THE ARTS: The New Century—Toward Recovery

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by Paul Johnson

THERE has been something like a collapse of the arts in the 20th century- -or so, I suspect, future historians will judge--and what we must look for, early in the Third Millennium, is a process of recovery. The whole of history teaches that men and women cannot live without art, and that art must be as good as they can make it. They were engaging in art long before they could write, perhaps even before they could communicate with one another fluently through speech. Art they must have; it is a human craving almost as strong as the need for food, drink, and sleep. If they are deprived of art--good art--for long, as sometimes happens in history, the craving, far from disappearing, becomes stronger than ever, and artists, often great artists, promptly arise to satisfy it.

The art of ancient Egypt, in the three millennia before Jesus Christ, illustrates this. The achievements of the Old Kingdom, which produced the pyramids of Giza and much else, were followed by a social and cultural collapse, known as the First Intermediate Period. When this came to an end, the Middle Kingdom arose, with astonishing suddenness, reassuming all the main characteristics of the art of the Old Kingdom, but with added brilliance: The best hardstone portrait-busts, for instance, date from this time. Again, a collapse followed, the Second Intermediate Period, followed by the New Kingdom, swiftly developing into the age of grandeur we associate with Rameses II and Tutankhamen, and Egyptian art continued until it was absorbed into the art of the Greco-Roman world.

The process of declension and recovery is more specifically illustrated in the depiction of pictorial space on flat or curved surfaces. This was a technical discovery of the ancient Greeks, which may be said to have been achieved by the 5th century B.C., as we can see from examination of Red Attic vases, and was transmitted to the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Most of the paintings of Greco-Roman antiquity have disappeared, but we can observe at Pompeii and elsewhere that linear perspective had been mastered, along with the foreshortening of figures. These pictorial techniques are essential to the creation of genuine illusion in surface art--they make it far more exciting and open up endless possibilities of development.

But sometime after the 4th century A.D., they were lost. The process of their recovery, in 13th- and 14th-century Italy, has been brilliantly described in John White's book, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. The excitement of the artists at being able to present realistic figures in genuine space was so intense, and the popularity of the new or recovered illusionism so enormous, as to constitute one of the principal dynamics of the Renaissance, so that within a comparatively short time artists were able to do everything the masters of antiquity could do, and a great deal more. If we take a long view of the history of art, the moral seems to be that collapses need not be final but can be the prelude to fresh advances--one step backward, two forward.

That a collapse has occurred in our own time is beyond doubt. Let me give one example. When, a few years ago, the sculptor Gerald Laing decided that Modern Art was a nonsense, or at any rate a blind alley, and wished to return to traditional representational sculpture, he discovered it was exceedingly difficult to learn the technology at that high level. He found modern textbooks useless. Then he was lucky enough to come across a copy of Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure by Edward Lanteri, Professor of Sculpture at London's Royal College of Art towards the end of the 19th century, from which he learned a great deal. He learned even more from the elderly Roman bronze-caster George Mancini, who had come to London to cast garden statuary before the First World War. He used exclusively traditional tools, such as bow-drills, believing that crude modern welding and grinding techniques, which make corrections to an ill- cast bronze possible, produce results that are inferior to a perfectly cast bronze. So Laing, by learning directly from Mancini, was able to take his place in a grand tradition going back to Donatello in the early 15th century, indeed in some respects to Nicola Pisano in the 13th.

This is one example. There are many others. In the second half of the 19th century, there were in Paris a number of studios where draftsmanship, particularly of the human figure, was taught to a standard probably never before approached, even in 15th- and 16th-century Florence, because the French master draftsmen were able to build on the Florentine corpus of achievement. Great foreign artists, like Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, as well as French students, were able to achieve levels of accomplishment in these studios that would seem almost miraculous today. Unfortunately, under the successive hammer-blows of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and their successors, this studio tradition, so long in the making, was destroyed. By the mid 20th century, draftsmanship as such was ceasing to be taught at all in the great majority of art schools, in France and everywhere else. Many students emerged from the schools less able to draw than when they went in; and as Vasari pointed out in the 16th century, without drawing-- disegno--you cannot paint. The history of art suggests that the discipline, leadership, competition, and mutual instruction of a well- organized studio, whether it be the one from the Egyptian New Kingdom whose foundations can be traced in the Tell el-Amarna site (where the bust of Queen Nefertiti now in the Berlin Museum was found) or the great studio-shop of Verrocchio in 15th-century Florence, where Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, and many other masters learned their craft, is the best way--perhaps the only way--to achieve the highest levels of skill.