ABSTRACT
This chapter presents “folk art” signifies the poetical, musical, and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and not urbanized or industrialized. The history of modern popular art begins about the middle of the nineteenth century with the rise of the idea that art is relaxation, the prevalence of a desire to find in art a means of distraction rather than of concentration, entertainment rather than education or deepened understanding. The style of this art, of which we can form some idea chiefly from the pottery of the epoch, shows the first signs of that “disorganization” and schematization of forms which characterizes folk art generally. The essential defect of the reception theory lies in its neglect of the fact that the taking over of art-forms and themes into folk art always depends upon the realization of certain conditions.
