Read Draws Crowd to Norton Lecture

"Throughout time, art has remained a means for man's survival," declared Sir Herbert Read last night in the first of his seven Charles Eliot Norton lectures, before a jammed New Lecture Hall audience.

Read explained that if man were not continually "searching the dark passage of the unknown through art," he would slip into mental apathy.

Read concentrated on the psychology and aesthetics of prehistoric art, and said that any sensible comparison between the art of children and paleolithic man would be quite limited.

"The child draws what he knows and not what he sees," he remarked. Prehistoric art, on the other hand, was naturalistic. "The men were trying to articulate an image and retain that image in the memory."

Awareness Improves

"Art does not evolve," he said. "There has been no progress in art that is specifically aesthetic since the stone age."

But he suggested that man has grown through time in his aesthetic awareness. We cannot censure the art of paleolithic man, however, because of this. "That would be like saying that Freud is more intelligent than Cezanne."

The former poet and writer complained that the word "aesthetics" covers too many psychological surfaces. "In general every artist has to choose between the path of vitality and the path of beauty. Prehistoric man chose vitality, but vitality is not animalism; it is the life force itself characteristic of specific tribes."

Read supplemented his talk with a series of black and white slides of prehistoric art. His next lecture on the "Discovery of Beauty" will be held Nov. 12.