempt at depicting perspective. Many experts believed that only profile images were presented in Paleolithic painting. In the "line" of bison there is practically no profile, all the heads of animals are shown either full face or in three quarters.

During excavations, as well as randomly, hundreds of figurines made of mammoth tusk, soft rocks and fired clay-earth mass were found. They depict people (mostly women), various animals and not very clear figures. The same characters are found in the form of engravings on objects made of bone, horn, mammoth tusk, on tiles made of soft stone or sandstone.

Thanks to the improved method of radiocarbon dating, the age of painting and sculpture is determined quite accurately using molecular spectroscopy. The oldest painting in the world (Cave Chauvet, south of France) dates from 32 thousand years ago. (Fig. 3.20, 3.21).

All the oldest images known to us are either artistic masterpieces, including those according to modern criteria, or normal drawings, such as we see in modern children and adolescents. The same feature is observed in graphics and plastic. Especially in graphics. If an error in an image made with ocher or charcoal can be erased, covered over, or otherwise corrected, then an error in embossing or engraving on a rocky plane cannot be corrected, but such errors either do not exist, or they are extremely rare. The ancient artists had a firm, highly professional hand.

No matter how hard archaeologists and art historians tried to find traces of some kind of evolution in the development of the oldest images from early to later and from simple to complex, as it should be according to the classical laws of evolution, they could not be found and, it seems to me, is unlikely to succeed. The most ancient images from the Chauvet cave are very perfect paintings., in which you can see both perspective, and chiaroscuro, and different angles, etc. (Fig. 3.20, 3.21, 3.22)

This feature of Paleolithic art was best expressed by Z. A. Abramova, the leading specialist in this field. She wrote: "Paleolithic art arises as a bright flash of flame in the mists of time. Having developed unusually quickly from the first timid steps towards polychrome frescoes, this art also abruptly disappeared. It does not find a direct continuation in subsequent eras ... It remains a mystery how the Paleolithic masters reached such a high level of perfection and what were the paths along which the echoes of the art of the Ice Age penetrated the brilliant work of Picasso" (Abramova, 1972, p. 28).

The problem of the "cradle of art" has been occupied by many prominent specialists in recent decades. It excites not only archaeologists, but also art historians, ethnologists, psychologists and many other inquisitive representatives of various humanities and natural sciences. But before continuing the discussion of this topic, it is necessary to make some reservations.

Art or visual activity?

Using the concept of "art" in relation to primitiveness, we voluntarily or involuntarily create some illusion of equality between it and the art of subsequent eras, up to the present. The formulations familiar to modern popular art criticism are widely used when considering the most ancient images ("aesthetic norms and principles", "ideological content", "reflection of life", "composition", "sense of beauty", etc.), but they lead away away from understanding the specifics of primitive art.

Now art is a special area of ​​culture, the boundaries and specialization of which are fully realized by both the creators and the "consumers" of art. In antiquity, this idea either did not exist at all, or it was more vague. In the mind of primitive man, art did not stand out as a special field of activity. The ability to create images, as now, was possessed by rare people, much rarer than now.

In our time, there is a developed system of art education, which, of course, could not have been in the era of the Upper Paleolithic. The artists of that era had such a powerful talent that he himself burst out and splashed bright images on the walls of the caves that overwhelmed the mind. Most likely, the tribesmen attributed to such people some supernatural properties inherent in shamans. This probably put them in special conditions among their relatives. One can only guess about the reliable details of these conditions: whether they were favorable for the ancient artist, or, conversely, forced him to hide his abilities.

The process of people realizing the independent role of art and its various types began only in late antiquity, dragged on for several centuries and ended no earlier than the Renaissance. Therefore, one can speak of primitive "creativity" only in an allegorical sense.

Of course, creativity, as a psychological phenomenon, that is, not always a conscious tension of all spiritual forces and a special surge of emotions, as a result of which something new is born, existed, but its awareness came much later. The entire spiritual life of the Cro-Magnon people took place in a single cultural environment, not divided into separate spheres. It is naive to believe that in primitive art there were artists and spectators, like ours, or that then all people were amateur artists and spectators at the same time (something like our amateur art).

Not entirely convincing is the idea of ​​some colleagues about the leisure that ancient people allegedly filled with various arts. Leisure in our understanding (as time free from "service") they simply did not have, since their life was not divided into work and "non-work". If, at the end of the Upper Paleolithic era, a person, in rare hours, not busy with a tense struggle for existence, had the opportunity to detachedly look around and look at the sky, then this time was filled with ritual and other actions, which were also not idle, but aimed at well-being of one's family and oneself.

So, the concept of "primitive art" does not fully reflect the phenomenon for which it is used. It seems more appropriate instead to use in this context the concept of "pictorial activity", introduced into the Russian-language archaeological literature by A. A. Miller and which has undergone a long approbation (B. B. Piotrovsky, A. D. Stolyar, etc.). Of course, we are not talking about some kind of ban on the concept of "primitive art". We will continue to use it in the future, but it is desirable to take into account the features that distinguish primitive visual activity from the visual arts of subsequent eras.

In this book, primitive art is considered to be the artistic activity of those times and regions, when and where it was not yet recognized as an independent area of ​​culture, when it was part of a single and integral set of elements of sign behavior of people, regardless of which era of historical chronology we attribute it to. . In other words, this is a certain artistic tradition in which the style and other features of the work of a certain person do not clearly go beyond the boundaries of the tradition characteristic of this culture and era. A good example of such an integral set of elements of sign behavior is church services, each type of which has been preserved in a certain order for many hundreds of years. Almost all the arts (images, music, singing, theatrical performance, etc.) are combined in their single action.

Was the Neanderthal an artist?

In search of the origins of art, many experts turn to the Neanderthal. Since recently everyone considered him to be our immediate evolutionary ancestor, it was natural to assume that the first imperfect images, like those drawn by our children in preschool age, must have been created by him. This is what some of my colleagues are saying right now.

In the absence of absolute dates, there was a wide scope for speculative constructions. Some believed that the earliest images were handprints and the so-called "pasta", that is, winding lines made by fingers along the damp surface of the cave wall. Others saw the origins of the art in scratches and incisions on the bones, coming from the layers of the era when the Neanderthals lived. Still others tried to build an evolution from a "natural layout" to a three-dimensional image, and from it to graphics and painting.

The "natural layout" is something like a stuffed animal: the skin of a killed and eaten animal was covered with an elevation of earth and stones, and ritual actions were organized around it. According to this hypothesis, it was assumed that the most ancient form of visual activity was a natural layout, which eventually evolved into planar graphics and only then into painting. After the discovery of the oldest painting in the Chauvet cave in 1994, it became clear that such an idea of ​​the evolution of pictorial activity does not correspond to the known facts. All visual techniques (volume, graphics and painting) appeared almost simultaneously.

Food for new reflections on the art of the Neanderthal was given by two finds made relatively recently. In 1981, during excavations at the Paleolithic site of Berehat Ram (Israel), an object made of rounded volcanic tuff was found in a layer of volcanic lava, similar to a blank for making an anthropomorphic figurine 3.5 cm high (Fig. 3.23). The head, neck, shoulders, arms and bust were marked with scratched grooves on the workpiece (Goren-Inbar, 1986 and many others).

The geological level in which this object was found lies between two well-dated volcanic layers, indicating that between 150 and 280 thousand years ago. n. there were people on the territory of the monument. The opinions of experts about the nature of the grooves on the surface of this object were initially divided, but F. d'Errico and E. Nowell studied these grooves using optical and electron microscopes. For comparison, samples of the same tuff from the same layer were used. Grooves were applied to these specimens with tools similar to those found on the territory of the site. Some parts of the workpiece or figurine are polished so that the figurine could stand on the surface. The experiment showed that the processing of the subject could last from 15 to 30 minutes. It left a fairly large amount of red coloring powder, which could be used to make a dye. The figurine is similar to anthropomorphic images typical of the Upper Paleolithic of Europe. There is no doubt that the object was made with care, its features were carefully considered, and it cannot be put on a par with the finds of pieces of mineral dyes that are found in Europe and Africa in the layers of the lower and middle Paleolithic. Most likely it was a pendant. The groove separating the neck from the body was convenient for suspension (d'Errico, Nowell, 2000).

The second figurine made of metamorphic quartzite was found in the south of Morocco near the city of Tan-Tan in the Acheulian layer (Fig. 3.24). Judging by the publication (Bednarik, 2001), it has not yet been subjected to the same thorough research as the first one.

According to data that there is no reason to doubt, the statuette from Berehat-Ram comes from the Mousterian or even from the Acheulian layer. Seemingly, - here is the actual proof of the existence of Neanderthal or even erectus art. However, one should not rush to conclusions based on a single find. The formation of modern man took place mainly in Africa and the Middle East. To Europe Homo sapiens sapiens came already "ready".

A characteristic feature of the Paleolithic of the Eastern Mediterranean was the coexistence of stone processing technologies characteristic of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Human bones found in the Mousterian layers of the Qafzeh cave are morphologically closer to Homo sapiens than to the Neanderthal (Kozintsev, 1993). At a time when modern man did not yet exist in Europe, he could already appear in the Middle East. Then it is possible that the statuette from Berehat Ram was made by an early sapiens.

Of course, all of this is nothing more than a guess. In any case, against the background of hundreds of caves with paintings, drawings and plastics, dozens of which are dated by radioactive carbon, against the background of many hundreds of statuettes and other small and large three-dimensional and flat images found in the Upper Paleolithic layers of European sites, a statuette from Berekhat-Ram while it is difficult to consider convincing evidence of the early "prehistory" of art. Moreover, this figurine does not testify to any initial links in the evolution of visual activity and cannot be considered as a transitional form from “non-art” to art.

My British colleague Paul Bahn published an article in a popular magazine with the beautiful title "Don't Look for the Cradle of Art" (Bahn, 2000, pp. 206-208). Partly I agree with him. In the sense that the "cradle" of art, apparently, was located in the same place as the cradle of a person of a modern anthropological type. One should hardly hope that someday material evidence of evolution from primitive signs to highly artistic images will be found.

Evolution undoubtedly took place, but it developed latently and manifested itself not in some signs on material carriers, but in the development of the entire system of higher nervous activity during the formation Homo sapiens sapiens as a special kind. It can be assumed that such development did not take place according to some single "standard", but, due to the extreme complexity of the system, with certain deviations in one direction or another.

As a result, some people began to differ in that, with more emotional and vivid imaginative thinking, connections between the hemispheres of the brain and the hand closed more firmly than others, and then the bright images of the environment that overwhelmed their consciousness began to form a stable focus of psychological stress, turning into neurosis (Davidenkov, 1947, 1975). Since it is impossible to live in a state of neurosis for a long time, there arose a semi-instinctive need to get rid of the main source of neurosis - visual images crowding in the mind. And they moved to the walls of caves, on the plane of rocks, on the surface of objects made of bone and mammoth tusk, and also embodied in bas-reliefs and three-dimensional plastic.

Unlike scientific literature, which requires verified facts and rigorous proof, in a popular science book you can make guesses. In general, no science can exist without intuitive guesses. It is possible that in the genetic apparatus Homo sapiens sapiens along with Chomsky's "generative grammar", a similar structure was formed, operating not with verbal, but with figurative texts

Until the beginning of the 90s. 20th century in our archaeological and art criticism literature, burdened with Marxist ideology, the hypothesis was widespread that art was formed on the basis of labor and labor actions. It does not find confirmation, primarily because everyone worked, and very few, endowed with special artistic abilities, began to draw. Labor actions require the mobilization of analytical thinking (for right-handed people it is left-hemispheric), and artistic talent is the dominance of figurative thinking, that is, right-hemispheric thinking and a certain combination of individual psychological qualities laid down genetically.

Of course, in the previous lines, the problem of the origin of visual activity is extremely simplified and schematized, but its essence is preserved, and it is hardly appropriate to present such a hypothesis in detail, using special terminology, in a popular book. Several books have already been published on this subject (Cher, eds., 1998; 2006; Lorblanchet, 1999; Lewis-Williams, 2002).

To be continued...

art, synthetic in nature, originally associated with human labor activity and representing both material and spiritual culture. N. and. goes back to the syncretism of primitive culture, retains at its core the mythological and poetic sense of the world. Develops as a collective creativity based on continuity and tradition; is predominantly epic in nature (Epos), which is also determined by the very type of creativity, the collective method of working on an image based on detail, repetition and variation. The figurative structure of N. also preserves the original image, which is included in the synthesis with its variations and new elements into a single artist. product integrity. Synthesis is inherent in the very imagery of N. and .. in the principles of shaping, where the generic essence and function are decisive. Syntheticity is also manifested in the connection in one product. plastic, pictorial, graphic, architectonic beginnings. On the basis of synthesis in N. and. an image-type is formed, figurative systems are determined, ensembles arise, an aesthetic criterion is formed. Bourgeois science does not study folk art as a special kind of art, that is, in the aspect of its artistic. specificity and figurative and expressive means. Considered exclusively in the light of the concepts of Freudianism, ethnopsychologism, structuralism, it is defined as “impersonal”, “unconscious” creativity and only as a product of urban culture, supposedly sinking into the peasant masses, although it has nourished urban art in all epochs. Thus, the Canadian sociologist M. McLuhan sees in folk art a kind of "collective dream". Sometimes folk art is interpreted in the West so broadly that even advertising is included in it. Soviet aesthetics and art history assert a meaningful approach to the study of N. and. It is considered as a living phenomenon of the artist. culture as a special type of art. creativity, interacting with another type - individualized creativity. If N.'s specificity was not allocated earlier and. as an independent phenomenon of culture and it was equated either with the art industry or with amateur creativity, then at present it has received an independent, generic status, which opens up new perspectives not only in its study, but also in solving the problems of art. practices. On modern N.'s stage and. has four forms of existence and development. The first form is N. i., not isolated from its ethnographic environment, associated with the national, social way of life that gave rise to it. This is N. and. remote regions of the USSR, closed due to special geographical conditions. Responding to aesthetic requests, N. and. also serves the practical needs of the population (felt mats, pottery, etc.). Represented by this form N. and. lives as an element of people's national consciousness. The second form is the work of individual masters, based on collective experience, preserving and developing the artist. tradition. Main its stimulus is the need for creativity itself. Each Soviet republic has its own craftsmen - carvers, potters, masters of weaving, embroidery. The third form is artistic. handicraft (artistic crafts), growing spontaneously on the basis of local cultural tradition, supported by demand from outside. The fourth form is artistic. fishing on the basis of workshops with the necessary equipment. Existing in the specified four forms, N. and. retains the overall creative structure of development, focused on canonical systems, on tradition, living in oral-visual transmission. It reflects the cultural and psychological structures associated with ethnic identity, is based on a culture of craftsmanship, on collective experience.