The folk print
The wood block (also used for stamping textiles) was the natural folk medium for making prints. Usually simply cut and sometimes crudely coloured or stenciled, they served to illustrate popular subjects, with more interest often in the idea than in the depiction itself. Small prints of various saints were widely produced in Europe. Comic themes were popular, such as the “topsy-turvy world” and “man reversed” (e.g., “the fish catches the man”) and stock characters. Block printing was also used to produce games, announcements for traveling shows, and forms for certificates. The English broadsheets and the Mexican calaveras (literally “skulls,” a category of prints, sometimes made from lead cuts) offer outstanding examples of the cheap printed sheets that combined a verbal message (verses, proverbs, polemics, pious themes) with illustration. The 19th-century trade cards (notice for a shop or service) are sometimes included in folk art, but doubtfully so; they were often machine printed. In fact, it is difficult to segregate the print of truly folk character from the voluminous field of either “popular” or commercial printing.
Other arts
In the folk field, the minor arts can hardly be called minor, for such universal necessities as pottery, textiles, costume, and furniture and more unusual forms such as weather vanes and scarecrows provided the most frequent opportunities for creative expression and often absorbed the aesthetic impetus that, in the sophisticated world, was associated more with the fine arts.
Both pottery and textiles range from the everyday to elaborately decorated forms that are often symbolic or highly pictorial; even common examples are typically ornamented with design in a simple slip (a mixture of clay and water) or a woven band.
Folk costume is justly included in many general works on costume, but it differs significantly from the sophisticated in several respects: in a localism so extreme that even a particular town or valley may have its own prized style and every region is distinctive; in the complete differentiation of the festival costume from ordinary clothing; and in a prolongation of style that is little affected either by changes of fashion or by individual taste. The motifs which are typical of festival costumes, such as the twin, cone-shaped buttons symbolizing fertility in Sardinia, are too deep-rooted in the tradition of the area to be discarded.
Furniture tends toward basic, repeated shapes, which may be left purely functional but are often extensively carved or painted. The Alsatian chair, for instance, has an upright-board back, carved with a pierced, silhouetted, bilateral design; some hundreds of variations of this simple design have been recorded within the area. Certain occupational forms emerged, according to need, such as the milking stool, the cobbler’s bench, and the rocking bench, or “mammy settle.”
In metalwork, the materials used to produce tools and other essentials were also turned by the craftsmen into such art forms as toleware (painted tin or tinned iron), incised copper or silver, pewter toys, and lead figurines. European wrought-iron grave crosses and shop signs are distinguished by intricate scrollwork and inventive linear depictions. Delicate bone carving is very widespread, appearing on such objects as implements, game pieces (such as chessmen), figures (notably crucifixes), and ornaments. An art peculiar to North America is the whalebone carving (scrimshaw) made by sailors while at sea.
The theatrical arts are spectacularly represented by puppetry, ranging from toy theatres, finger puppets, and the ubiquitous Punch and Judy shows to the famous puppet theatres of Sicily and Indonesia. Among the appurtenances of traveling shows and miracle plays, dating from the earlier phase of European folk art, was the hobbyhorse, which had a counterpart in festival performances in India. Musical instruments offer a profusion of types, often preserving ancient features of construction, principles of sound, and decoration: the heavy ratchets and rattles of the Alpine festivals; the shaggy bagpipes of the Abruzzi mountains; fiddles such as the rudimentary gusle of the Balkan States, with its typical horsehead or horseman scroll, and the more complicated Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, with underlying sympathetic strings; and innumerable ornamented flutes, harps, horns, and dulcimers. The simple, painted clay whistle or flute is widespread, often in mimetic bird shape.
Specific folk categories
Any attempt to analyze folk art in terms of the established, sophisticated categories, though revealing in comparison, fails to take into account a substantial bulk of the art. Many characteristic products not subject to sophisticated aesthetic treatment have become specific fields of study and collection because of the ingenuity expended upon them—mangles (laundry beaters), molds, decorated eggs, weather vanes, decoys, powder horns, trade signs, scarecrows, and figureheads, to name a few. There are also significant objects categorized according to function; for example, animal gear represented by the woven harness of donkeys in Spain, carved and painted ox yokes and sheep collars, brass-studded and tasseled headpieces, and ornaments supposedly endowed with protective powers. Other widespread types are decorated vehicles such as the caravans of Roma (Gypsies), circus wagons, boats bearing symbolic motifs, and toys and miniatures in countless media.
Freedom of media
While some of the art is executed in a recognized sophisticated medium such as wood carving, many other materials, such as hide, horn, straw, bamboo, and palm leaf, are characteristic in certain regions or for certain objects. In fact, there is scarcely an available material that is not utilized somewhere in folk art, from the hickory-nut doll to the commemorative picture made of human hair, and materials are often combined. This free-wheeling employment of any sort of material rivals the fertile adaptations of “found objects” in 20th-century sophisticated art—as many other modern “innovations” have a long-standing precedent in the spontaneous art of the folk. Collage, and assemblage are an old story in this field; embroidered pictures had faces painted in watercolour, and festival figures were made of anything that came to hand. Weather charms in southern Germany were often collages of—among other things—saints’ pictures, amulets, and seeds. The many types of kinetic art include manipulated masks; jointed dolls, figures, and toys; whirligigs (spinning toys); pinwheels spun by wind or candle heat; and balance figures set in motion by a touch. Folk festivals, with their impromptu processions, costumed personages, antics, and props, offer almost a prototype of the mid-20th-century “happening.”
Style
Although folk artists had their own criteria of function and craftsmanship, design in the theoretical sense was not a part of their training; rather, it was the natural result either of continued use of established patterns or of instinctive methods of organization. In special instances there was deliberate imitation of well-known works of art, as in the American portraits of George Washington and folk versions of famous Virgins and Buddhas.
Any particular folk art will necessarily share the style of its general cultural area; Chinese folk art is Chinese as well as folk. Thus, analysis of the style and recognition of its folk origin is dependent upon knowledge of the “high art” with which it interacts, as well as of the folk situation that sets it apart. When a folk piece is compared with an adjacent sophisticated one produced at the same time, the differences become apparent, whether in the nature of the object as a whole or in its material, execution, content, or style. Stylistically, the time lag is significant; for example, the Baroque curve survived in simple country churches, and elaborate floral ornament in furniture decoration, long after sophisticated European art had become Neoclassical.
One of the commonly accepted notions of folk style is that it is naive; it is thought to be childlike and fresh, despite the fact that some of its 19th-century critics condemned its “meaningless repetitions” and its “degenerate” forms. Repetitiveness is to be expected in the production of objects needed by all; but the artists saw only a few neighbouring examples, and to the practiced eye their art reveals many variations. Folk art is often associated with bright colour and an appealing charm, qualities sufficiently present to account for a wide popularity but counterbalanced by the sombreness and seriousness of many pieces, notably in religious art. In fact, few commonly accepted notions of folk style apply to the entire field. Execution may be free or meticulous. Representations of figures may be highly literal (even to the inclusion of actual hair and clothing), almost abstractly simplified, or monstrously exaggerated and distorted, as in, for example, the boldly painted papier-mâché carnival figures of Europe or the fantastic animal figures of East Asia.
The focus on utilitarian production leaves its mark in two opposite ways: often there is a strong decorative orientation, with a wealth of surface ornament lavished on objects that maintain a prescribed shape; on the other hand, certain categories of folk production, such as simple tools, and the work of certain groups are characterized by a functionalism so complete as to seem in tune with modern sophisticated design. Technical limitations and the demand for a quantity of certain necessary objects are conducive to simplification; the reverse may be true of such an object as the bridal bedspread, for which custom dictates extreme elaboration.
The particularly long retention of traditional forms and patterns generally results in increasingly stylized versions of themes; in crewel embroidery, for example, the representation of landscape elements is commonly reduced to a tree and hills, the hills typically shown as three simple, rounded humps; in American portrait painting, the bust or figure is conventionalized in a simple frontal form, repeated over and over again and sometimes painted in advance of a sitting, leaving only the features to be filled in. More important, perhaps, is the fact that the adoption of materials not used in sophisticated art, the forcing of a limited technology toward artistic expression, and the adaptation of rather remotely perceived sophisticated ideas to the folk artists’ concept of the realities of life result in some highly original stylistic solutions.
Content and motifs
Whereas sophisticated art often reaches out for the esoteric and the unusual, the content of folk art is closely related to immediate human concerns. The major events of life were universally celebrated on the folk level in ways that demanded of art special costumes, implements, vessels, and auspicious gifts. For the newborn there might be amulets and decorated birth certificates. The period of courtship occasioned a love token, often a beautifully carved feminine implement such as a shuttle or needle case; traditional in England was a double spoon symbolizing union and plenty, whereas in the former Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic and Slovakia) it was often a painted egg or carved stick. In many regions elaborate wedding chests were carved or painted for the bride. The bridal bedspread or bed curtain, like the wedding costume, was ornate and highly symbolic, with such motifs as Adam and Eve, the tree of life, and mating birds considered appropriate. Both weddings and funerals required processional equipment, standards, and special vehicles. In some places there were gifts for the dead, which in China took the form of paper models burned at funerals. There were memorials such as grave sculpture, pictures, and documents.
Specific memorial motifs crystallized in two American forms: the “mourning picture,” executed in embroidery or watercolour, often depicting grieving figures draped around a tombstone under weeping willows, and the gravestone carved with a winged death’s-head or, later, with the urn-and-willow motif.
