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The Critic
This solid block of a book looks more like a plinth for a sculpture than a
piece of reading matter – which makes sense since it serves the same
purpose. It is intended to display art: 30,000 years of it. And, at just
under £30, 30,000 Years of Art sounds like a bargain. That’s just £1 per
thousand years of world culture. You would pay more for wine gums.
So, what exactly are you getting? “A whole new way of looking at art,” gibbers
an excitable dust jacket. The trouble is there’s an entire history of “whole
new ways” of looking at art history. Ever since Pliny the Elder kicked it
all off, scholars have been seeking alternative approaches, from Vasari, who
ushered in the idea of steady progression, through Winckelmann, who
preferred the lens of the learned spectator to the artist’s own views, to
Ernst Gombrich, whose The Story of Art remains a delightfully accessible and
broadly encompassing classic. And that’s just here in the West. Elsewhere
they have developed their own methods. For example, Xie He, the great
Chinese critic, classified his cultural legacy according to six fundamental
laws.
The art-historical canon is a long-standing source of critical squabbles. And
there are no signs of things settling: rather the opposite. We live in a
postmodern pick’n’mix age. We peep through a kaleidoscope that shatters the
monolith into myriad patterns. We are asked to look at our world through the
eyes of the Marxist, the feminist, the psychoanalyst, the racist – pretty
soon, I expect, it will be the turn of the dentist.
Now Phaidon is offering us art for the relativist. 30,000 Years of Art takes
what is currently an extremely fashionable stance. This is a book for
today’s global society. Here is art history for “all regions and cultures in
a single unfolding chronology”.
The book is fun to look at. It has lots and lots of pictures; the paper is
nice and shiny and the accompanying textual snippets are fairly informative,
if rather concise. As you turn the pages, you creep progressively, image by
image, past the years and along the decades, down the centuries and through
the millennia. You watch the slowly changing – or sometimes unchanging –
progress of culture across six continents. And you can feel your outlook
slowly expanding – even as your knee is getting squashed.
Besides, this book has a delightful curiosity value. Did you know, for
instance, that when Leonardo was painting his first realistic portraits, the
Arawak people of the Dominican Republic were making ironwood pipes for
inhaling hallucinogens. Probably not. But then, why should you? What does
this really tell you? Nothing much.
Comparisons between the images paired up by the pages can be refreshingly
enjoyable. Look at Fragonard’s frilly petticoats, for example, beside the
scaly, scrolling curves on a Chinese quatrefoil box. And a juxtaposition of
Blake’s view of the creation story with that of an Indian manuscript painter
reminds us once again how radical this familiar British maverick really was.
There is plenty to fascinate. The image of an Egyptian deity nursing her baby
in 2190BC reemerges thousands of years later in the Christian tradition with
an Early Byzantine tapestry depicting the Madonna and child. And if you have
come to associate large tracts of the East with a prohibitive Islamic
culture, you might be interested to observe that, when you go back to
earliest beginnings, by far the sauciest images seem to come from the
regions that are now dominantly Muslim. Look at the provocative little
dancing girl made in 2000BC in what is now Pakistan or the remarkably bendy
acrobat painted a little bit later at Thebes.
But, in its broad sweep, this book does precious little to alter the
predominant balance of views. Culture is still presented as a sort of
developmental baton passed on from nation to nation. The Egyptians were
carving dramatic hippopotamus-hunting scenes while the backward Britons had
got no farther than making little chalk lumps with what look like primordial
emoticons scratched on the side. So, quite rightly the Pharaohs get far more
early references than the North Yorkshire neolithics. The United States
still comes across as a late starter. You may be offered the odd early
object by a Native American, but the 50-odd entries that the US clocks up
mostly kick in during the past 50 years, when it is proffered pride of place
as a cultural superpower.
If the African continent doesn’t feature that much, it’s because the compilers
of this volume are still hung up on the notion of developmental progression.
They are not looking at visual power or religious significance. And African
art, it seems, doesn’t change that much from a 6000BC painted cobble to a
20th-century mask. It only really gets a look in later because of its
influence on emerging Modernism.
But, more often, the constant borrowings that have moulded our cultures seem
occluded. The Venetian Renaissance master Bellini may have spent time at the
Ottoman court; but although the text mentions this, his own art is not
pictured alongside a piece by those whom he taught. The ambitious sky-space
projects of James Turrell are indebted to the pyramids but, by the time you
have got all the way to the end of the book and see them, ancient Egypt has
probably been just about forgotten – not that architecture ever gets a
mention in this book.
But the most obvious cross-cultural links are often missed out.
Toulouse-Lautrec was enormously influenced by Japanese drawings, for
instance. But he doesn’t appear. And in this strictly chronological tome the
art of the Australian Aborigines features only in 1988.
If I wanted a truly global picture of culture, I think I would prefer Julian
Bell’s Mirror of the World (Thames & Hudson) , also published this
month. He forgets chronological dictates to explore what a Chinese scroll
has in common with a paparazzi photograph, a prehistoric stone with the
latest video work.
This Phaidon compendium feels like the opening parade of the Olympics. It’s
nice to include everyone and to see them all so proud. But, in the long run,
we want to know who is holding the baton, who is outstripping the others in
the race. 30,000 Years of Art is published by Phaidon on Nov 5 at £29.95
The Philistine
Its title alone – 30,000 Years of Art – sounds like a threat. One imagines in
the deepest circle of Hell that the punishment for miserable sinners is to
read aloud from exhibition catalogues for 30 millennia: “Kozlovsky broke
with the Symbolic-Expressionist Movement in his radical work, White Ceiling
with Coving Number 4, unveiled at the 1923 Exhibition de Poseurs in Paris.
His wittily subversive use of the B&Q roller exemplified the
revolutionary linear, nondrip Expressionist-Symbolist style. In 1924 . . .”
So I approached 30,000 Years of Artwith trepidation: how much wittering about
post-neo-whateverism can a philistine take? Well, there is a bit of that in
this wrist-snappingly heavy tome but there is much more besides for the
nonarty reader.
Its strictly chronological approach gives you a vivid sense of how cultures
and civilisations progress or stagnate – and, let’s be politically
incorrect, not all cultures are equal. For instance, the Chupicaro of the
Mexican highlands in 100BC bequeathed to the world what looks like little
indecent gingerbread women; in Rome, in the same era, the powerful statue of
Laocoön wrestling with writhing serpents was carved from stone.
And there is plenty of intriguing detail that arouses a deeper appreciation of
the artist’s achievement. The first piece of art in the book, for instance,
is The Lion Man of Hohleinstein-Stadel – carved from the tip of a mammoth
tusk, it is a reminder that lions roamed around Europe until the second
millennium BC. The Book of Kells, produced on Iona in about AD805, used
lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. It’s extraordinary, too, that we know that a
Greek named Sophilos sat down in 575BC to knock out a dinos, a bowl for
mixing wine and water.
The book helped to give me more of a shape to the history of art, rather than
just seeing it as one bloody painting after another. My new-found
understanding of the 30,000 years can be abbreviated thus: 25,000 years ago,
in Willendorf, Austria, a man picked up a piece of limestone and from it
carved a nude woman with oversized breasts (that’s why I assume it was a
man) and thunder thighs. The Venus of Willendorf,was either an icon for a
fertility cult or an early example of Ann Widdecombe worship. Soon, across
the globe, other people had the same idea and started making Widdecombesque
figurines.
The dinner party was invented in Mesopotamia in around 5000BC, so people
needed plates. The Samarra Plate was one of the first. Then artists saw a
new market opportunity: death. Not only was early man anxious about the
fecundity of women and land, he also had, what with all the bison-chasing
and the lack of antibiotics, a tendency to die. So artists started knocking
off trinkets for the dead to be buried with.
The Egyptians and Greeks battled it out for a couple of millennia in an arts
race for cultural supremacy: the Egyptians lost. It’s all looking good in
Europe for the next few centuries – plenty of statues of studly discus
throwers, pots with winsome boys, Roman senators looking suitably Classical,
heroic war scenes.
Then monotheism caught on: the Barberini Ivory (AD535) shows the Emperor
Justinian kicking Persian ass with Christ’s blessing. There is a lot less
nudity but plenty of saints, Virgin Marys, woe and crucifixions. Then –
crash, bang, wallop – Donatello unveils his David in 1435. It’s the Early
Renaissance and Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian,
Tintoretto and general highbrow gorgeousness.
(Meanwhile in the rest of the world: China – vases, delicate water-colours,
silk paintings and calligraphy; India – multi-armed divinities and saucy
carvings; the Arab world – tiles; Americas – geometric patterns and
frightening masks made from skulls; Africa – wooden heads.)
Let’s speed up: Mannerism, Dutch School, Baroque, Counter-Reformation. Before
you know it we’re in the age of the bourgeoisie, fruit bowls, horsey scenes,
portraits of ordinary people doing ordinary things (and, hooray, it’s the
18th century and the English start getting a look-in: Hogarth, Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Stubbs, Wedgwood). Romanticism, PreRaphaelites, Realism,
Impressionism . . . and then it all goes wrong with PostImpressionism.
Paul Gauguin in Savage Tales (1902) rejects European civilisation and embraces
the noble savagery of the Polynesians. Oh dear, Western artists reject
everything that had gone before, forget how to paint, discover the joys of
squiggles and geometry, and act like a bunch of Warhols. Cubism,
Expressionism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Socialist Realism, Abstract
Expressionism, Modernism, Pop Art, Op Art, Neo-Pop Art. The End. OK, I’ve
oversimplified. But 30,000 Years of Art,by dint of the grandeur of its
sweep, awakened within this thoroughgoing philistine a glimmer of awe in
mankind’s irrepressible itch to create.
