The Glam-Ur-ous Life: Archaeology and Modern Art

When British archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered in December 1927 the tomb of Puabi, the queen/priestess of the Sumerian city of Ur during the First Dynasty of Ur more than 4,000 years ago, the story rivaled that of Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt just five years earlier. “Magnificent with jewels,” as Woolley described it, Puabi’s tomb contained the bodies of dozens of attendants killed to accompany her in the afterlife — the ideal material for a headline-grabbing PR campaign that momentarily shouldered Tut out of the spotlight. A new exhibit at New York’s The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World titled From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics puts Puabi back in the spotlight to examine how archaeology and aesthetics intersected, transforming ancient art into modern and making modern art strive to be ancient. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Glam-Ur-ous Life: Archaeology and Modern Art."

An Exhibition About an Art Critic?

Nobody goes to a baseball game to watch the umpires, so why would someone go to a museum to see an exhibition dedicated to an art critic—one of those arbiters of taste who hopes to mediate but sometimes only muddles the interaction between artists and the public? England’s Tate Britain bets that the British public will come to watch the umpire in their new exhibition Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation. Not just your average umpire, Sir Kenneth Clark (shown above) ruled over art criticism for decades, stretching from his becoming Director of the British National Gallery in 1933 at just 30 years of age all the way to his crowning achievement with the 13-part documentary Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark in 1969. Although the main focus of the show is on Clark’s work in the 1930s and 1940s, by having the show’s title hark back to his highly personal broadcast of what was civilization and art, it raises the larger question of how this public servant served the public for well-intentioned good and possibly ill, as any critic can. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "An Exhibition About an Art Critic?"

Saving Silence

"We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds," Jean Arp once said. Born September 16, 1887, the French Arp (who called himself Hans when speaking German) joined forces with like-minded artists during the dark days of World War I and helped form the Dada and Surrealist movements, which wanted to take the twisted reason of “power-mad gangsters” embroiling the world in armed conflict and replace it with the playful, unconscious world of chance. Arp’s Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws of Chance) (above, from 1916-1917) belongs to a series of collages he did by allegedly dropping torn bits of paper onto a larger sheet and pasting them wherever chance led them. By placing his imagination completely out of the picture, Arp sought to reproduce the random effects of nature. This collage seems to composed to be done purely by chance, but the spirit of Arp’s enterprise—literally a dream to save the world—still holds true.

Arp loved to mimic nature in his abstractions, creating biomorphic figures such as Head and Shell (above, from 1933). Arp’s polished brass Head and Shell suggests natural forms without accurately reproducing them. Arp claimed that he only titled such works after deciding there was nothing left to change after allowing his unconscious mind to play with the forms. Like Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth, among many others, copied Arp’s flirtation with natural forms in their paintings and sculptures. "Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb," Arp later said, again echoing the Surrealist/Dada line that art flowed organically from the unconscious rather than the conscious mind, which always looked to shape (and often misshape) the world. There’s always a great sense of movement in Arp’s sculptures, which often seem to be growing before your eyes, as if they had just emerged from a shell and were looking for their mother.

Arp fled France as the Nazis advanced and sat out World War II in Zurich, Switzerland. Years later, Arp looked back on those sad days and lamented the fate of humanity. "Soon silence will have passed into legend,” Arp believed. “Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation." With works such as Human Concretion (above, from 1935), Arp hoped to cement the importance of thought and right reasoning to the survival of the human race. While Arp’s earliest works represented an escape from thought, or at least the twisted thought of those hungering for power, his later works emphasize the need to find a quiet place within and find the meaning of life for ourselves, away from the cacophony of media and technological progress. What would Arp make of today’s world of gadgets, all of which fill the world with noise and drown out our inner voices? He’d probably put a finger to his lips, point to one of his sculptures, and whisper quietly, “Look, and learn.”

New World Disorder

When you serve as an officer in not one but two world wars, the whole world starts to take on a surreal tint. Paul Nash fought in both World War I and II for England, recording the war in his own personal way, which was shaped largely by the modernist art movements he studied before the conflicts. Born May 11, 1889, Nash acerbically titled his dystopian landscape of the bloody sun rising over the trenches in We Are Making a New World (above, from 1918). There are still places in Europe upon which the violence of World War I and the years of trench warfare are clearly written upon the landscape. The Great War (an oxymoron, if there ever was one) aimed at creating a new world, and succeeded, but not in the way it imagined. Nash loved the writings and paintings of William Blake, whose vision of hell on earth and sense of caustic irony emerge in We Are Making a New World. Nash’s surreal landscape captures the unreal reality of warfare without straying too far from the photographically documented truth.


Between the wars, Nash returned to civilian life in England and interacted with British abstract artists such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In Pillar and Moon (above, from 1932-1942), Nash paints a sculpture similar to those by Moore and Hepworth. The moon in the sky echoes the moonlike sphere sitting atop the pillar, as if the stars had fallen to earth. The trees in the background seem borrowed from the paintings of the German Expressionists, twisted and gnarled with the angst of having lived through war with a soul not completely intact. That German touch may be a gesture towards understanding that all sides suffered greatly during the war, erasing the dehumanizing rhetoric employed to get the murderous job done. Even when not facing a hail of bullets, Nash couldn’t remove himself from the theater of the military absurd.


During World War II, Nash photographed a field full of damaged aircraft. Looking upon the wrecks, he imagined the shapes of the fuselage to be the waves and breakers of a vast sea frozen in place. Totes Meer (German for “Dead Sea”; above, from 1940-1941) beautifully transforms the machines of death into a roiling sea of grey metal. Only a few scattered German crosses on broken wings identify the “waves” for what they truly are. Whereas We Are Making a New World documented how war transformed peaceful reality into a nightmare, Totes Meer documents how imagination transforms harsh reality into something beautiful. From these ashes, Nash rises with a sense of hopefulness, remarkable given that 1940 and 1941 marked the nadir of British life during the war, when the Blitz rained down death upon London and FDR battled isolationists in the United States just to initiate the Lend-Lease Act to help England survive. Surrealism, which often took the everyday and made it nightmarish, here in Nash’s work takes the tragically horrific and finds a slender ray of beauty and, perhaps, hope.

There’s Nothing Like a Dame

Although she’s compared most often to her friend, contemporary, and fellow British sculptor Henry Moore, Dame Barbara Hepworth carved out her own niche in the world of modernist sculpture, rising to an elite, international stature few other women sculptors reached in the twentieth century. Born January 10, 1903, Hepworth easily drew comparisons with Moore in works such as Mother and Child (above, from 1934), which reduces the human form to its essential elements and allows the eye and mind to penetrate the work through the openings so closely identified with Moore’s sculptures. Along with Louise Nevelson and Louise Bourgeois, Dame Barbara helped forge a new acceptance of women sculptors in modern art.

When Dag Hammarskjold, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, died tragically in a plane crash in 1961, the U.N. commissioned Hepworth to create a memorial. Single Form (above, from 1962-1963) still stands outside the United Nations Building in New York City as an simple, austere tribute to Hammarskjold’s spirit. The openness of the man himself appears in the opening of the cape-like structure, which seems almost inviting in its desire to envelop you. Much public abstract sculpture seems more off-putting than inviting (think Richard Serra), but Hepworth paradoxically brings a softness to these hard structures. Usually, “softness” serves as code for “female” and, hence, “not as good as a man could do,” but in Hepworth’s case, her deft touch often conveys something very apt and beautiful in that appropriateness. Hepworth married the sculptor John Skeaping and later the painter Ben Nicholson, showing that she could more than hold her own in the world of male artists.

I find Hepworth’s Construction (Crucifixion)—Homage to Mondrian (above, from 1966) to be her most unique work. The colors pay homage to the works of Piet Mondrian, but Hepworth does more than honor that artist’s works. The red symbolizes the sun, while the white stands for the moon. The yellow circle stands for the head of Christ and, perhaps, a halo. As the description near the sculpture says, “The red, white and yellow colorings form a pattern evocative of pain, purity and deity.” Hepworth’s open framework not only suggests the crosses of Christ and the two thieves, but also creates a network through which time and space can flow. The two dimensionality of painted crucifixions gives way to the veracity of three-dimensional pain. Through her unique style, Hepworth brings a freshness to old forms and revitalizes the religious content. Sadly, Hepworth died horribly in a fire in 1975 as she was battling cancer. The Barbara Hepworth Museum carries on her memory today, which serves as an inspiration not only to women artists but also to those who struggle to maintain their faith in this modern world.

Automatic Artist

Jean Arp, one of the founders of Dada and early Surrealist, was born September 16, 1887. Painter, collagist, sculptor, and poet, Arp may be best known for his automatism, in which he allowed the rules of chance to create his works, especially his collages in which he would allow pieces of torn paper to fall upon a sheet and he would glue them in place exactly in the pattern in which they fell. Works such as Before My Birth (above), from 1914, show Arp’s dependence on unconscious forces to compose his works.

I’ve always found Arp’s sculpture to be the most interesting aspect of his art. Works such as the beautifully gleaming Classical Sculpture (above) compare favorably with those of fellow abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Henry Moore saw Arp’s works and modeled his own approach to the human figure after Arp’s. Arp gets at the essence of the figure in his sculptures, reducing the figure to its simplest components. In his poetry, Arp showed a similar gift for getting at “the roots” of a subject, as in his poem “The Air Is a Root”:

The air is a root.
The stones are filled with tenderness. bravo.
bravo. the stones are filled with air.
the stones are watery branches.
on the stones replacing the mouth
grows the skeleton of a leaf. bravo.
A stone voice face to face and foot to foot
with a stone glance.
the stones are tormented like flesh
the stones are clouds for their second
nature dances to them on their third nose.
bravo. bravo.
when the stones scratch themselves, nails grow
on the roots. bravo. bravo.
the stones woke to eat the exact
hour

Arp always seems to stand between two extremes. Born in the Alsace region of France, Arp spoke both French and German and was known as “Hans” by Germans and as “Jean” by the French. Multiple early schools of avant garde modernism claim him as their own. Despite ties to other modernists such as Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters, Arp always maintained his own unique style. As great as Arp’s greatest works are, they always seem to me to be fragments, as truncated as his limbless Pyrenees Torso (above). Flying by autopilot throughout his artistic career, Arp never seemed to arrive at any destination of achievement. Of course, he would probably respond that it was the journey itself that mattered, the mind in flight more vital than the results on the ground.

Soft Edges

Henry Moore, one of the most successful and influential sculptors of the twentieth century, was born on July 30, 1898. Moore’s work shows the influence of the art of the primitive cultures of Africa and Central America in his approach to the figure. Recumbent Figure (above) serves as just one example of Moore’s many depictions of the nude female figure in his signature stylized way. On one hand, there’s an odd beauty to Moore’s figures, a simplifying and softening of all the hard edges of many other modern depictions of the human figure that seems almost timeless. On the other hand, some critics view Moore’s female figures, which are often simplified to the point of erasure and frequently pierced through with holes, as symbols of the violence of the male gaze—a passive-aggressive attack on the female body via sculpture.

Moore made group figures such as Family Group (above) much less frequently. Again, the simplification of the figures simultaneously universalizes and erases individuality. I tend to fall in with those who see Moore’s work positively, believing that anyone can recognize these figures as a family unit regardless of culture. If Moore truly erased identity, those roles would be erased as well. If realistic portraiture can clearly transform an individual into a symbol of the universal human condition (if one accepts the possibility of such absolutes), then the opposite extreme of nonrealistic portraiture (Moore’s typology of women or families) can reach the same goal, but from a different direction. Moore claims that the story of Michelangelo inspired him at the age of eleven to become a sculpture. I’ve always believed that Moore’s admiration of Michelangelo embraced the ideals of Renaissance humanism as well.

Although Moore is deservedly best known for his sculpture, his drawings deserve some attention as well. During World War II, Moore served as an official war artist for England. When the Nazis bombed London during “the Blitz,” driving innocent citizens into the London Underground for safety, Moore followed and sketched them (above) trying to sleep in the midst of the chaos above them. Like the sculpture, these drawings remain stylized in that Moore does not concentrate on individual faces, but the realistic depiction of the Underground tunnel receding into the distance and the rhythm of the sleeping bodies trailing off into the vanishing point aptly capture the scale and the sense of community of that moment in British history.

Before his death, Moore created the Henry Moore Foundation as his gift to the British nation to help further arts education. Moore’s Foundation still contributes to arts education as well as promotes the work of Moore himself. Sadly, in 2005, Moore’s Reclining Figure LH608 (above) was stolen from the grounds of the Foundation. In perhaps the most audacious art robbery of all time, thieves stole off with the two-ton sculpture, worth $5.3 million USD. Authorities now believe that the sculpture has been melted down for scrap. The “LH608” stands for the catalogue number assigned to the sculpture, necessary because Moore used the same, simple titles over and over for this sculptures. Moore’s simple titles place the responsibility of interpretation on us, the viewer, which may be the most positive, the most affirmative act any artist can perform.