TRANSL ATED TEXT

Folk Art: Artistic and

Scientific Works from
the First Congress on
Folk Arts, Prague, 1928
Henri Focillon, Professor at the Sorbonne
Introduction by Christopher S. Wood
New York University, USA
Translation by Samuel Luterbacher
Occidental College, USA
2 vols. (Paris: Duchartre, 1931): 1:VII–XVI.

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Introduction

The first international scholarly congress on the topic of art populaire, or folk art,
took place in Prague in October 1928, under the aegis of the League of Nations.
The two volumes of conference proceedings, published in 1931, comprise eleven
general essays on the origins and definitions of folk art; a series of brief reports
on the study and collection of the arts populaires in twenty-four nations, mostly
but not all European; several dozen more detailed articles on the various tech-
niques: architecture, wood carving, metalwork and jewelry, ceramics, textiles,
dance, theater, and music (including an essay by Béla Bartók); and abundant
illustrations. Among the authors of the reports were directors and conservators
of regional, ethnographic, and so-called open-air museums as well as university
instructors. The following text is a translation of Henri Focillon’s introduction
to that publication.1

Focillon (1881–1943) was, from 1913 to 1924, director of the Musée des Beaux-
Arts in Lyon and, from 1924, as the successor to Émile Mâle, professor of art
history at the Sorbonne. Focillon was active in the International Institute for
Intellectual Cooperation (IICI), an agency of the League of Nations whose
first chair was Henri Bergson and that numbered among its members Albert
Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Paul Valéry. Focillon, often in league with Valéry,
would play a leading role in the IICI’s programs throughout the 1930s.2

Before the Prague conference, Focillon had no record of publications in the

field of art populaire. Mainly he had written on the graphic arts and modern
French painting. Nevertheless Focillon was entrusted with the keynote lecture.
He had an intuition about folk art and, for those museum conservators who
might be tempted to enlist their collections in the promotion of nostalgia or
nationalism, a message: namely, that the traditional rural crafts of Europe,
which in some remote corners had survived industrialization, spoke a common
formal language that precedes all distinctions, all contents. “Spirals, roses,
chevrons, stars, wreaths, and knot work,” in Focillon’s words, “constitute a
universe where man’s thought injects the meaning of his choosing” (XIII/116).
Folk art, he said, opens a window onto a primordial creativity rooted in fantasy:
“A hidden instinct allows the marvel of a beautiful dream to inhabit the poorest
material. . . . within the tightest extended thread, the strictest human definition,
whimsy, reverie, love, and gift remain in play” (XV–XVI/119). The proper frame
of reference for folk art can therefore never be “national and ethnic,” for these
latter categories are “unstable as well as mobile, because the notion of race is
confused and often artificial, because a people is a complex entity, be it ancient

Folk Art 97
 Henri Focillon, Image courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Public Domain.

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or recent, stabilized within a language and a civilization” (XI/113). Folk art, its
roots lodged in the deepest, universally shared layers of human nature, num-
bered instead among those “connections that unite national forms of action”
(X/00). This was the very program of the League of Nations, which placed great
hopes in the capacity of culture to disarm divisive nationalisms.

Focillon wished to pull the study of folk art out of the orbit of the ethnographic
museums, whose perspectives were often parochial and identitarian, not to men-
tion reductively materialist, and instead toward what he saw as the universalism
and idealism of the academic discipline of art history. He would bring to the con-
ference in Prague the same liberal optimism and moral seriousness he brought
to his teaching duties in the United States, where, over the last decade of his life,
at New York University but mainly at Yale University, he taught as a visiting pro-
fessor. At Yale Focillon succeeded in introducing the formal study of art history
to the university’s general curriculum.3 His voice resonated in New Haven for
decades. In 1948, Focillon’s eminent pupil George Kubler translated into English
his teacher’s poetic meditation on the essential freedom and irreducibility of art,
Vie des formes (1934). Almost three decades later, the furniture historian Robert F.
Trent, who had been a fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery in the mid-1970s,
published a translation of Focillon’s introduction to the Prague conference as a
supplement to his own book on early American chairs, Hearts and Crowns: Folk
Chairs of the Connecticut Coast, 1720–1840. With this new translation by Samuel
Luterbacher, we reopen the dossier of the Prague Congress of 1928.

Focillon and the League of Nations were well aware that the collecting and
study of folk art since the eighteenth century had very often reinforced regional,
national, and ethnic particularisms as well as myths of the “genius of races,”
including the liberatory myths of oppressed minorities, myths nourished by
suspicion and hostility toward cities, mechanization, and internationalism. “The
principle of nationalities,” Focillon warned, “tended to accentuate differences,
leading each political group to glorify its own ancient heritage of traditions as
an exclusive asset, like some original value” (VII/108). Admittedly, the contribu-
tions to the Prague proceedings are mostly workmanlike in tone and ideologi-
cally innocuous. But with little prompting, the promoters of folk art and culture,
especially in Germany, were apt to strike nationalistic notes. Nowhere was
folklore studies better established than in Germany. In 1965, reflecting on the
history of his discipline—Volkskunde, a calque from the English “folklore”—the
folklorist Hermann Bausinger wrote that “already on the basis of its name Volks-
kunde seemed predestined to verify and disseminate National Socialist ideas.”

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 The Nazification of Volkskunde after 1933 did not impose alien ideas but rather
brought out themes already latent in the discipline.4 One senses the Germans’
lack of enthusiasm for the league’s program already in the 1931 publication,
where the German contribution to the section reporting on the various national
folk art traditions amounted to only a single page. And, sure enough, Germany,
which had been invited to join the League of Nations only in 1926, withdrew in
1933. Six years later, the league, with its fond dreams of peaceful cooperation
among nations, effectively expired.

Since World War II, at least in Europe, a cloud has hung over the topic of folk
art. Folk art is marginalized within the academic study of art history. Exactly
what Focillon feared has come to pass: the study of folk art is left mostly in the
hands of local and regional scholars and collectors, at least in Europe, and
museological solutions remain sources of misunderstanding.

Just as the League of Nations and its irenic spirit was reborn after World War II
in the United Nations, so, too, the IICI was reborn as the United Nations Educa-
tional, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Yet the case Focil-
lon made for folk art qua art as the basis for a renewed concept of a common
humanity has never been reopened. Have his propositions been refuted?

In the opening paragraphs of his text, Focillon recounts in compressed form

the story of the discovery of folk art in the Romantic era, a project that he likens
to the uncovering of “hidden treasures,” the revelation of a “strange, obscure,
and disdained world,” which the narrow rationalism of the ancien régime had
overlooked. A formless but “active and primordial element,” the “people” had
produced poetry and art, “an order of authentic powers that shapes humanity’s
essential traits.” In the nineteenth century, scholars faced with the “forest of
folklore” began to sketch out a “vast system of comparisons and associations,
which—under the variety of races and environments—tend to show a kind of
common ground, a universal sensibility and wisdom” (VII/108).

Focillon’s phrases resonate with those of Walter Benjamin in his essay of 1927
on the mid-nineteenth-century Swiss writer Gottfried Keller: “His work is the
breakwater from which the tide of bourgeois ideas once more retreats, reveal-
ing the treasures of its own and every past, before gathering up and unleashing
the idealistic floodwaters that will devastate Europe.”5 Benjamin credits Keller
with sheltering within his fictions certain irreducible forms of provincial and
rural life otherwise concealed by “bourgeois idealism,” by which he means the

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religion of art, sentimentalism, and spurious, hollow utopianisms. Benjamin
valued Keller for the unromantic materialism that rendered his portrayals of
vanishing ways of life at once heartfelt and skeptical, and all the more intense
and touching.

To bring out this guileless, unpretentious aesthetic, Focillon believed, the study
of folk art must be disengaged not only from the ethnographic museum but also
from the already well-developed academic discipline of folklore, as represented,
for example, by Arnold van Gennep, who was among the authorities involved
in the planning of the Prague conference, or by Pierre Saintyves. Van Gennep
and Saintyves were scholars of legends and fables, customs and superstitions,
calendars and rituals, “rites of passage,” archaisms, and survivals. They more or
less ignored the products of folk art unless they happened to be chaperoned by
symbolically laden behaviors or performances.6

In the next section of his argument, Focillon discusses the mind-liberating

effect of Europeans’ encounters with unfamiliar forms of art beyond Europe, in
the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries,
acknowledging that such encounters were an aspect of the colonial enterprises of
the “white race.” The new art, escapist and rejuvenating, taking as its examples
of “primitive art forms,” was the site of a struggle between “the principles of
Mediterranean humanism, weakened from the battles of modern painting, and
the passionate anxiety aroused by contact with other forms of humanity and
their more distant secrets” (VIII/110). Folk art, for Focillon and for many of the
conferees, was a form of primitive art, a trace of this “other humanity,” embed-
ded in Europe itself.7 This was the blunder that marred the Congress of 1928: the
attempt to compare the arts and crafts of rural Europe to the “primitive” arts
of those peoples “with whom we have entered into relations through explora-
tion and colonization,”8 for example, in the Belgian Congo, New Caledonia, the
Dutch West Indies, Ecuador, Egypt, Canada, and the United States (where the
topic was Native American art, not American folk art!). (The reports on all but
the North American material were unsurprisingly written by Europeans.) Equally
half-baked and poorly supported—and equally half-hearted—were the frequent
comparisons of folk art to prehistoric art and the art of children, as if all forms of
art that flourish outside official or court contexts, in any time or place, or beyond
the reach of rule-governed, academic art instruction were alike.9

But in practice the main focus of the Congress was the modes of household
decoration characterized by colors and patterns, which flourished in rural

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 Europe between about 1750 and 1850. After 1850, threatened by industrial-
ization, folk art was produced with increasing degrees of self-awareness, as a
deliberate rebuke of the machinic approach and with the awareness not only
that handmade products are well out of step, stylistically, with the main currents
of modern art but also that those products were ever more likely to end in a col-
lection, private or public, than be put into daily use.

Like Alois Riegl already in 1894, Focillon saw no profit in extending the ambi-
tion, cultivated by the Arts and Crafts movement and by the Fauves and Expres-
sionists, of regenerating modern art through the assimilation of folk and craft
forms. In his pamphlet Volkskunst, Hausfleiss, und Hausindustrie, Riegl punctured
the lingering Romantic fantasy of a renewal of modern arts and crafts based
on rural folk art. Folk art as a living art was exhausted and could now only ever
be the object of historical study.10 Riegl and Focillon both understood that the
nationalist “care” for folk art, cultivated in modern times, was just another
aspect of that hypocritical idealism invoked by Benjamin, which, in seeking to
redeem and sublimate the crass materialism that shapes bourgeois existence,
sometimes submerges the irreducible “treasures” of folk culture but sometimes
also seeks to honor them as tokens of a more genuine, more realistic, but no-
longer-possible materialism, which—free of the idealist neurosis—does not
contest mortality.

Focillon also marks out his own distance from the aesthetic ideology of his day,
avant-gardism: “Our goal is to show series and not discontinuities” (X/113).
Here he plants the seed that will grow into the little masterpiece of his Ameri-
can disciple Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962), a
still widely read meditation on the plural time frames of art production. As
if detecting a pause in the late 1920s in the momentum of avant-gardism or
seeing in the anarchy promoted by Surrealism a symptom of exhaustion,11
Focillon adopts a defiant tone against that “almost Heraclitean hostility to any
idea of continuity” characteristic of evolutionary or progressive thought, as
noted by Benedict Anderson.12 But Focillon’s argument is not simply that folk
art is a hardy survivor; rather he seeks to locate it on another stratum of history
altogether, as witness to a different sense of time, less urgent and fitful, less
obsessed with novelty: “A slowed down, even immobile, temporality opposes this
accelerated time where the past is contemporary with the present, and the idea
of a future escapes understanding. One can do plenty in these wide expanses of
time, this vast daily monotony, but nothing ever happens” (XII/116).

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Focillon’s hypothesis has two implications. First, the essential structure of world
art—the stratification of time, the “double humanity” (XII/114)—is revealed
only by the formal approach. “Technical analysis, formal analysis, and the
comparative method”: this is the way of art history (X/113). The “proper object”
of an art history of folk art is “the study of forms.” This is what Focillon means
when he calls for the disengagement of the study of folk art from the “neighbor-
ing disciplines” of ethnography, linguistics, sociology, and human paleontology
(XI/113).

One might have wished that Focillon, here or elsewhere, had shown his read-
ers exactly how to look at a work of folk art. But his point comes across. Forms
have a life of their own. By treating folk art as art, in the formulation of Anna-
maria Ducci, he was removing folk art “from the domain of nature in order to
give [it] back to that of culture, understood as an open and dynamic system of
relations.”13 The life of forms is a third time frame, involving neither the rural,
immobile time nor the paroxysmal, accelerated time of civilization. None of this
was lost either on Kubler or Trent, who saw that Focillon’s axiom that “forms
have a vocation,” derived from Riegl, could serve as the basis for a rigorous
analysis of the formal systems governing the plain-spoken chairs of colonial
Connecticut, thereby liberating the objects from condescending and invidious
comparisons with the luxury furniture produced in those years in London.14

The second implication of Focillon’s hypothesis is that formalism refutes any

nationalist, ethnicist, or racialist approach to folk culture. This is the core
of Focillon’s essay and the belief of the League of Nations. “The art of the
people,” wrote Focillon, “is not necessarily the art of peoples” (XV/00). All folk
art belongs to everyone and so cannot be recruited to the myths of the nations.
Kubler, too, decades later, would use form as a way of overcoming the cultural
politics of race and ethnicity.15 Folklore—what the people know—is actually
mostly wrong, a web of superstitions and delusions. Folk art, by contrast, is
beyond truth and falsehood. It has no stable relation with content. The secrets
of folk art invoked by Focillon must remain secrets.

Paradoxically, with his rather loose and inconsistent uses of the word “race,”
Focillon the anti-nationalist exposed himself to later critique. About the folk
art of Romania, he waxed sentimental, all too charmed by the handicrafts of “a
beautiful peasant race.”16 As World War II unfolded, and Focillon felt compelled
to speak out in writings and lectures on behalf of the civilization threatened by
Hitler’s Germany, he formulated ever more patriotic and, finally, embarrassing

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 defenses of the genius of the French “race.”17 Éric Michaud has pointed out the
inconsistencies in Focillon’s uses of the word “race.”18 In more than one context,
he discredited the concept of race and then immediately employed it himself. An
example is his debate, published in 1935 by the IICI, with the Austrian art historian
Josef Strzygowski about the cultural identity of the “Germans” and “nordic genius.”
Focillon rejected Strzygowski’s Aryanist fantasies but then countered with his own
dubious notions of the “Celtic” genius.19 Let us say that Focillon had a “stratified”
mind.20 Opposition to the nationalist and ethnicist ideologies infecting folklore,
folk art studies, and museology was, after all, the very essence of Focillon’s Prague
address. He saw that the cultivation of “a political philosophy based on the idea
of race” (IX/111) had been a major factor in the establishment of ethnographic
museums. He saw that the supposed ultimate object of the study of folklore and folk
art, “the people,” was an unstable object. At risk of disappearing, he wrote, were the
“languages and civilizations [that] enrich themselves through exterior influences
. . . History is composed more of communications than conservations” (XI/113)—a
clear shot across the bow of the assembled directors of the ethnographic museums.

Focillon’s credentials as a socialist and a liberal, his good will and his social con-
science, cannot be questioned.21 And yet, missing from his presentation of folk art
was any consideration of social class, which, after all, determined the whole con-
figuration of “the people” as nonelites. At one point, Focillon lists class alongside
race, nation, and time period as forces less “powerful” than “man’s condition”—his
“immediate forms of life, the contexts of creation and action as they are defined by
human geography” (XI/114). Focillon did not consider the tensions between the
people and the elites to be an aspect of the content of folk art.22 The same could be
said about his youthful enthusiasm for the vitality and sincerity of vernacular spec-
tacle—vaudeville, the circus, operetta, cinema. Focillon was quite far from grasping
the idea of the culture of “the people” as counterculture, as a site of resistance, an idea
that would emerge in the 1960s, ignited in part by the great book of Mikhail Bakhtin
on Rabelais, written only a decade or so after the Prague conference but published
in Russian and not until the 1960s in translation. Some of the scholars associated
with this last happy moment of folklore studies, rebaptized in Europe as the study of
“popular culture,” are still active: Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Burke.
Popular culture was once defined by the Frankfurt School theorist Leo Lowenthal
as “the counterconcept to art.”23 The formulation is striking because it is similar to
Focillon’s, but with the values reversed. Focillon sought to redefine folk art as art and
so position it against folklore as conceived by the ethnographers (i.e., as something
like “popular culture”). For Focillon, folklore and folk customs, a thicket of beliefs
and practices created by fears, desires, and confused memories, were less likely than

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 folk art to bind the nations back together. For Lowenthal, by contrast, the concept of
popular culture, insofar as its basic content was the struggle against elites, offered the
best hope of forging new transnational solidarities. For the Marxist critical theorist,
“art” was a bourgeois fiction that served only to mask the real rifts in our societies.

This was not Focillon’s position. He seemed to hold out hope that rural forms of
life, once transfigured as folk art, might serve as a “commons” embedded within
modernity, a place where all might meet. A similar idea was articulated by Benjamin
in a short essay on folk art written in 1929 but never published in his lifetime.24 Here
Benjamin developed theses adumbrated in the essay on Gottfried Keller published
two years earlier. Folk art, he wrote in this typically dense, gnomic text, “draws the
human being into itself.” One wears folk art like a mask: behind it, we look out-
ward onto our former selves and experience a distant recognition, a déjà vu. Folk
art allows us to “stand apart from moments and situations that have been lived
through unconsciously but that are here finally reintegrated.” Folk art emerges out
of elemental existential orientations. This is why Benjamin spoke in the essay on
Keller of the hidden treasures not just of the past of nineteenth-century Europeans
but of every past. Folk art activates sensations of well-being, shelter, immunity. Its
beauty is a primitive wish fulfillment. Unexpectedly, Benjamin said that kitsch affords
us the very same vantage point upon ourselves that folk art does. Kitsch is senti-
mental, ingratiating, and inauthentic art, a quaint and consoling art that appeals
to the unsophisticated. In his text of 1929, Benjamin chose to disregard the threat
or affront posed by kitsch to the purist ideology of modernism. Instead, alert to the
mysterious involvements with shared, even presocial existence offered by some forms
of art, Benjamin wrote that kitsch and folk art alike “allow us to see outward from
within things.” He described folk art and kitsch as “a single great movement that
passes certain themes from hand to hand, like batons, behind the back of what is
known as great art.”25

Benjamin’s text of 1929 forces us to ask whether a certain alienation from avant-
garde art, even a secret vulnerability to kitsch, may not have animated Focillon’s
romance with folk art. Focillon himself would not have put it this way. His intentions
were modern. He risked everything in apologizing for folk art, an art form that
already in his own lifetime had become, for art history, an impossible object. But
Benjamin also reminds us not to judge Focillon too quickly.

—Christopher S. Wood
Christopher S. Wood is professor in the Department of German at New York University.

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 Notes
1 Art Populaire: Travaux artistiques et scientifiques du 1er Congrès International des Arts Populaires, Prague,
1928, 2 vols. (Paris: Duchartre, 1931), 1:VII–XVI.
2 Annamaria Ducci, “Henri Focillon, l’arte popolare e le scienze sociali,” Annali di critica d’arte 2 (2006):
341–77; Annamaria Ducci, “Europe and the Artistic Patrimony of the Interwar Period: The International
Institute for Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations,” in Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the
European Idea, ed. Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 227–42; Annamaria
Ducci, “Le musée d’art populaire contre le folklore: L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle à
l’époque du Congrès de Prague,” Revue germanique internationale 21 (2015): 133–48; Daniel H. A. Maksimiuk,
“L’engagement politique au sein de l’Institut de coopération intellectuelle,” in La vie des formes: Henri
Focillon et les arts (Ghent: Snoeck; Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon; Paris: Institut national d’histoire
de l’art, 2004), 283–91 (drawing on archival material); Bjarne Rogan, “Folk Art and Politics in Inter-War
Europe: An Early Debate on Applied Ethnology,” Folk Life 45 (2006): 7–23; Bjarne Rogan, “Popular Culture
and International Cooperation in the 1930s: CIAP and the League of Nations,” in Networking the International
System: Global Histories of International Organizations, ed. Madeleine Herren (Cham: Springer, 2014),
175–85; Molly Nesbit, The Pragmatism in the History of Art (Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2013), 56–57.
3 Nesbit, Pragmatism, 55–66.
4 Hermann Bausinger, “Volksideologie und Volksforschung,” in Deutsches Geistesleben und
Nationalsozialismus, ed. Andreas Flitner (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1965), 125–43, here 140 and 128.
5 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 2.1:286;
translated in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 2.1:53.
6 See, for example, Van Gennep’s remarks on folk art in chapter 10 of his Le folklore (Paris: Stock, 1924):
he dismisses rural costumes and jewelry as unaesthetic and rural furniture as poor and belated imitations
of urban furniture; he approves only of simple, pragmatic artifacts, such as wooden chests, chimney tiles,
toys, commercial signs, and some religious imagery.
7 Focillon said that insofar as folk art is guided by a need for order, regular and symmetrical figures, and
a harmonic sense of color without models in nature, it “seems to continue the stylistics of Neolithic art”
(XIII/00).
8 G.-H. Luquet, “Essai de définition de l’art populaire,” in Art Populaire, 1:7.
9 Focillon, too, asserted that the Prague Congress had revealed the affinity of folk art with prehistoric art
(XV/00).
10 Alois Riegl, Volkskunst, Hausfleiss, und Hausindustrie (Berlin, 1894), esp. 54–82.
11 Willibald Sauerländer, “L’art des sculpteurs romans et le retour à l’ordre,” in La vie des formes, 147–53.
12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1983, rev. ed. 1991), 11.
13 Ducci, “Europe and the Artistic Patrimony,” 234. Theodossios Issaias, PhD candidate in the School of
Architecture at Yale University, kindly shared with me the text of his oral presentation on Focillon and
the 1928 conference, in which he maps out the politics of the event and defends Focillon’s attempt to
“resignify” folk art.
14 Robert F. Trent, Hearts and Crowns: Folk Chairs of the Connecticut Coast, 1720–1840 (New Haven, CT: New
Haven Colony Historical Society, 1977), 11.
15 Barbara E. Mundy, introduction to “Dialogues: Kubler’s ‘On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-
Columbian Art’ Reconsidered,” Latin America and Latinx Visual Culture 2, no. 4 (2020): 58: “By setting the
trajectory of forms themselves as [his schema’s] organizing principle . . . [and] by accepting into its embrace
any formal sequence of objects, [Kubler’s art history] set itself free from Eurocentrism.”

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16 Henri Focillon, “L’art populaire et les musées: Échanges et comparaison,” Mouseion 2, no. 6 (December
1928): 206–7: Folk art “traduit une poésie particulière, le génie des races et leurs inflexions préférées.” See
also Focillon’s foreword to G. Oprescu, Peasant Art in Rumania (Bucharest: Rumanian Academy, 1937), IX–
XII, and Ioana Vlasiu, “L’expérience roumaine,” in La vie des formes, 231–41.
17 See the quotes collected in Pierre Wat, Henri Focillon (Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2007), 32,
58, and Ducci, “Europe and the Artistic Patrimony,” 231–33.
18 Éric Michaud, Les invasions barbares: Une généalogie de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 138–41,
187–88; translated as The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2019),
116–19, 163–66.
19 Correspondence of Henri Focillon and Josef Strzygowski, in Civilisations: Orient-Occident; Génie du Nord-
Latinité; Lettres d’Henri Focillon, Gilbert Murray, Josef Strzygowski, et Rabindranath Tagore (Paris, 1935),
131ff.
20 Walter Cahn decided in the end that Focillon’s heart was in the right place: “L’art français et l’art
allemand dans la pensée de Focillon,” in Relire Focillon: Cycle de conférences organisé au musée du Louvre
par le Service culturel du 27 novembre au 18 décembre 1995 sous la direction de Matthias Waschek (Paris:
Musée du Louvre et École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1998), 35–39.
21 See the revealing article about Focillon’s teaching and his journalistic writings in his twenties, in the first
decade of the century: Pascale Cugy and François-René Martin, “‘Populovitch n’est pas si bête qu’il est mal
vêtu’: Henri Focillon, le vaudeville, les prolétaires et l’art social,” in L’art social en France: de la Révolution
à la Grande Guerre, ed. Neil McWilliam, Catherine Méneux, and Julie Ramos (Paris: INHA; Rennes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2014), 357–71.
22 On the left-wing traditions of interest in artisanal and folk cultures in France, see Ducci, “Le musée
d’art populaire,” 134–35, and Frédéric Maguet, “Pierre-Louis Duchartre et l’imagerie: La construction
d’un discours sur l’image,” in Du folklore à l’ethnologie, ed. Jacqueline Christophe et al. (Paris: Maison des
sciences de l’homme, 2009), 263–73.
23 Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 4. An
earlier version of Lowenthal’s first chapter was published in 1950.
24 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 6:185–87; Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Brigid Doherty (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 254–56.
25 Benjamin’s position on kitsch is complex; see Winfried Menninghaus, “On the ‘Vital Significance’ of
Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste,’” in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, ed.
Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 39–57. Menninghaus argues that Benjamin
imagined a counterpolitics drawing on our “most primordial . . . affects, fears, and images of yearning” as
well as the dream energies of everyday life and banal objects (55).

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 Folk Art: Artistic and Scientific Works from the
First Congress on Folk Arts, Prague, 1928
Introduction
Henri Focillon, professor at the Sorbonne, government delegate at the
Prague Congress

For a long time, the vast domain of the folk arts remained unknown to historians,
intellectuals, and people of taste.1 One could say that until the end of the Classical
Age (the seventeenth century), it belonged to the category of hidden treasures—like
the arts of the medieval era and those of the Orient. Even though these latter fields
impinged on European consciousness over long periods, leaving a lasting mark, the
simplifying power of rationalism and its narrow definition of man prevented any
methodical inquiry into such a strange, obscure, and disdained world. But then, the
great maritime voyages undertaken during the eighteenth century expanded our
knowledge of primitive forms of activity, social organizations, and morality. These
insights generated more reflection among philosophers concerning man in the state
of nature, rather than awakening a greater interest in positive observations among
scholars and artists.

It is the nineteenth century that discovered the folk arts. The Romantic movement
played a large part in this because it assigned an important role to the notion of “the
people,” as opposed to the elites, as an active and primordial element within histori-
cal forces. One knows the place the Romantics reserved for the people in the life of
languages—even in the very genesis of language. Among all the revivals undertaken
by the Romantics, the genre of “popular” epics is one of the most characteristic, con-
sidered to be the natural extension of a race’s instinct and genius.2 The people, their
poetry, and their folk arts, as formulated within the Romantic philosophy of history,
constitute the order of authentic powers that shape the essential traits of humanity.
For the first time, the full amplitude of this forest of folklore was revealed in all its
shimmering diversity, and one can begin to map out the vast system of comparisons
and associations, which—under the variety of races and environments—tend to
show a kind of common ground, a universal sensibility and wisdom.

But at the same time, by a contradiction more apparent than profound, the prin-
ciple of nationalities has tended to accentuate differences, leading each political
group to glorify its own ancient heritage of traditions as an exclusive asset, like some
original value. In the struggles to liberate oppressed minorities, the folk arts held
a value equivalent to a language: one recognized blood brothers not only in their

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Front cover of the proceedings of the first international scholarly congress on the topic of art
populaire, or folk art, in Prague, published in 1931.

demeanor, nuances, or inflections but in the songs and ornamentation of their lives.
These obscure masterpieces—a carpet, a piece of pottery, a dance step—became the
symbols and bearers of a fraternal force; they signified the union of hearts. Long
condemned to servitude and oblivion, they were suddenly swept into the foreground.
Exoticism, the love for the long-lost trinket, and this passion for the object, which
is a trait of the nineteenth century, led the refined cultures to enrich themselves
from such things, in the vein of so many other stimulating discoveries revealing the
complexity of the world.

Folk arts acquired a particular significance within the later forms of Romanticism.
When John Ruskin came to formulate his antimechanization stance and the lengthy

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 praise of handicraft in his work that, even today, preserves a touching poetic
virtue by returning to natural models and matters, encouraging a renewal of
ancient techniques, he came to agree not only with the archaic nostalgia of his
time, not only with a form of age-old naturalism, but also with the very concep-
tions ignored in preceding eras that had revived a mode of reverie and action.
He combined this with a social protest explained by the development of mid-
nineteenth-century English industrialization. For the same reason and many
others, his thoughts later reverberated throughout the rest of Europe. For a long
time, however, before the history of folk arts was established as a science, this
particular Ruskinian tone informed its study. Without a doubt, fifty years ago
a similar sentiment inspired some Western artists. Tired of the false and flimsy
refinement and confused eclecticism of the cultivated classes, they strove to
establish a new style: synthetic and decorative in character, taking its examples
from more primitive art forms.

This attempt at escape and renewal takes on a singular grandeur, even a dra-
matic meaning, when one sees the struggles between the principles of Mediter-
ranean humanism, weakened from the battles of modern painting, and the
passionate anxiety aroused by contact with other forms of humanity and their
more distant secrets. When Paul Gauguin draws inspiration from the Calvaries
of Brittany and later exiles himself to discover a more noble sadness in Polyne-
sia, he follows the same path, obeying a logical development. One could say that
he pushed Romantic Pre-Raphaelitism to its final conclusion. Around the same
time, it was from popular sources that a renaissance in the decorative arts drew
its strength. In addition, a passion for the “decorative,” even in its more subtle
and rare forms, reawakened the outlook of ancient Man, substituting a singular
interest in beings or objects with combinations and rhythms initiated by the
mind. Finally, sociological research on primitive societies, results acquired by
great explorations, and colonial expansion by the white race has reshaped the
definition of man and of the art of humans. This has provoked a movement that
is much greater in scale than the former vague exoticism. We will study this
decisive moment in Western history later, although some of its traits are now
within our historical consciousness.

The peoples of Russia, Scandinavia, and eastern Europe pursued their inves-
tigations into their own roots and the treasures of their peasant cultures. At
times by way of research motivated by taste alone, at other times through the
frame of a political philosophy based on the idea of race, the rustic arts came

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back into light, museums were founded, and attempts were made to preserve
the products of disappearing techniques and even to endow them with an
artificial vitality. Fine and skilled image makers elaborated a composite style
in which the contributions of varied cultures were brought together through
diverse historical fates. Music demanded deeper accentuations of folk themes
and a beauty of color that the masters no longer believed they could harness
themselves. Thanks to the work of capable administrators, the heterogeneous
character of certain political communities, like the Austro-Hungarian monar-
chy, fostered the establishment of art and ethnographic museums, which—even
within their unifying setting—respected such diverse elements of this mosaic
with ingenious fidelity. Meanwhile, in countries more formally melded and
subject to the upper hand of a centralized culture, those same institutions
remained, for a long time, mediocre and of little significance. Since then, how-
ever, folk art museums, regional museums—like in France, for instance—took
on a completely different tonality.

The Great War and its consequences have increased the value of the folk arts
as historical testimony in certain regions of Europe. Extending Romanticism’s
poetic and political trajectory, the folk arts became publicly institutionalized.
They provide the bases for independent cultures (or those conceived as such),
representing not only the legacy of the past but the permanence of a sacred
activity. The museum is not the inevitable destination of the folk arts. Its tastes
and processes are propagated through elementary-school education, which
draws its strength from deep regions of national sentiment. One seeks its traces
in the history of ancient religious and dynastic arts. One proposes them as
models to metropolitan artists. Finally, the peripheral and agitated form of
knowledge that we call fashion takes hold of it. In nations where the peasant
element dominates and charmingly preserves ancient skills, some high spirits
judge it possible to fight for some advantage against banal and interchangeable
mass production by calling on indigenous procedures and labor and, thus, by
associating it with the nation’s active life to save its most precious heritage.

The League of Nations thought that a methodical study of the folk arts could
promote an interesting exchange of views on the connections that unite
national forms of action. It approved the project of the International Congress
of Folk Art that was proposed by the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation,
following the initiative of the subcommittee of the Arts and Letters. One will
find the proceedings of the Congress’s conference, held in Prague in 1928,
in the present volume, which was the first attempt to address these questions

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 The holy family, painted on glass, Czechoslovakia, 19th century. Illustration from the proceedings of
the First Congress on Folk Arts, Prague.

systematically. Its main aim was to provoke comparisons and establish the outlines of
a kind of ideal chart in which classification by nationality would not prevent us from
seeing forcibly the links that unite so many forms of folk art, diversely nuanced but
not unfamiliar to one another.

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The need to compare is the basis of all observational science and perhaps of all
scientific disciplines. One knows how the comparative methodology has developed
over two generations; it is no longer a marginal technique but almost an art of the
mind. To define is not to separate; even when isolating a phenomenon or a fact, we
need to confront it. We create specificities only by making connections. Our goal is
to show series and not discontinuities. Everywhere we find ourselves at crossroads,
wherever routes of exchange meet. This is obvious in the field of archeology. Admit-
tedly, we need an archeology “of location”: one that scrupulously studies a precise
object and proceeds monographically. We also require a comparative archeology
that establishes relationships and lineages and, beyond that, influences, affinities,
and identities. In this way, the study of monuments offers some opportunity to found
this science of man that matters so much to us. The same goes for art history itself.
It stands between two polar opposites: either everything is devoted to the individual,
to the particular and the spontaneous, following the arc of creative imagination and
free play or it conforms to the Hegelianism of Taine, ascribing everything to race,
milieu, and the moment, presenting the work of art not as the vague dream of a God
but as the product of a great number of factors.3 Technical analysis, formal analysis,
and the comparative method lead us to consider forms as living beings and milieus
as malleable frameworks, modified by nomadic geniuses, novel inventors, or seden-
tary spirits that live outside of time. Ultimately, they invite us to consider spiritual
families that chronology and geography allow us to situate but not to qualify.

Is this the case in the study of the folk arts? Do these issues appear in similar ways?
This kind of research has still not clearly been detached from neighboring disci-
plines. It borders not only on archeology and art history but also on ethnography,
folklore science, linguistics, sociology, and human paleontology. Its proper aim is
the study of forms: plastic, graphic, musical, dramatic, choreographic, and ceremo-
nial, as well as the techniques emerging from within their popular milieus. The
whole question is to clarify the value of the term “folk art”; our chances of suc-
cess hinge upon setting limits within which this activity must be undertaken. Any
investigation of cultural movements must define not only its objectives but also its
very frameworks. Those that take place here are manifold and overlay one another.
National and ethnic frameworks do not coincide, nor would they, because they are
unstable as well as mobile, because the notion of race is confused and often artifi-
cial, because a people is a complex entity, be it ancient or recent, stabilized within a
language and a civilization. However, these very languages and civilizations enrich
themselves through exterior influences at pain of death. History is composed more
of communications than conservations. Conservative forces, with their sheer regula-
tory procedures, can be only provisional guarantors of stability. Social frameworks

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 hold more of an objective value, as long as we extract them from a determined
period, because such frameworks are not immutable. Social classes go up and down,
or, rather, there is an osmosis from one to the other. The study of cultures reveals
porous zones at the boundaries of classes, a kind of periphery where elements tend
to amalgamate and engender a series of hybrids or even a common ground. As for
chronological frameworks, they would certainly be useful, if it were not for facts and
objects that are almost impossible to date and that manifest (as I will show) within
an irregular time line.

The immediate forms of life, the contexts of creation and action as they are defined
by human geography, seem to offer more resources. Man’s condition is perhaps
a more powerful force than his race, his nation, his class, or his time. It presses
immediately upon him: by his type of work, his tools, his habitat, his environmental
resources, the beasts that act as his companions, and, finally, even his food. Pastoral
and agricultural life, urban and peasant life, the life of the plowman and that of the
sailor, that of the islander and that of the continental dweller, these are not inter-
changeable and remain far from being impermeable: one sees again that exchanges
come into play here, but the construction of each life remains strong and constant. It
may be what maintains itself the most solidly through time.

Yet what we are seeking is not classification for a museum or an encyclopedia. If we

want to obtain the truth—that is, to accurately qualify phenomena that spark our
interest—we must defy theoretical and preventative structures. We have to con-
stantly keep in mind all of the forms, all of the frameworks, offered by the logic of
the moral sciences without restricting ourselves to one or another. As observation
enriches our documentary baggage and the materials of such research expand, we
can better conceive of folk art’s remarkable diversity. At the same time, it seems pos-
sible to perceive it not as a series of secondary movements and derivations of high
art but as an order with its own laws, like a human language that is not “noble” and
originates in other regions of life. The truth is one might be tempted to think here
and there, I would say, not of two levels or branches of humanity but of two faces of
man. Without a doubt, one will fall into error if one takes this notion to the extreme.
It is not historically accurate because there were periods and contexts in which the
two arts were conflated: where folk art faithfully transmitted “high art” in the most
common materials and by the most expeditious techniques. But, if I may be permit-
ted, as a working hypothesis, to maintain for a few moments this notion of a double
humanity, we will immediately see that it can be justified by fundamental differences
in the conception of time, of space, and of action.

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Hand-painted terracotta discs from Belgium, used to adorn cougnous, a kind of bread offered at
Christmas. Illustration from the proceedings of the First Congress on Folk Arts, Prague.

First, as far as time is concerned, let us recognize that its perceived wavelength
is not the same everywhere. The West and urban centers all possess an accel-
erated notion of time that is extremely mobile and capable of both artificial
backtracking (archaism) and of anticipation. The many everyday drudgeries
fragment time into various short and full periods that press upon each other

Folk Art 115

 and set the frantic and halting pace of life’s ordinary actions. It imposes upon all
an impatience to surpass temporal boundaries and incessantly renew matters of
existence. Thus, the notion of the modern is born in art, determined by an acute
need for synchronicity and by the fear of being outmoded. It is for the same reason
that art is the domain of inventors and that we can view (rightly or wrongly) each
significant work as a discovery, as an innovation, in other words, as a renewal. The
spirit of novelty depends on short, temporal wavelengths. However, a slowed down,
even immobile, temporality opposes this accelerated time where the past is contem-
porary with the present and the idea of a future escapes understanding. One can
do plenty in these wide expanses of time, this vast daily monotony, but nothing ever
happens. Actions may pile up without ever giving rise to an event. Cultures of slowed
time are naturally characterized by survivals, patois, beliefs, customs, folklore, and
folk arts. Invention, in the fullest sense of the term, is banished from that temporal-
ity. Such cultures are unaware of the particular type of humanity known as the great
artist, and even though they create charming and beautiful works by way of endless
variation, the idea of art is foreign to them.

The same contrast is manifest in the conception of space and of form. True space,
three-dimensional space, true form, meaning a being or an object’s authentic
external appearance, is the result of discoveries and lengthy prepared investigations
in modern art. We have proof of this in the history of perspective as it was formu-
lated by Renaissance masters: before becoming the perspective of verisimilitude,
the fiction of space, represented or simulated in all its parts, it was initially purely
hierarchical or ornamental. When it comes to the authentic representation of the
human form, we know—thanks to the successive investigations of the Greek canons
of proportion—what kind of subtle modulations it received. Notions of aesthetic
imitation or realism tend to stabilize, to harden, and to represent as passive all sorts
of very particular approaches that are, themselves, inventions. However, an indeter-
minate space exists, one where combinations of spiritual and conceptual forms link
up with each other. This space belongs to children and primitives but also to folk
artists. These makers conceive their art before seeing it. Rationality and a powerful
instinct for order dominate their representation of imagery. From this originates
the love for regular and symmetrical figures, as well as a harmonious sense of color,
whose principles and models are not found in nature: spirals, roses, chevrons, stars,
wreaths, and knot work all constitute a universe where man’s thought injects the
meaning of his choosing, all forms serving as the storehouse of a great number of
suggested images. In this way, folk art seems to continue the stylistics of Neolithic
art. But, more than a direct affiliation or heritage transmitted from generation to
generation, can we not see within this identity the continuity of the same intellectual
structure? In any case, prehistoric humanity would have left us a double tradition

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(rather than a singular one): on the one hand, we have the Age of the Reindeer of
Paleolithic art, where visualization of the form preceded the conception of images
and, on the other hand, Neolithic art conceived of the image first. The secular
experiences of great inventors and observers belong to the former group, while
decorative permanence and the order of symmetries can be ascribed to the latter.

The dual conception of time and space also corresponds to a dual aspect of action
and creation. Sometimes creative action alone can satisfy and even serve as a
game on its own terms, while at other times, creative action is tied to the require-
ments of social life, subject to natural forces and the change of seasons. At times,
art is a luxury that engenders this astonishing notion of the art object, thus imply-
ing that non–art objects exist and are eternally condemned to indifference and
ugliness. At other times, art is life’s regular and necessary ornament. Here we see
techniques change and becoming perpetually enriched; there, they preserve the
most remote era’s materials, techniques, tools, and handiwork. We could even
shine a light on differences among cooperative groups and fabrication processes.
But it is important to note the profound gap between a disinterested, superior,
and free art, created for the pleasure of little useless universes and, on the other
hand, an art linked to function, to the object, to the commodities of existence; an
art that serves like moral law, like a religious technique.

We are no longer considering two races, two groups of people, or two periods
in history but, rather, two attitudes of the human spirit, two outlines of civiliza-
tion. These are not eternally separate from one another. We move from one to
the other, either abruptly or by slow infiltration. When barbarians invaded the
West, they brought with them a huge and repetitive repertoire of linear combi-
nations, bestiaries from the steppes subject to ornamental patterns, decorative
grammars related to hunters, carpenters, basket makers, leather curriers, and
goldsmiths. Upon a sedentary and urban civilization knowledgeable in stonema-
sonry, they overlaid a nomadic and rustic culture that improvised its own habitat.
The primacy of ornament erased that of architecture. Therefore, the history of
art during the high Middle Ages consisted entirely of successive attempts to bal-
ance and assimilate the remnants of Mediterranean forms, the feeble leftovers of
the great antique tradition and, on the other hand, contributions from nomadic
art, from folk art. Sometimes this relationship slowly established itself the other
way around. We moved gradually from a cultivated art to a folk art or, at least, to
popular renditions of cultivated art. We therefore find in the Calvaries of Brit-
tany not a direct and fierce expression of the Celtic spirit but a vast conservatory
of obsolete forms in the middle of the seventeenth century. Even after that, the

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 Calvaries continued perpetuating late medieval and Renaissance themes, types,
and styles. Often propagated by waves of refinement, style leaves its mark in a
more modest décor: for example, the Sassanian griffon of Russian embroideries,
the baroque themes found in some Scandinavian or Czechoslovakian textiles,
or the “classical” scrollwork of Saxon potteries in Transylvania. We would find
more abundant and characteristic evidence of this tendency in the history of
popular imagery in Italy. The line of demarcation between bastardized or feeble
forms of high art and the instinctive forms of folk art remains difficult to deter-
mine. This category of relations, resulting in what one might call a rejuvenation
or a degeneration (depending on one’s taste), makes up a formidable intermedi-
ary zone. But it would be a grave error to view folk art as uniquely composed of
these residual elements. That represents only one avenue of exchange. Similarly,
but in the opposite direction, the bastardized forms stand as borrowings made
by skillful artists or masters of treasured rustic and distant arts. I only recall
them in order to cite another aspect of such associations that tend to unite and
merge two such apparently different forms of human ingenuity.

Therefore, the idea can gradually be established that such kindred relations,
such differences, exchanges, and irreducibilities, singularly surpass the limita-
tions of theoretical frameworks—or, rather, cancel them out completely. Ear-
lier I tried to seek their principles within the structuring of the intellect. Does
the identity of the tools, closer to ourselves and within easier reach, not explain
a great deal? The Prague Congress, which has illuminated the close relation-
ship between the study of prehistoric and folk art, has also revealed graphic
analogies explainable only by analogous procedures: for example, the drops of
color and ink left at the brush’s tip using a system of thick and thin lines can
be found in certain Savoyard interiors but also far from their area of develop-
ment. It is therefore true that the art of the people is not necessarily the art of
peoples. By this I mean that it is not chiefly a national expression because the
identity of materials and techniques will correspond to at least one kinship in
labor and forms, because in villages we sometimes find the diminished, simpli-
fied, and durable traces of more general artistic movements. Finally, because
the folk arts maintain traditions as old as man himself, they escape our politi-
cal geography.

But these remarks are not conclusions. Art, whatever it may be, is not entirely
defined by a certain notion of time, space, or action. The tangible quality is
inherent within the diversity of skills, hands, eyes, and voices. It is the product of

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heavy and light hands. Some eyes prefer to see rare, severe, and delicate notes,
while others see sumptuous brilliance. Not all voices are equally warm, just, and
pure. A hidden instinct allows the marvel of a beautiful dream to inhabit the
poorest material. The indolent potter of a Carpathian hamlet is, at once, a bird
charmer and an accomplished gardener of painted flowers. Within the tightest
extended thread, the strictest human definition, whimsy, reverie, love, and the
gift remain in play. Here lies the principle of this magic we call talent and that
which none of our efforts can reduce to formulas. This is the privilege of cer-
tain individuals but also of certain groups. Folk art is not the domain of serial
production; what we enjoy is its diversity, its freshness, fighting against the idea
of monotonous conservatism lurking within us. In the repertory of inherited
forms, taste discerns and combines while fantasy circulates freely. From canton
to canton, skills and preferences change as if the clans of yesterday remembered
their distinctive signs and conventions. If the genius of folk art is not deter-
mined by nationality, national tonality is not a fiction. It is a precious variety to
be noted and preserved among exchanges, influences, and accords—so surpris-
ing in other respects. But to accomplish this securely, one must proceed by way
of comparison and speculate upon vast ensembles.

This was accomplished at the Prague Congress, truly an event free of doctrines
and excessive theorizing but, rather, demonstrating faith in the natural develop-
ment of our work. To our surprise, examples projected on the screen led us
to spontaneous comparisons. Such rich experiences, so new and yet already
so conclusive, compel us to borrow a current expression that encapsulates an
essential problem of our time: to combine within our research the horizontal
with the vertical. What I mean is we must not be satisfied with the monographs
of a region but focus our investigations in the study of a theme, a form, or a
technique, and we must extend it broadly over a certain number of contexts.
This attitude does not just offer a purely philosophical advantage; it leads us to
very remarkable factual consequences: first, even in strongly conservative and
traditionalist circles, like peasant groups or “schools” (here I deliberately apply
one of the most unsuitable expressions), gifted talent can be felt, and quality
intervenes. It is just that identities and resemblances, when they are not attached
to well-determined historical trajectories, influences, or exchanges, correspond
to profound affinities between races, either concerning a very ancient com-
munity or revealing a general and natural aptitude of man. Thus, we are led to
move from the provincial to the universal level.

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 Translator’s Notes
1 Focillon’s term art populaire typically appears as “folk art” in English translations. The French
notion of art populaire or culture populaire differs from the English “popular art” or “popular culture.”
Defined in opposition to industrialized “mass” cultural production, it carries stronger associations
with tradition and social class; thus, it shares more affinity with the English “folk.” It is important
to note, however, that the congress’s organizing committee chose the term art populaire to define
their object of study while explicitly avoiding other words, including “ethnology,” “ethnography,” or
“folklore.” They not only felt that these words were limited in scope but that they carried a political
charge, emphasizing differences that could exacerbate contested territorial claims among different
participating communities. They omitted these terms lest they hinder the strengthening of ties. See
Bjarne Rogan, “Folk Art and Politics in Inter-War Europe: An Early Debate on Applied Ethnology,” Folk
Life 45 (2007): 9.
2 Focillon often uses the term “people” and “race” interchangeably. This topic had already been
the subject of debate in the Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle (IICI). In their view,
the term “race” should not be deployed for explicitly discriminatory purposes, but racial difference
could be seen as an objective cultural qualifier. Racial categories had been proposed initially to
structure the congress’s sections. See A. Ducci, “Le musée d’art populaire contre le folklore,” Revue
Germanique Internationale 21 (2015): 138 and note 28.
3 Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) was a French historian who developed theories of naturalism and
historical determinism under the influence of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). The expression “race-milieu-
moment,” denoting the three factors that determine historical events, draws directly from Taine’s
writings, notably his texts on the philosophy of art. See Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art (Paris:
Germer Baillière, 1865).

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