Triumph of the Past
MULLER, MARION
On Art TRIUMPH OF THE PAST BY MARION MULLER. Left to our own devices, we have tended to plow past mummy cases and Grecian urns without batting an eyelash. From grade school on, we had been...
...I mean, simply, that it must have a passion?an importance beyond its strictly formal elements...
...forts are lightweight and whimsical...
...Who needed, ever again, to be told that the ancient Egyptians and Greeks made great art...
...More than 100 such places were discovered in Europe and Asia in the late 19th century, the most celebrated being Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France...
...Climate notwithstanding, the area sustained a wide variety of animal life...
...Their lines are elegant...
...Much modern art prides itself on stunning our senses, frustrating our expectations, or zeroing in on a single aspect of esthetics or form to the exclusion of all else...
...they have not added to its significance...
...Then, one day, we might be able to look at a painting or sculpture just a few years old and feel the same wonder and empathy as we do for a bas-relief in an Egyptian tomb, a fresco in a medieval cathedral, or a drawing on the wall of an Ice Age cave...
...gestures are stated accurately with an economy of means that would be the pride of any contemporary artist...
...You're hostile in self-defense...
...The show at the Museum of Natural History, however, is a stunning recreation of the drawings, polychrome paintings, sculpture and other objects found in many of them, and it includes a number of authentic pieces on loan from important archeological collections...
...This, in turn, not only provided the food and clothing needed to sustain human life, but animal bones and ivory tusks also were turned into tools and decorative objects...
...Moreover, the untutored artists invented finger painting, brush painting, crayon work, and even a form of air-brush or spray painting that they engineered by blowing color through a hollow bone...
...Indeed, this quality of "timeless-ness" almost inevitably raises some disquieting thoughts about the value of contemporary art...
...Similarly, in a series of rock paintings one sees not just the seeds, but the very images of modern painting...
...All reveal an amazing ability to use various media...
...What ours lacks, and what I think the art of the past-Including the prehistoric past-possesses, is religiosity...
...Some are faceless, some have features inscribed in the head, some are coolly abstract, some are almost humorous fantasies...
...More people than ever before are involved in creative activity-and with patronage a thing of the past and commissions handed out to a small group of "established" names, competition is devastating...
...It goes like this: "You don't like it because you don't understand it...
...In fact, compared to the art of early civilizations, that of our own era seems vacuous and insignificant...
...From grade school on, we had been shepherded through museums and lectured ad nauseum on the glories of the past...
...They carved and incised drawings in limestone and ivory, and modeled huge animal figures in clay as well...
...There is a popular rebuttal to negative criticism of such precious works...
...To wrap a coastline in plastic, to paint a 12-foot portrait with every follicle and pore in place is no small accomplishment...
...I do not mean to imply that art must serve some religious purpose...
...Finally, with the help of highly specialized scientific equipment, the age of the artwork was verified...
...Most of them are fertility figures with enormous pendulous breasts, protruding buttocks and distended abdomens...
...Here's a Mi-ro...
...Present, too, are Sol Lewitt and our ubiquitous graffiti arVenus of Koslenki (Ukraine), ivory...
...They seriously questioned its authenticity, for there was nothing faintly primitive, naive or clumsy about these creations...
...Their most recent success is Ice Age Art at the Museum of Natural History in New York, which is bringing visitors in record numbers-a fact that may tell us more about our own art than that of our ancestors...
...The voluptuous "Venus" fertility statuettes are surely related to the work of Milton Hebald and Gaston Lachaise...
...Open to the public until atmospheric conditions began to take their toll, the caves have been sealed off to prevent further damage through erosion...
...Ice Age artists used cracks in walls and "found" textures as springboards for drawing, a technique practiced in the "creative drawing" classes of today...
...Thus we find canWillendorf (Austria), limestone...
...The contours and forms of the subjects were evolved out of pre-existing cracks and bulges in the walls and ceilings...
...of course, artists have since had the advantage of technological developments-the camera, laser beams, xerography, video-art, etc...
...In contrast to the naturalistic animal representations, humans sculpted in limestone and ivory are more abstract, though equally expressive...
...We look at some of our contemporary works and we feel locked out-alienated...
...Ice Age art has this quality: We look at it and understand something of the aspirations, fears and pleasures of human existence...
...Perhaps in the light of the dwindling space and budgets of most museums, the refreshing visions coming to us from past civilizations will bolster our creative energies toward bigger ideas-on a smaller scale...
...And yet, over the past few years the curators of our most prestigious museums have somehow succeeded in having us line up to see the Thracian Treasures of Bulgaria, dating from the 4th century BC, Scythian Gold of the 7th century BC and the Treasures of Tutankhamen from the 14th century BC...
...But even the comprehensible works are for the most part unloveable, vacuous and ultimately boring...
...of Lespugue (Frai vases exploring the whiteness of white, the blackness of black, the surface of the canvas, color alone, edges alone, texture alone...
...there are the glyph and sunburst motifs of Adolph Gottlieb...
...Otherwise, it would perhaps still be impossible to accept these sophisticated images as the production of prehistoric Cro-Magnon man...
...But these advancements have merely expanded our modes of expression...
...tists, in the form of drawing done directly on walls...
...For protection and performing mysterious rites, those human beings took refuge in caves where they left behind their artifacts and their art...
...First, it makes clear that for all the chatter about avant-gardism and originality, we have not "progressed" much in 350 centuries...
...The animal drawings are not static primitive symbols, but vigorous, organic, naturalistic images-In motion...
...As for abstract art?supposedly a 20th-century innovation -there are three little carvings of human figures in the show that could easily be signed, "Noguchi...
...This would appear to explain in part the preoccupation with gimmickry, with dazzling pyrotechnics and attention-getting devices at the expense of meaning...
...This exhibition, due to go on tour throughout the country after January 1979, takes us back 35,000 years to the last Ice Age, when a one-mile thick sheet of ice blanketed the continents of Europe and Asia...
...All c.28,000-25,000 BC...
...Nonetheless, on the scale of human achievement such efice), ivory...
...But they are timeless in their concept...
...For a long time, archeologists studied the art inside the shelters in disbelief...
...In the interest of fairness, it should be pointed out that artists do face serious problems...
...Undeniably, it is difficult to like what is incomprehensible...
...The artists "make art," and the viewers-not unjustifiably?make faces...
...they could just as easily be the work of an African tribesman, of an Australian bushman or of a modern sculptor...
...Even more astonishing than the variety of the media is the quality of the work...
...They derive from the kind of advice I heard offered by a contemporary painter to a student: "If you have a small idea-paint it big...
...there's a Paul Klee...
...And they appear all the more incredible when one considers that they were drawn and sculpted from memory, since no bison or mammoth (dead or alive) could have entered a cave to serve as a model...
Vol. 61 • August 1978 • No. 17
