T he Creative work of a plastic artist cannot be wholly explained by the aesthetics. 
One may be introduced into the artist's life and may try to touch its deepest chords, 
and architectural plastic painting may be very clear and convincing in form and pro- 
duction, yet before the understanding eye it always holds the fascination of an 
elusive and inexessable charm. Thus the works of the plastic artists have something 
absolutely timeless. They are always able to give something and to please. 
We have learned that every new cultural epoch brings new life, new content, and 
new meaning into the apparently dead forms. Philosophie and poetic works lose their 
Problems on the whole by repetition and cannot hold the attention nor create such 
great interest and pleasure as pictures can do. Unfinished thought holds more than 
thought that is clearly defined, for that which is clearly seen and understood, no 
longer holds that elusive mystery which is preserved for the plastic art and which 
makes it so inexhaustible. In this way the individual imagination as the deciding 
essential element is stronger than any possible and generally current and logical 
explanation. Therefore the aesthetic can only try to explain a little the 'great unknows' 
which are hidden in the outer forms and which finally are nothing more than the mani- 
festation of the ideas of humanity. 
In regarding facts which owe their origin to a general rise from a general spark 
which connects reason and sense into form we realise that it is nearly impossible to 
solve them in logical conception. We cannot see the sense in an artistic work, we 
can only feel it. The inner law which we discover as that sense in an artistic work 
which enables us to understand and enjoy it, is simply given to us if the form is seen 
to have arisen by a mouvement, whose action and reaction, arising and finishing, we 
feel to be as natural as organic. This again is the case if the aesthetic forces and 
actions tend to move according to the realities of life, if they symboiise the organic 
necessities of the sensations and conceptions of time; and just as they differ accor 
ding to race and climate and historical epochs, so the Symbols differ accordingly. The 
gracious feminine display of forms of the French Rococco, the rüde sensuality of the 
Italian Barok, the over-sensuality of the German Gothic and the self-conscious quiet- 
ness and law-abiding style of the Greek Antique all symboiise time, race and climate. 
Nations with similar Symbols are necessarily related and their sentiment and spirit is 
accessible to us as well as their art and language. The less we understand their Sym 
bols, the stranger the race becomes and explanations are more arbitrary. The highly 
developed and perhaps superior art of Asia is hidden from us in its real inner being. 
That which the Indian plastic, the Chinese painting and the Japanese wood-cutting are 
trying to express will be an eternally stränge world of thinking and feeling. 
There are few artists who have been able to understand and to recognise so 
quickly, the still unknown organic necessities of their times and to symboiise them 
in a general current manner as Josef Hoffmann. He solved the problem which was 
urgently needed to clear the existing aesthetic chaos. He created the new form at the 
time of the greatest confusion of taste; the new form which was to give a new impetus 
to European Industrial Art. He created that form which, in connecting the Creative 
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