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SUMER AND THE MODERN PARADIGM
Pedro Azara
The
identification of pictures hanged on the walls of Son Boter -a XVIIIth century
mansion at Palma de Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) used by Joan Miró as his
studio for sculptures since the sixties-, by the professor and architect Marc
Marín, as images of Sumerian masterpieces from the National Museum of Iraq in
Baghdad –and not images of ethnographic or traditional art as most historians
of modern art have written-, led the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona to
organise a large exhibition of the relationship between “Sumerian art” and
modern art.
The exhibition is devoted to the discovery of
“Sumerian art” by modern artists at the time large Anglo-North-American
archaeological missions working in the south of Iraq between both world wars,
when Iraq was an English colony, were making discoveries such as the hoard of
worshipper statues at the Diyala valley. However, archaeologists like Charles
Leonard Woolley, head of the mission in Ur (Iraq), were not fascinated by their
finds, as they considered Mesopotamian art inferior to Egyptian and to
Graeco-Roman art. They thought Mesopotamian iconography was an expression of a
violent and barbaric culture. Sacrificed bodies found at the Royal Tombs of Ur
were the proof that the Bible was right. However, the archaeological
discoveries, published by magazines as popular as the Illustrated London News
and by newspapers, and promoted by archaeologists in spite of their disdain for
finds, found a very favourable reception outside the archaeological world.
Modern or surrealistic writers like Michel Leiris and George Bataille, who
published the journal Documents at
the very end of the twenties and early thirties, and Christian Zervos,
collector and publisher of Cahiers d´Art
-both journals appreciated by modern artists and collectors-, wrote illustrated
articles of “Sumerian” culture. They considered it as a new “primitivism” at
the time when the fascination for African art was vanishing. Christian Zervos
asked to the known Argentinian photographer Horacio Coppola, who was working at
the photographic studio at the Bauhaus, to portrait Mesopotamian works of art
or artefacts at the Louvre Museum and the British Museum for the journal. These
magnificent black and white pictures –shown publicly for the first time at the
Joan Miró Foundation- framed the way modern artists perceived and judged
“Sumerian” art: Coppola took black and white frontal and lateral pictures of
different parts of sculptures, mostly heads, shown isolated against an abstract
background. During the same years, different economic illustrated instalments
of L´Encyclopédie de l´Art, with
short commentaries by the purist painter Amédée Ozenfant –who worked with the
architect Le Corbusier-, on Mesopotamian art and culture, promoted black and
white images that structured and conditioned the way “Sumerian” art would be
perceived. These journals and magazines mediated between modern artists and
ancient art. For instance, Giacometti, who made quite a large number of
Sumerian heads, did not draw from life. His drawings of Gudea heads are of a
plaster copy he bought at the Louvre museum. Other drawings of “Sumerian” heads
are of photographs by Coppola. Even Miró, whose sculptures from the 60´s were
inspired by Mesopotamian art –an art Miró loved and considered not only the
first art but also the only true art, as he declared to the French writer
Pierre Schneider during a visit to the first rooms of the Département des Antiquités
Orientales at the Louvre Museum-, are based on photographies of Mesopotamian
works of art published in the French Arts
& Loisirs magazine –which main copywriter was the writer George
Perec-. So the knowledge of Mesopotamian
art, and the way it was looked at, was due, not to permanent and temporary
exhibitions –Museums did not show too many Early Mesopotamian art before the
Second World War-, but to illustrated publications on modern art, as “Sumerian”
art appeared as a new and different “primitive” art.
Sumer and the Modern Paradigm would like the spectator to stand
at the same position of surrealistic artists. What he should look at is not
archaeological material but its interpretation by modern photographers, graphic
designers and writers. For instance, an economic book on Neo-Assyrian reliefs
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with black and white pictures and a careful
lay out by the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, during the Second
World War, was an important contribution to the appreciation of “barbaric”
reliefs.
The
exhibition combines graphic and written original documentation, modern works of
arts by Miro, Moore, Hepworth, Giacometti, le Corbusier, Smith, de Kooning,
Baumeister, and a few but outstanding archaeological items from the Louvre
museum, the British Museum and the Vorderasiatisches Museum. The exhibition
visualises nets of relations between ancient and modern works and
documentation. We would like the spectator to look at works and their
connections, not to isolated works of art. Written and graphic documentation,
such as pictures by Coppola or texts by Bataille, are part of the
archaeological material, part of its meaning.
The
exhibition deals with what some modern –surrealistic- artists have seen in
early Mesopotamian material. What has raised their attention? How they have reacted to this interest? How
they have communicated their interest or discoveries? Some artists, like Moore
–who wrote an early article on Mesopotamian sculpture-, Hepworth, de Kooning,
or Miró have focused on the interpretation of “Sumerian” worshipper statues.
For them, the gravity of the statues, the large eyes, the clasped hands, have
been formal solutions to express feelings of tranquillity and restrain.
Meanwhile, the French poet and artist Michaux was fascinated by cuneiform
writing because he considered it a primal writing, able to express directly,
without any mediation nor distortion, the being of the called and described
things. The North-American sculptor David Smith focused on cylinder seals. They
were a mean to create compositions without any beginning nor end, endless
compositions able to suggest the distorted or destroyed times of the war. While
the German painter Baumeister, during the Second World War, looked at the Poem
of Gilgamesh and other “Sumerian” texts recently translated, he illustrated, as
way of looking for a refuge in the past when there was no future, trying to
find an explanation to violence and destruction. The Poem, dealing with the
human condition, was a way to accept it. This poem was not the first ancient
eastern text known in the XXth century. Ancient Testament possesses myths and
legends inspired by Mesopotamian texts. One of these myths, the Tower of Babel,
was a mythical recreation of the ziggurat of Babylon. Architects like Le
Corbusier and Loos used the ziggurat typology for projects symbolising the
mixture of languages –a hotel called Babylon,
by Loos- and the power of human knowledge – the Mundaneum, a museum for all kind of arts and technics, by Le
Corbusier-. These architects used the ziggurat motif having in mind the
mythical symbolism of the Babel Tower.
The
exhibition does not put an end to the research on Mesopotamian influences in
modern art, but it tries to find a possible answer to this unexpected interest
in artists apparently so far away from near ancient motifs such as Miró or Le
Corbusier. They did not copy Mesopotamian art; they looked at it (or at images
of it) for clues to understand the complexity of the modern world.
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