I've recently started in on another art compendium, The Visual Arts: A History, one of those start-to-finish histories that are an opportunity to not just see the art but learn how somebody who has a broad enough vision to write one of them thinks. I owe an immense debt to the first one of these I read, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, because of the variety of interesting observations and subtle insights it offered into the topic. It really was one of the best summers of my life, sitting outside in the shade of a tree in the morning, reading, transcribing snippets, and writing my responses to them.
Given that, this new one would certainly have a lot to live up to and I admit, it's not on the same level. Part of it is the time difference; I read the 6th edition of Gardner's, published in 1975, and so it avoids much of what I consider degenerate in more recent art commentary. This book being revised in 2009 is prone to milquetoast statements that seek to judge nothing and so, ultimately, say nothing. These authors just don't have the same depth of sensibility. However, it does have a few advantages, not the least of which is color pictures; I spent some time on my phone with Gardner's locating equivalents on the internet, only to have to peer at them on a 5.8" screen. But the one relevant benefit here lies with the prehistoric art, for unlike many other aspects of art which I don't think our understanding has improved, and has often degenerated, our knowledge of prehistoric artifacts has only increased, and I was delighted at the collection.
First, let's start with one I had seen before, the Venus of Willendorf (c25,000 BC):
Now, I'd never given a second thought to this thing, my first reaction being that it was somewhat grotesque in its faceless paean to female features. But one of the lines in the book forced me to take a second look:
The exaggerated rotundity of the body has a yielding fleshiness, felt rather than seen.
And I realized they're right. This is a hunk of sandstone, and while I was preoccupied over the off-putting obesity I failed to appreciate that I, without any effort, had judged it as a perfect depiction of corpulent flesh. That was actually the magic, that I'd forgotten what I was looking at in favor of what it depicted. It got me, and while I'm still not attracted to it, I can it the credit it is due. But I had no such reluctance with the next piece, the Venus of Brassempuoy (c22,000 BC):
I found myself just staring at this one. It's beautiful. Yes it is simple, but somehow it has elegance with its spherical head resting on an elongated neck, like the famous Nefertiti bust in Berlin (and far better to my eye than the Madonna with the Long Neck of Parmigianino). The eyes are merely indents with hints of pupils bored in, but somehow the brows make it expressive, if not of a specific emotion then of a general disposition of confidence, even regality. It's not hard to imagine her as some Mesopotamian queen, hair braided and flowing down the curvature of her neck. Which that's the last thing: I can almost still sense the original shape of the ivory here. Ivory is made of concentric layers, and the "skin" of her neck is one of them; she has that aspect that Michelangelo speaks of when he says he's just freeing a sculpture from the stone. It's like a subtler version of the spearthrower from Montrastruc (c12,000 BC):
What a remarkable usage of the natural shape of the bone. You can see what it once was, probably some leg bone with the haunches being the bone's trochanter and the head the ball-socket.
Some of this usage of natural form also extends to the cave art, like the Goddess of Laussel (c20,000 BC):
The rock naturally curves outward there, and while we can never know exactly what it looked like before the carving it's a reasonable guess that it had a form rather similar to what we see now. It reminds you that ancient artists saw people and animals in the clouds and rocks and such too, and that one of the natural jumping off points is expanding on these initial impressions. The book makes much of the potential symbolism, that the ram's horn appears to be a moon, and that it has 13 notches that correspond with the 13 phases of the moon, but I admit I have my reservations. It's not that I don't want to attribute such relatively advanced symbolism to these people, it's that at least from where I stand I find the connection tenuous. Fertility goddess? Certainly; not hard to believe that given her proportions. But advanced union of female cycle, lunar cycle, and annual cycle into a single integrated symbol? I'd want more data before I credit that.
Which really gets back to an issue that has fascinated me for some time, and that is the eerie ability of primitive peoples to produce very compelling images with a relative sparsity of concepts. I've already gushed over a few statues above, and the next few left me even more in awe:
On the top are carvings on the wall of Addaura Cave in Sicily (c8000 BC), the bottom is Matisse's The Dance (1910). The early 20th century saw a real turn to "primitivism" as European art looked for other sources of inspiration, and in the process of this much of it involved the paring away of inessentials. No more of the ultra-detailed academic art of the 1800s, we just want to depict the feel of something without the unnecessary bits. Matisse wanted to convey the kind of stretching human bodies go through in motion, and in the process get at the essence of what it's like to move as a human.
But I dare say the cave art did it better. The figures are even more clear than those in The Dance, with fewer distracting aspects, and while we're somewhat lost on the context (many are wearing masks, a few appear prone on the ground; why?) the postures are unmistakable. It is complete economy of form. Now, this is a far cry from most cave etchings, which struggle to render humans better than awkward stick figures, but the fact that this was accomplished so early is a testament to this artist and how such precise observation, even in the absence of anatomy, can produce compelling people. And my respect only deepened:
Once again, on the top we have The Thinker and Sitting Woman of Hamangia (c4000-3500 BC) and on the bottom Henry Moore's The King and Queen (1952). Like Matisse, Moore is trying to get at the essentials here. Just a few details, a pose, and you get what you need to have a sense for these things. Yet again here, I have to give the medal to the older work. I still have to think just a little about Moore's statue while the ancient work is unmistakable. The pensiveness is immediate and there is not the slightest hitch one has in appraising the forms.
Which is another profoundly interesting subject to me: these people on the left are on their way to being geometerized. Their arms, legs, and necks are cylinders; bulged cylinders to give them life, but still cylinders. The shoulders are wedges, and the heads a kind of rounded pyramid. Yet it again all works. And what's amazing is that these figures are ~4.5" tall without having the slightest sense that they would be out of place next to Moore's life-sized depictions. In fact, as I've written this I've been reminded of another parallel, this time in painting with Picasso's Rites of Spring (1959):
It's the same sort of basic compellingness from only a few rounded shapes, although part of its import is the sense of depth that isn't required from a sculpture.
What I really learned from all this, ironically, was what modern art had been trying to do. I knew in theory what it was practicing, in an abstract (hah) sort of way, but now with reference I could really see the goals when they were achieved even better. It's like when a 19th century architect (I frustratingly have forgotten who) had been fighting against the bonds of Neo-Classicism and considered Greece and Rome "the enemy", but he eventually went to Athens and saw the Parthenon for himself and was amazed. He realized this was what the moderns were attempting, and failing, to recapture, and after that he gained quite some more respect for the original. While I don't think Matisse and Moore and Picasso are by any stretch failing to capture something, I think the originals did it better, and now I feel quite edified for learning about them.
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An addendum to this that came to me over the night:
I'm still working on appreciating Greek art. I find this primitive art easy to appreciate in part because it requires so little context or concept. It just is, and in looking at it the most important thing I need do is strip away my preconceptions rather than have any additional ideas. In this way the prehistoric art, at its best, is a kind of perfection of an unadorned mind.
But Greek art is different. There are ideas there, big ideas, subtle ideas. It reminds me of Mill's admonition that everybody ought to learn Greek and Latin; not because he thought they were the end-all, but that he thought within their idiom they reached a kind of perfection that was inspiring by its mere existence. In other words, it wasn't imitation that Mill wanted, for some of their sentiments are in fact rather limited (what's the good life? For the Greeks it seems to mostly be poems about wine and symposia), but just knowledge that such peaks were out there.
It really leaves us with a conundrum, because as our thought has generally become more complex as it has added more and more to itself over the millennia, the ability of art to express a sum-total worldview perhaps becomes rarer. I can get primitive art because there's nothing more to get than basic humanity, and perhaps one day I can get Greek art because of its type of formal perfection, but I still don't know what kind of art would fit us now...
