Post by jonsdigs on Dec 31, 2006 9:16:43 GMT -5
Different perspective on some hidden art
The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Bill Marvel
Some of the best writing about art has come from nonspecialists, writers who are not scholars or historians but who bring a lively curiosity, a good eye and clear prose to the subject. Michael Crichton, author of techno-thrillers, wrote one of the best books on the painter Jasper Johns. Novelist John Updike is always illuminating, no matter which artist he writes about.
Three years ago, in "Disarmed," journalist and former Texas Monthly editor Gregory Curtis told the story of the Venus de Milo, perhaps the most famous statue from all of antiquity. Now he dives deeper into the past to examine the most mysterious works in the Western canon: the cave paintings of southern France and northern Spain.
As in "Disarmed," Curtis illuminates the art by casting light on the people, the explorers who discovered and the scholars who studied the painted horses, bison, rhinos, bulls and lions that seem to have galloped out of the dawn of the world. It's a fascinating gallery of the brilliant, the quarrelsome and the obsessed.
In 1879, a Spanish aristocrat and amateur archaeologist, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, was digging for artifacts in a cave on his property when his 8-year-old daughter, Maria, looked up at the ceiling. "Look, Papa," she said. "Oxen!"
The discovery of cave art is full of such happy accidents. A bunch of boys and a dog named Robot stumbled upon wondrous Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel of painted caves. Scuba divers found the underwater entrance to Chauvet, the newest discovery but the oldest site, dating back more than 30,000 years.
The arguments began almost immediately. Some said that the paintings at Altamira were fakes, too good to be ancient. Whoever painted them had a master's eye not only for line and form and the anatomy of the animals, but for sophisticated techniques that we associate with the Renaissance, such as shading and perspective. Notions of human prehistory could not accommodate them.
One of the first revisers was a French priest, the Abbe Henri Breuil, who skipped Mass to copy hundreds of the paintings and, what was far more difficult, attempt to interpret them. The "Pope of Prehistory," as he was called, thought they were religious images, a hunting culture's way of evoking the magic and beauty of the prey. The Marxist art scholar Max Raphael, on the other hand, discerned a story of clan warfare.
And so each expert, whether an archaeologist or art scholar, digger or intellectual, brings his or her predisposition into the debate. Curtis follows every twist and turn as the paintings are cataloged, mapped, analyzed, dated. In a final chapter, he offers his interpretation, arguing that, taken together, the paintings represent "classical" style, the kind produced only by a stable, reasonably prosperous culture.
Today, there are eight major painted caves, all clustered around the Pyrenees. Most are fragile and off-limits to tourists, which means most of us have to depend upon books such as this to guide us. One wishes, in fact, that "The Cave Painters" had included a lot more maps and illustrations.
Each new discovery only increases the mystery: Why only here, in this little corner of Europe? Why, except for a few depictions of female genitalia, are almost all the paintings of big mammals? Why no birds, fish? What's the meaning of the handprints and scratched markings often found with the paintings? Why did this art thrive, virtually unchanged, for millennia?
Most intriguing of all: What do these works have to do with us? Though they are mysterious, they are not strange. We see in them something familiar, a way of perceiving the world and re-creating it in our own likeness.
Perhaps this is as close to the mystery of the cave paintings as we'll ever get. Article
The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Bill Marvel
Some of the best writing about art has come from nonspecialists, writers who are not scholars or historians but who bring a lively curiosity, a good eye and clear prose to the subject. Michael Crichton, author of techno-thrillers, wrote one of the best books on the painter Jasper Johns. Novelist John Updike is always illuminating, no matter which artist he writes about.
Three years ago, in "Disarmed," journalist and former Texas Monthly editor Gregory Curtis told the story of the Venus de Milo, perhaps the most famous statue from all of antiquity. Now he dives deeper into the past to examine the most mysterious works in the Western canon: the cave paintings of southern France and northern Spain.
As in "Disarmed," Curtis illuminates the art by casting light on the people, the explorers who discovered and the scholars who studied the painted horses, bison, rhinos, bulls and lions that seem to have galloped out of the dawn of the world. It's a fascinating gallery of the brilliant, the quarrelsome and the obsessed.
In 1879, a Spanish aristocrat and amateur archaeologist, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, was digging for artifacts in a cave on his property when his 8-year-old daughter, Maria, looked up at the ceiling. "Look, Papa," she said. "Oxen!"
The discovery of cave art is full of such happy accidents. A bunch of boys and a dog named Robot stumbled upon wondrous Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel of painted caves. Scuba divers found the underwater entrance to Chauvet, the newest discovery but the oldest site, dating back more than 30,000 years.
The arguments began almost immediately. Some said that the paintings at Altamira were fakes, too good to be ancient. Whoever painted them had a master's eye not only for line and form and the anatomy of the animals, but for sophisticated techniques that we associate with the Renaissance, such as shading and perspective. Notions of human prehistory could not accommodate them.
One of the first revisers was a French priest, the Abbe Henri Breuil, who skipped Mass to copy hundreds of the paintings and, what was far more difficult, attempt to interpret them. The "Pope of Prehistory," as he was called, thought they were religious images, a hunting culture's way of evoking the magic and beauty of the prey. The Marxist art scholar Max Raphael, on the other hand, discerned a story of clan warfare.
And so each expert, whether an archaeologist or art scholar, digger or intellectual, brings his or her predisposition into the debate. Curtis follows every twist and turn as the paintings are cataloged, mapped, analyzed, dated. In a final chapter, he offers his interpretation, arguing that, taken together, the paintings represent "classical" style, the kind produced only by a stable, reasonably prosperous culture.
Today, there are eight major painted caves, all clustered around the Pyrenees. Most are fragile and off-limits to tourists, which means most of us have to depend upon books such as this to guide us. One wishes, in fact, that "The Cave Painters" had included a lot more maps and illustrations.
Each new discovery only increases the mystery: Why only here, in this little corner of Europe? Why, except for a few depictions of female genitalia, are almost all the paintings of big mammals? Why no birds, fish? What's the meaning of the handprints and scratched markings often found with the paintings? Why did this art thrive, virtually unchanged, for millennia?
Most intriguing of all: What do these works have to do with us? Though they are mysterious, they are not strange. We see in them something familiar, a way of perceiving the world and re-creating it in our own likeness.
Perhaps this is as close to the mystery of the cave paintings as we'll ever get. Article
