October 2008

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In November 1893 Camille Pissarro had an irritable encounter with Paul Gauguin. ‘He told me his theories about art’, he wrote to his son Lucien, ‘and assured me that the young would find salvation by replenishing themselves at remote and savage sources. I told him that this art did not belong to him, that he was a civilised man and hence it was his function to show us harmonious things.’ Gauguin was always stealing from others, grumbled Pissarro, ‘Now he is pillaging the savages of Oceania.’

In the intervening century contemporary and modernist art has had an intermittent but persistent connection with work from remote places and distant epochs (‘savage’, for understandable reasons, is no longer a term used by artists or art historians). ‘Art’, Joan Mirò proclaimed after a visit to Altamira, ‘has been decadent since the days of the caveman.’ More recently, Gary Hume has referred to himself as a caveman, painting on the wall of his cave (his point being that the art of painting has only altered in trifling technical respects since 15,000 bc).

In its efforts to renew itself, the avant-garde has often looked far into the past. Pablo Picasso was influenced not only by African artefacts but also by ancient Iberian carvings. Indeed, he nearly got into very hot water by acquiring a couple that had been stolen from the Louvre. Brancusi’s art has been compared with Cycladic Greek sculpture; Giacometti, it has been suggested, got the idea for his enormously elongated figures from certain Etruscan bronzes. There is a clear, although elusive, connection between the approach of contemporary artists such as Richard Long, an exponent of stone circles, or Antony Gormley, and the creations of human beings who lived thousands, even tens of thousands, of years ago.

This autumn, as London prepares for two antiquity blockbusters – Chinese terracotta warriors at the British Museum, and Tutankhamen at the Dome – is a suitable moment to ponder this relationship. Is it a matter of ‘pillaging’? Or is the rapport deeper and more significant? There is, for example, a resemblance between the hundreds of baked clay soldiers standing in their pits near the tomb of the first Chinese emperor near Xi’an, created in the later 3rd century bc (see Jane Portal’s article, pp. 54-59), and the various incarnations of Gormley’s Field (Fig. 1). Indeed, so many people pointed out the likeness that Gormley was moved to fly to China and check it out. He concluded that the terracotta warriors had little to do with his own work. ‘They are something else.’

You might say that they are a bit too modern for Gormley. The point of Field is partly the anonymity and simplicity of the figures, a piece of clay squeezed between the hands, with two holes poked in for eyes. Although it seems that they were mass-produced using a modular system, the terracotta warriors are endowed with a surprising degree of individuality and realism. This is precisely what Gormley is trying to avoid. One of his code-words for the effort to transmit texture, movement and surface detail in sculpture is ‘Bernini’. ‘Once you go down the Bernini path you are totally lost. I got it out of my system by doing art history at Cambridge. I love Bernini, but I don’t want to do him again. Now I’m very happy to be megalithic.’

Gormley is an enthusiastic visitor to prehistoric sites such as the 5,000 year-old Newgrange in Ireland (Fig. 3), which is also a reference point for the American artist James Turrell (Fig. 2). Newgrange – where, of course, the winter solstice sun shines through a specially-contrived ‘roof box’ and down a long passage – has obvious affinities with what Turrell is creating at Roden Crater in Arizona and in his other projects. There heavenly bodies – in one case just the evening star – will light underground chambers.

Is Turrell imitating the artists of prehistoric Ireland? Not really, any more than Long is mimicking Stonehenge or Avebury – or, in the beautiful works he makes with mud and his bare hands on walls, the hand prints to be found in the caves of Altamira. The point, as Long put it to me as we walked through his current exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, is different. ‘Cave painters and aborigines and Richard Long all have hands’, he points out, ‘and we all make hand prints’. In fact, I suggested, Long manages to make prehistoric art look contemporary. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘And vice versa.’

That’s true. But Long’s adoption of the line and circle as motifs was intuitive, and reflects his back-ground in the new art of the 1960s; similarly, Turrell’s starting-point was Mark Rothko, rather than Stone-Age Eire. Gormley is certainly well informed about the ancient past, since he studied archaeology and anthropology as well as art history. But again, his affinity with the long ago is more a matter of working in parallel than simple imitation. Gormley’s cast figures remind us of Egyptian mummies or the ‘involuntary’ sculptures made by pouring plaster into the voids left by the perished citizens of Pompeii.

This is because his figures are intended to do something similar: they are not 3d images of people – like Berninis or Rodins – but a person-shaped marker in space, the index of where a human being has been. In the same way, Long is doing the same thing as a caveman making a hand print on the wall – leaving a simple mark of his passage through the world. In his brilliant book on the interconnections between contemporary art and archaeology, Figuring it Out, published last year by Thames & Hudson, Colin Renfrew describes Long’s marks, circles and lines as follows: ‘Each…becomes a declaration of human existence. It says, “I was here and I did this…”’.

Once artists escaped from what Renfrew calls the ‘tyranny of the Renaissance’ – that is attempting 3d realism in painting and stone, or what Gormley calls ‘Bernini’ – they naturally began to rediscover the methods of other and earlier forms of art. Renfrew takes part of his subtitle from Gauguin: ‘What are we? Where do we come from?’ Those questions, with the third, perhaps most disquieting – ‘Where are we going?’ – are, Damien Hirst keeps saying, the only ones in art. It seems more and more that Pissarro was on the wrong side of that exchange in 1893.

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