Horizon – Summer 1970 – 2

Tags

Antonine emperors, Board of Trade, Canton, China, Christoper Hibbert, Commodus, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Georges Deyverdun, Ghiradelli Square, Harold L. Bond, Howqua, Lausanne, Lawrence Halprin, Lord Napier, Marcus Aurelius, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thirteen Factories

In ‘Lawrence Halprin: Eco-architect’ David Lloyd Jones explores the work of the American landscape architect and pioneer of adaptive re-use of buildings, such as San Francisco’s Ghiradelli Square: 

Halprin says his best work is done for daring clients, men who are willing to risk their money on good ideas and have the guts to live the risk through. One of these is William Roth, who bought the old Ghirardelli chocolate factory buildings  on San Francisco’s waterfront to save them from destruction. An enchanting tangle of box factory, clock tower, manufacturing bays, and storage space, it was not clear that the old buildings were anything but a monument to nineteenth-century achitectural whimsy. With architects Wursterm Bernardi & Emmons, Halprin’s firm turned the block into an intriguing and commercially successful array of boutiques and restaurants.

To say Halprin is proud of the crowds of people moving, exploring, and enjoying themselves around the square would be an understatement. The purpose of his art, the principle for which he strains, is designing for people – real, moving people, not the people of abstract designers’ principles. The triumph of architecture is not, as the International stylists would have us think, in looks, lines or majesty. Forty years of these criteria have left us only blank-faced monuments and city blight. Successful architecture is usable and used.

 

 

Ghirardelli Square, the old factory site, attracts people because it is interesting and humane; it is architecture real people can relate to  Young couples come here just to walk around, without paying the fairly steep prices charged by most of the establishments. Elderly ladies sit and watch the seaport over a cup of espresso because the place is that kind of pleasant spot to be in. People go out their way to shop in the square’s boutiques because the friendly, cheerful bustle makes shopping such fun.

In ‘Tremble! Intensely Tremble!’ Christoper Hibbert describes the British trade envoy Lord Napier’s abortive 1834 expedition to Canton, in an extract from his book The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793-1911:

Two hours before they were due, a party of Chinese arrived at the factory [in Canton], where the interview was to take place, carrying a number of ceremonial chairs. Three of the chairs were arranged in a row facing south, the direction in which Chinese authority was traditionally required to face; the other chairs were placed in two rows at right angles to the first, running along the western and eastern sides of the hall. One of these rows had its back to the portrait of George IV. The three great mandarins, the Chinese said, would naturally take the seats facing south, the Hong merchants, the others; no seats were provided for the English.

Lord Napier was outraged when told of these impertinent arrangements and gave immediate orders for the position of all the chairs to be changed so that none would have its back to the king’s picture. He himself would sit in the place of honour, he decided, with one mandarin on his right and two on his left; his secretary, Mr. Astell, and the assistant superintendent, John Francis Davis, would occupy the remaining two seats at the table.  

When Howqua arrived at the factory, he was appalled by the way the English had altered the position of the chairs. He begged Lord Napier not to insist upon a disposition that could only cause grievous offence to the dignity of the mandarins and that could only result in the punishment of himself and the other Hong merchants, who would be forced to pay crippling fines. Such an arrangement of the seating would, no doubt, be very proper in England, but this was China. Could not Lord Napier give way in this small point for the sake of the Hong merchants, who relations with the foreigners had always been so friendly, and if not for them, at least for the happy continuance of trade?

No, Lord Napier decidedly could not…

In the title of ‘Gibbon: “An ugly, affected disgusting fellow”‘, Peter Quennell uses a quote from James Boswell to describe the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

At length, in February, 1776, the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was delivered to the London bookshops, whence it soon found its way into every library, onto ‘every table’ and ‘almost every toilette.’ Before long it had run through three editions. Volumes II and III appeared in 1781. They were not the product of a cloistered scholar. During his London residence Gibbon contrived to lead a remarkably energetic social life; he sat in Parliament as member from a Cornish borough – he enjoyed listening to a hard-fought debate, but, no doubt wisely, never spoke himself – and held a comfortable sinecure at the placid Board of Trade. It was Edmund Burke’s thundering attack on sinecures, followed by the reform of the board and the abolition of his own post, that finally determined him to leave England. In September, 1783, with his valet and his lap dog, Muff, he bade good-bye to London and crossed the Strait of Dover, bound for Lausanne, where an old friend, Georges Deyverdun, had invited him to share his house. Four years later in the garden of that house he brought his grand design to a triumphant close.

 

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of the most astonishing books ever published in the English language – unusually long, yet extraordinarily easy to read; a work of tremendous scholarship, yet imbued throughout with the characteristic quality of a single man’s intelligence. The historian’s tone is cool and calm, and measured, but strong feelings, even violent prejudices, often boil beneath the surface. Gibbon was an eighteenth-century humanist, anxious to demonstrate (writes Professor Harold L. Bond in an admirable study, The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon) ‘that the dignity and nobility of the human spirit are possible only under conditions of political and spiritual freedom.’ Thus he begins with an eloquent tribute to the Antonine emperors and to the civilization they had built around them, comprehending ‘the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind,’ protected by ‘ancient renown and disciplined valour,’ and unified by the ‘gentle but powerful influence of law and manners.’

This was a world where men like the historian could have lived contentedly and profitably and dwelt at peace among their fellows. Gibbon’s purpose is to show, after the death of the enlightened emperor Marcus Aurelius and the succession of his brutal successor, Commodus, the Roman world had become uninhabitable for human beings of his own kind.

Horizon – Summer 1970 – 1

Tags

Calouste Gulbenkian, Correlli Barnett, Defeat, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Frederic V. Grunfeld, Gulbenkian Foundation, Helena Fourment, J.H. Plumb, John Walker, Karl Maria von Clausewitz, Peter Paul Rubens, Thomas Gainsborough, Troubadours, Vietnam War

The cover of this issue shows Portrait of Helena Fourment by Peter Paul Rubens, accompanying the article “How I Didn’t Get Mr Gulbenkian’s Art” by John Walker, former director of Washington’s National Gallery of Art:

The Gulbenkian Collection, the greatest in breadth and standard of quality assembled by one person in our time, has now become public property. A new building has been erected in Lisbon, both as a museum and as offices for the Gulbenkian Foundation, one of the world’s largest…

When I attended the opening of his museum, I wondered whether he would have been pleased. I was not, however, sufficiently disinterested to make a fair judgment. A personal failure was involved. For eight years, from 1947 to 1955, I bent every effort to acquire both the collection and the foundation for the United States. In the midst of the final negotiations with Calouste Gulbenkian death touched this extraordinary man, surprising him as much as the skeleton in Holbein’s Dance of Death surprises its victims. True, he was eighty-six, but he had expected a span of life longer than that of his grandfather, who died at 105.

Horizon caption: ‘Calouste Gulbenkian, opposite, master collector of art and oil concessions, poses in 1934 before an apt emblem for himself: a fiercely aloof hawk, the Egyptian god Horus.’

Horizon caption: ‘In art, as in life, Gulbenkian was an admirer of beautiful women. Elizabeth Lowndes-Stone, the wife of a country gentleman, sat for the bridal portrait on the facing page by Thomas Gainsborough. Bought through an antique dealer for $168,750 in 1923, the painting had belonged to Baron Alfred-Charles de Rothschild.’

Also in this issue:

In his ‘In the Light of the Past’ series, J.H. Plumb’s  ‘The King’s New Clothes’ traces how dress has changed over the centuries:

Clothes, like so many other aspects life, have suffered an almost complete revolution. In the Far East and in the less westernized parts of Africa, clothes still confer status and grandeur, as they once did throughout the world. But clothes are no longer an indication of rank in the West – not even for the greatest in the land. President Nixon dresses like tens of thousands of other prosperous, well-groomed, middle-aged Americans in somber suits and somewhat gayer leisure clothes. The Queen of England – except on very special occasions – does not wear anything different from any other middle-aged woman of her country; style, color, cut, differ in no way.

What a marked contrast this makes with the ancient great…Even, perhaps especially, Elizabeth I, would have been amazed, and possibly outraged, by the inconspicuous modesty of her namesake. For clothes used to set men apart, enhance their glory, touch them with a divinity to which the men who toiled and worked, or bought and sold, could never aspire.

One of the reasons for the excessive preoccupation of monarchs and aristocrats with clothing in the sixteenth century may be the establishment of printing and engraving. This opened up he opportunity not only for creating awe and adulation but for broadcasting satire and ridicule on a scale that was unthinkable in previous ages….It is not surprising,, therefore, that Elizabeth I’s Privy Council forbade printers to publish any likeness of the queen until an authorized portrait had been agreed upon.

In mid-1970, the United States was being torn apart over the Vietnam War,   while Great Britain was dealing with its long post World War II decline. In ‘How Nations Take Defeat’, Correlli Barnett notes that the United States and Great Britain had not suffered ‘complete national defeat’, but

‘…defeat does not always come in the guise of national catastrophe…It can come slowly, like the onset of disease – a cumulative warning that national power has overreached itself. It can come without a defeat in the field: for while defeat is more often the case, there may be instead a mere failure to win. And ‘to win’ does not mean the simple, even childish, notion of some military men of forcing an enemy into total surrender à la 1945, which some arrested juveniles have recommended as an American course of action in Vietnam. ‘To win,’ as Clausewitz pointed out, means either achieving your political and strategic objects, or in a defensive situation, thwarting the enemy’s intentions. ‘To lose’ can therefore mean simply a frustrating failure to achieve your goals, even though your armies may stand undefeated. The demoralizing effects of such impasses are compounded by the inevitable prolongation of the dilemma, and disillusion, often bitter and self-destructive, follows the failure to achieve the expected decision.

…America is far from being the first great imperial power to undergo such a searching experience. History affords similar examples, and millenniums earlier than such recent parallels as the French agony in Indochina or in Algeria. These historical examples display a characteristic pattern that unfolds both before and after the moment of confession of failure: first comes the gradual realization that that there is a limit to imperial strength; then follows the consequent sense of bafflement, the weariness as the struggle drags on, the difficulties of extrication from the predicament, the search for a fleeting success or a diplomatic formula that will disguise the failure and cover the retreat; then the divisive effects at home, the accentuation of social troubles; and finally the far-reaching influence on national attitudes toward foreign affairs. Yet, although the onset of such failures has a repetitive pattern, national responses to military bafflement differ widely, just as the individual response to ill fortune varies from one person to another, sometimes inducing a crushing despair, sometimes a resolute effort at a fresh start.

Historical examples he cites include the Roman defeat in the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest, ‘Spanish embroilment in the Netherlands’ in the sixteenth century, and England’s loss of empires in France and America.

In ‘The Troubadours’ regular Horizon contributor Frederick V. Grunfeld compares the mediaeval singers with the pop stars of the then-present:

Some aspects of the scene may seem vaguely familiar: scores of long-haired young men roaming the country with stringed instruments under their arms, singing songs that proclaim a sexual revolution – urbane, immensely influential songs that catapult some of their authors into the ranks of the rich and famous. But the time is the twelfth century, the place is southern France, and the young men in question are known as troubadours, which is to say ‘composers,’ since the verb trobar (to find, to invent) covers all manner of poetic and musical invention.

Horizon – Spring 1974 – 2

Tags

1755 Lisbon Earthquake, Cahokia Mounds, Calcutta, Candide, Collinsville, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, Jan Morris, John Pfeiffer, Mississippian Culture, Nabob, Neil McKendrick, St. Louis, Voltaire, William Hickey

In ‘The World of William Hickey’ Jan Morris (for the first time writing under this name in Horizon, having previously been James Morris), tells the story of ‘an adventurer and a scribbler [who had a] boisterous rise to nabobdom’:

She describes Hickey’s arrival in Calcutta in 1769:

So on the first day of May he climbed the companion ladder and put his head above deck to see the Coromandel Coast. The moment he emerged, something terrible happened to him. ‘I felt an indescribably unpleasant sensation, suddenly, as it were, losing the power of breathing, which alarmed me much…I would compare it only to standing within the oppressive influence of the steam of a furnace.’

So dreadfully did it strike the young Londoner, so inconceivable did it seem that tolerable human life could be conducted in such an inferno, that almost as soon as he landed young Mr Hickey was looking around for passage home again; but it was, in fact, only the ordinary morning heat of India, blowing out to sea from the sweltering flatlands of the Carnatic, and in it Hickey was to spend the best and most profitable years of his life. ‘Cut off half a dozen rich fellows’ heads,’ that old family friend had said, ‘and so return a nabob yourself’; and indeed, getting rich was the classic first step in that classic process of eighteenth-century social history, the making of a nabob.

 

Morris describes his early life in England:

The son of a well-respected London lawyer, educated at Westminster, he was one of those young men of the upper-middle classes whose fate it is to gravitate to grander circumstances, getting themselves as a result constantly into debts and deceit. Mr. Hickey senior was not at all a severe father, and in his way Mr. Hickey junior loved him; but time and again the son let the father down, escaping his tutor to sleep with a whore in Drury Lane, running up debts, spending other people’s money. He worked for a time in his father’s office and thus gained – more by useful connections than by diligence – legal qualifications; but all his energies went into pleasure, the pleasures of the tavern, the recreation garden, the river (for he loved rowing and sailing), and, predictably, the brothel. His stamina was tremendous, his high spirits were marvelously infectious. Women loved him, as he loved them all his life, and his friends were mostly picaresques of his own kind: spendthrift younger sons, wild Guards officers, rakes and roués of every background.

In ‘America’s First City’, John Pfeiffer writes about the pre-Columbian Cahokia Mounds, the largest settlement of the Mississippian culture:

In the heart of the Midwest, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, is the site of a great prehistoric city. It lies in a perfectly ordinary suburb that has little use for times past: commuters have been passing through it day after day for years, never realizing what happened there, just six miles east of St. Louis. Known as Cahokia, the city has vanished without a trace, except for a number of mounds that still remain and could easily be mistaken for natural hills.

Things were different some eight centuries or so ago. Imagine that all the marks of what passes for civilization have faded away – the four-lane highways and gas stations and hamburger joints and drive-in theaters and smog – and you stand in another age, another America. You are at Cahokia as it appeared in its prime, at about the time of the signing of the Magna Carta.

 

You stand in the midst of a bustling scene in the center of a wide plaza. An earthen skyscraper looms before you, a terraced mound about ten stories high, with a platform overlooking the plaza, and ramps and stairways leading to a large, decorated building at the top. Surrounding you are other buildings, a dozen smaller mounds, and two smaller plazas, all enclosed in a stockade of heavy logs a smile and a half long.

In ‘The End of Optimism’, Neil McKendrick describes the Lisbon earthquake, tsunami and fire of 1755 and its effect on the European Age of Enlightenment:

There were some startling anomalies to explain away. The entire street of brothels called the Rua Suja had remained, for instance, completely undamaged: why should convents, churches, and monasteries be destroyed and brothels spared? The explanation that God had spared the brothels out of pity for their wretched inhabitants, but could not pardon those who profaned the houses of worship, was plainly inadequate. Another question frequently asked was, Why Lisbon? It was a city of countless churches and ample miracles: it had a Virgin who regularly shed tears, a statue of the infant Jesus that wept real blood, and another statue whose toenails grew so fast that they were said to need a weekly trim. Didn’t the Lisboans constantly put on religious processions and faithfully attend the burning of heretics at day-long autos-da-fé? Why should Lisbon, of all places, be struck down?

Horizon caption: ‘Panic-stricken survivors of the earthquake flee or watch in horror as towers topple and Lisbon burns. The detail opposite comes from a contemporary engraving.’

 

In 1710 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz had published his Essais de théodicée sur la bontée de Dieu, la libertée de l’homme, et l’origine du mal. In it he tackled and apparently solved for all time the puzzle as to how God, though all-wise and all-good, could tolerate evil. Leibnitz hypothesized that if a lesser evil could bring about a greater good, it would clearly be a necessary element of God’s creation. Supreme wisdom, united with infinite goodness, could not exclude any lesser evil, that would lead to a greater good…

This tout est bien school of thought, labelled Optimism in 1737, won almost unanimous approval of governments…Voltaire, always something of a natural radical, never regarded Leibnitz with much respect…[He] wrote Candide in 1759 with the express intention of polishing off the Optimistic school. This time he succeeded – so triumphantly that after Candide people spoke of Optimism, if at all, with irony and condescension.

Horizon – Spring 1974 – 1

Tags

Arnold Newman, Basques, Bolsheviks, Bretons, Edmond Taylor, Kasimir Malevich, Leo Castelli, Michael Pearson, Michael Peppiatt, New York art, New York’s SoHo, Nicolas Poussin, Occitanians, Paul Cézanne, sealed train, still life, The Blue Vase, Vladimir Lenin

The cover of this issue shows The Blue Vase (now in the Musée d’Orsay) by Paul Cézanne,  accompanying the article “Father of Us All” by Michael Peppiatt, which includes a portfolio of Cézanne’s still lifes.

In his constant concern that each tone be exactly the one required by the overall chromatic scheme of his paintings, Cézanne was seeking to render much more than the surface of things seen under a certain light. He desired, as he said, to make ‘out of impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums.’ As one looks at the various versions of Mont Saint-Victoire, for example, one notices that underlying the intricate pattern of delicately modelled forms is a massive volume. Late in life, Cézanne said that the artist ‘must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere and the cone…’ The phrase is eloquent proof of his own search for the means to discover the essence of a subject – be it a mountain, a figure group, a bowl of fruit.

Such an approach is, of course, a perfectly classical one. Nothing could be less ‘impressionistic’ than Cézanne’s determination to make his scenes as internally coherent and changeless as possible. When he talked of doing ‘Poussin again, from Nature,’ he meant he aspired to his predecessor’s accomplishment of completeness and solidity, but by working directly from nature rather than by interpreting myths. How ironic that this innately classical painter long appeared to most of his contemporaries as a kind of savage obeying uncontrollable impulses!

…Born into a dying tradition that enshrined narrative effectiveness as its supreme value, Cézanne helped to set painting on a course that ended in complete nonrepresentation, the furthest remove imaginable from the nineteenth-century Salon. Within a decade or so of his death, the ultimate point in abstraction – Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (a white square on a white ground) – was reached. The revolution thus accomplished was as total as it was brief, with the result that virtually every kind of present-day art refers back to it. Even Cézanne, in his most boastful moments, would have been astounded by the rapidity and breadth of his influence. And with good reason: his work has become more than famous, both in itself and as a reinvention of the vocabulary of painting.

Also in this issue:

In ‘Transporting a Plague Bacillus’ Michael Pearson writes about the ‘Sealed Train’  which brought Lenin from Switzerland to Russia in 1917:

Suddenly on the afternoon of March 15 a friend hammered on the door with the news of revolution in Russia. Lenin’s existence was transformed. The day he had waited for so long, and prepared his party for, had arrived. But the Bolshevik party was small, even within Russia – with barely two thousand members in Petersburg and only forty-five thousand in all, it was dwarfed by other parties, including the Mensheviks. It was crucial that Lenin reach home before the long-awaited revolution was betrayed.

In March, 1918, the new Bolshevik government finally made peace with the Germans. It was a humiliating peace, made under threat of Russian military might: Russia had to relinquish her possessions in Poland, give up the Baltic states, Finland and the Ukraine; to Turkey, Germany’s ally, she ceded much of the Caucasus. The journey on the Sealed Train had served the Germans well…

Even today Soviet historians are sensitive on this point. Of course, any suggestion that Lenin was a German agent is absurd. His short-term aims coincided with the kaiser’s and he took funds where he could. In his eyes the source was irrelevant, for he believed that the world revolution would spread quickly from Russia to Germany. All the same, the publication of the secret German headquarters papers removed any doubts. The Germans did more than provide Lenin with the Sealed Train; they financed a strike for power, and it changed the world.

‘Bohemia Reborn’ is a pictorial essay by Arnold Newman, exploring New York’s SoHo neighbourhood, which had grown in the previous decade into an ‘art colony’, but one that was already rapidly gentrifying:

In ‘The Fourth World’, Edmond Taylor examines the recent rise of regional independence movements in Europe, including the Basques, the Bretons, and the Occitanians:

Horizon – Winter 1971 – 2

‘Authors at Work’ is an ‘Entertainment’ by New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton:

In ‘Mao’s Long March’, Correlli Barnett writes about the ‘migration of an army of 100,000 men and camp followers across thousands of miles of hostile territory’ in the 1930s:

Even in the modern age, history is not easily separated from legend, as the reminiscences of retired statesmen constantly remind us. The pasts of great nations, great religions and political movements, are all furnished with happenings that were historical turning points, and have become myths…The taste for history as national epic goes back to Homer and beyond.

For the Communist Chinese, newest of the great nations, the heroic age was only thirty-five years ago. For them it is the ‘Long March’ of the Red Army, some six thousand miles from eastern China to the northwest in 1934-35, that constitutes this blend of a real historical turning point and the stuff of legend. The Long March equally supplies a key ingredient in the myth of Mao Tse-tung as a leader. As such legends go, the Long March is a catchall.

Since the Chinese documentary sources are not available, and not likely to be, Western knowledge of the Long March is based on various published accounts by Chinese Communist participants or on verbal reminiscences communicated by them to sympathetic Western authors…[The] disentanglement of the pudding of truth from the rich sauce of fable is made more than usually difficult because the puffing of the Long March into heroic legend has not been left merely to the spontaneous human process of mythmaking but has been the subject of a careful Communist propaganda operation…

However much the mythmakers may have spiced up the story, the Long March remains an epic of endurance, leadership, and discipline. Though born out of a defeat in the field, it saved the cause of Communism in China and opened the way for the successful application of Mao’s theories of revolutionary warfare. It made Mao’s military and political reputation and established him and his colleagues as the undisputed leaders of Chinese Communism – leaders who would take whatever aid might be gotten from the Russians while firmly guarding their own independence.

In ‘Jean Piaget: Measuring Young Minds,’ another article in the special section ‘Children: Past and Present’, child psychologist David Elkind writes about the Swiss psychologist  who learned ‘about the way human beings acquire knowledge. How? By talking to children.’

…[The] winds of the nature-nurture controversy blew hot and strong.

Piaget declined to take sides; he saw himself as ‘the man in the middle,’ the man who viewed nature and nurture as always relative to each other. His early experiments with mollusks had suggested that the influences of environment and heredity were reciprocal, with neither absolute, and his first observations of children convinced him that this relativism of nature and nurture extended to the development of human intelligence as well. He discovered that children harbored notions concerning nature and the physical world that they had neither inherited nor learned in the classic sense. He found, for example, that young children believed the moon followed them when they went for a walk at night, that dreams came in through the window while they were asleep, and that anything that moved, including waves and wind-blown curtains, was alive.

Where did these ideas come from? They were not inborn; because something that is inborn does not change and most children give up these ideas as they grow older. Likewise, the ideas could not have been learned from adults, because adults do not think in this way and would hardly teach such things to children. And since children everywhere, from completely different backgrounds, harbor such ideas, the ideas could not have been learned.

Piaget’s answer to this puzzle was that the child’s ideas about the world were ‘constructions’ that involved both mental structures and experience. Like the Gestalt psychologists, Piaget argued that experience does not come to us raw but is organized by our intelligence. His advance over Gestalt psychology was his argument that the organizing structures are not fixed at birth but develop in a regular sequence of stages related to age. While the changes with age imply the role of experience, their orderliness reflects an interaction between nature and nurture. Piaget set out to discover the principles that govern this interaction.

In ‘The Humanists’, Vincent Cronin explores the birth of the Renaissance in Italy:

…In 1390 Gian Galleazzo Visconti of Milan, poisoner, tyrant, and lonely neurotic, whose banner depicted a viper swallowing a man whole, sought to conquer Italy. Florence, the leading free city, tried to unite Venice, the pope, and certain Tuscan city-states against Gian Galeazzo, but the league came to nothing, and in 1402 Florence found herself alone. Desperately the leading citizens sought to raise sinking morale. They recalled the tradition that Florence had been founded by colonists from Rome, that the republican constitution on which they prided themselves was probably a legacy of the old Roman municipal government, and it occurred to them that by exploring this link they might be able to find a spiritual ally in the past to take the place of an actual ally in the present. They got hold of Latin manuscripts that told them that Florence had been founded in republican times, in the first century B.C., before Rome had fallen under the rule of a single man. Against Gian Galeazzo’s pretensions to be the successor of the emperors, the Florentines announced that they were heirs of those republicans who had battled to save Rome from tyranny. They even called themselves ‘New Romans,’ and this became their war cry. It gave their morale a spectacular boost, so that they bravely withstood a long blockade, famine, and plague. Then, Gian Galeazzo died suddenly of fever, and the danger passed. But in Florence a new era had begun, for it was now believed that the classics held the secrets of success, and men were more than ever determined to read them.

Florentine scholars began to explore cobwebbed monastery libraries throughout Europe. They brought to light an immense amount of forgotten material, from cookbooks to lives of the philosophers. They reclaimed, within a generation, the great mass of ancient literature, and they translated most of it. It was a fantastic moment for the human spirit, comparable to the arrival of a capsule from outer space containing an unknown Loeb edition of the Greek and Latin classics.

This literature is vast in time and range. From Homer to Diogenes Laërtius it spans a thousand years. It extends from the gloom of Hesiod to the frivolity of Ovid, from the high morality of Aeschylus, to the slapstick of Plautus. In such a wealth of material it is possible to find a precedent for almost any statement, for any way of life from crude hedonism to the cynicism of Diogenes in his barrel. Yet almost as remarkable as the discovery itself is the fact that the Florentines who read this literature evolved from it a way of life that presents a definite homogeneity. They were immersed in these books not as idlers or dilettantes, not as pure scholars or men seeking material for a doctoral thesis. They were men with unsatisfied needs, with a deficiency of certain intellectual and spiritual vitamins. It was to make up for this deficiency that they adopted for themselves certain elements from the classical past and rejected the rest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Horizon – Winter 1971 – 1

Tags

Bernard J. James, Children, Children's games, Fidel Castro, Francesco Cossa, Fulgencio Batista, Iona and Peter Opie, J.H. Plumb, Military uniforms, Palazzo Schifanoia, Peter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Robert Cowley, Roger A. Beaumont, Thomas Gainsborough, Vincent Cronin, Vladimir Sukhomlinov

The cover of this issue shows a details from The Triumph of Venus from the Palazzo Schifanoia by Francesco Cossa, accompanying an essay by Vincent Cronin, ‘The Humanists.’

Also in this issue:

A special section ‘Children: Past and Present’ begins with J.H. Plumb’s ‘The Great Change in Children’, arguing that it has only been relatively recently that children have been treated as ‘a special group…exiled to a separate existence’ from adults:

The world we think proper to children – fairy stories, games, toys, special books for learning, even the idea of childhood itself – is a European invention of the past four hundred years. The very words we use for young males – boy, garçon, Knabe – were until the seventeenth century used indiscriminately to mean a male in a dependent position and could refer to men of thirty, forty, or fifty. There was no special word for a young male between the ages of seven and sixteen; the word ‘child’ expressed kinship, not an age state…

Kept out of the adult world, the adolescents naturally created a world of their own choosing – one that incorporated their own music, their own morals, their own clothes, and their own literature…

Social movements and tensions in the adult world can be adjusted by politics, but adolescents and children have no such mechanism for their conflicts with the exclusive world of adults. And so the result has been, and must be, rebellion. That rebellion, however, is not due to the mistakes or difficulties of the last few years. Rarely do we look far enough into the past for the roots of our present problems. This revolution of youth has been building up for decades because we forced the growing child into a repressive and artificial world – a prison, indeed, that was the end product of four centuries of Western history, of that gradual exclusion of the maturing child from the world of adults. We can now look back with longing to the late medieval world, when, crude and simple as it was, men, women, and children lived their lives together, shared the same morals as well as the same games, the same excesses as well as the same austerities. In essence, youth today is rebelling against four centuries of repression and exploitation.

In ‘Their Work is Child’s Play’ Robert Cowley writes about Iona and Peter Opie, folklorists who studied children’s literature and play:

…[Children] are such strict observers of tradition. Tug of War, Blindman’s Buff, and Hide-and-seek…were played more than two thousand years ago in Periclean Athens, and Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims drew straws to decide who would narrate the first tale, just as children do to pick the person who will be ‘it’ or ‘he.’

But many old favorites, such as King of the Castle, Sardines, and Leapfrog, are diminishing in popularity. ‘We feel it is no coincidence,’ the Opies write, ‘that the games whose decline is most pronounced are those which are best known to adults, and therefore most often promoted by them…’ Games lived only as long as they have a reason to live, and the Opies see nothing intrinsically sad in the gradual disappearance of any particular one. Old games die out so new ones can flourish in their place: we threaten games most when we try to preserve them…

Most of their working lives revolves around Iona Opie’s study – the Folklore Room – where their collections of raw materials are filed…There seems to be nothing about children that the Opies do not collect: it is a house loaded with surprises.

In ‘The Games (Young) People Play’, the Opies give a detailed analysis of Brueghel’s 1560 painting Children’s Games:

‘Children as Seen by their Fathers: A Portfolio’ shows artists’ portraits of their children, including those of Gainsborough and Rubens:

In ‘The Sukhomlinov Effect’, Roger A. Beaumont and Bernard J. James argue that ‘in war victory goes to the armies whose leaders’ uniforms are least impressive’:

Horizon – Summer 1968 – 2

Tags

Allan Temko, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Archaeology, Bill Charmatz, Buckminster Fuller, Cadbury Castle, Center for Population Studies at Harvard University, Christopher Hibbert, E.M. Halliday, Ecology, Franklin Russell, George Perkins Marsh, Glastonbury Tor, Henry David Thoreau, King Arthur, Lewis Mumford, Lyndon Johnson, Milton Viorst, Population, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Roger Revelle, Transcendentalism, Urban sprawl, William Garnett

A letter from the editors introduces a special section, ‘Man at War with Nature: Three Articles on the Crisis in our Environment’. It focuses on ‘the ideas of four thinkers who, in different ways and disciplines, have devoted their lives’ to ‘a total examination of the permanent relationship of man to his environment – or “ecosystemics,” as scientists are beginning to call it.’ The section includes portraits by Paul Davis.

In ‘The Vermont Prophet: George Perkins Marsh’, Franklin Russell writes about the founder of the science of ecology:

When urban Americans feel nostalgic for the simple life, they invoke Henry David Thoreau. There was, however, another American, born sixteen years before Thoreau, whose union with nature was equally mystic and whose impact on this century is likely to be more important. George Perkins Marsh, a Vermont lawyer, created the concept of modern ecology, or the study of the interrelationships between organisms and environment. He cut through the Victorian complacency of his own age to prove that men were no asset to the earth: they were wrecking it. Indeed, Marsh anticipated many of the crises in resources, pollution, and overpopulation that plague our century…

Marsh’s genius, and his relevance to the present, were that he saw the earth as a single unit, a giant orchestra being conducted by Homo sapiens – and making agonizingly bad music. He was obsessed by the intricate chain of cause and effect. (The invention of the silk hat by a Parisian, he observed, caused the formation of many small lakes and bogs in the United States because it almost obliterated the demand for beaver fur, thus allowing the beavers to make a comeback.) He saw the earth as a series of environmental systems, which in Man and Nature he broke down arbitrarily into ‘The Woods,’ ‘The Waters, and ‘The Sands.’ All were governed by geographical rules that, Marsh noted acidly, man did not understand. Today these environmental systems have a name – ecosystems, or a series of ‘living and nonliving units interacting in nature,’ as one definition puts it. An ecosystem can be almost anything – an ant colony, Chicago, Africa, or two people in love. It is the interaction and interdependence of the parts of the system that are important.

In ‘Which Guide to the Promised Land: Fuller or Mumford?’, architectural critic Allan Temko writes about R. Buckminster Fuller and Lewis Mumford: ‘They both understand the crisis; they both know all the facts; they are both brilliant and thoughtful men. It is a measure of our ecological crisis that they disagree utterly on where to go from here.’

[Fuller] never came to regard the city, as Mumford has, as a ‘time-structure’ that itself is a formative factor in civilization. Fuller, the inventor, has sought to create an utterly new urban environment. Mumford, the historian, has seen the city as an institution that is the expression of social as well as political forces – ‘history made visible’ – and that transforms man as he transforms his surroundings. Yet by paradox Fuller is much more at home in contemporary America than is Mumford.

Nevertheless these two Americans share many of the highest values of the national heritage…Each of them retains deep affinities with an older, more spacious, less mechanized, relatively unspoiled, and in part wild and almost unpeopled America in which individuals counted for more than organizations, which industrial technology has now changed forever. Yet each carries on the American intellectual adventure today, headed for different destinations but really voyaging outward to the world at large, following the great circle course of nonconformity, self-reliance, and transcendental awareness charted by Emerson and Thoreau…

What each of them has done, really, has been to write philosophical poems celebrating a world that does not truly exist, and perhaps can never exist, even though the poems are true. Mumford is an epic poet, as grave, as moral, as grandly tragic, as John Milton; Fuller is a lyricist, and his bright, luminous structures had best be taken as lovely technological songs. Someday, from somewhere on the unified earth, a new poet may emerge to combine their gifts; but that supreme poet, as Santayana wrote at the end of his appreciation of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe, is in limbo still.

In ‘Too many born? Too many die. So says Roger Revelle,’ Milton Viorst writes about the then head of the Center for Population Studies at Harvard University: ‘If population growth is the root of ecological evil, how can it be stopped? A demographer finds a clue in a paradox: the birth rate is out of control because the death rate is out of control.’

What societies must do, Revelle says, is to shift cultural patterns to minimize the benefits of having large numbers of children and to reduce, where possible, the dependency on surviving sons. He suggests such changes as these:

¶ Institute compulsory education for eight or more years. This would mean that children, who require parental support during their school years, would become productive only at a much later age.

¶ Provide jobs for women. Their earnings would give them an incentive to work instead of incapacitating themselves by bearing or rearing children.

¶ Make consumer goods available. The opportunity to raise living standards would deter many parents from spending whatever money they have on larger families.

¶ Establish a strong social security system. By reducing the fear people have of being abandoned without support in old age, there would be less need to have children, particularly sons, as a form of insurance.

¶ Shift more of the population from agriculture to industry. In most instances industrial workers produce fewer children. This is probably because in an urban society, where skilled labor is in demand, there are fewer opportunities for children to work – as compared to rural areas, where unskilled labor is the rule. Too, wage earners must learn to plan for family support within the limits of known income.

An aerial picture by William Garnett depicts the urban sprawl of Los Angeles:

In ‘A Short Primer of Style’, E.M. Halliday satirises the ‘elegant and precise’ language in the report of a seminar on poverty issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The ‘nine characteristics of poor populations’ are illustrated by Bill Charmatz:

In ‘The Search for King Arthur,’ Christopher Hibbert explores the origins of the Arthurian legend, beginning in fifth century Britain as the Roman Empire was collapsing, looking at both the accounts of mediaeval historians and archaeological excavations at Cadbury Castle and Glastonbury Tor:

The sources of this legend have roots that stretch back far beyond the birth of printing to those Dark Ages of Britain’s history when barbarian invaders were driving the people of the island to seek safety in the Welsh hills and across the channel in that part of France that became known as Brittany. These British refugees told tales of a great leader who had fought to save them from the heathen hordes; and their stories, repeated and embellished, became entangled in later generations with the fables of the people in whose lands they had settled. Centuries later, when the Normans conquered large tracts of Brittany and invaded England, the tales of King Arthur came to the ears of French poets, who set them down in epic verse.

[Standing] on the hill at Cadbury, shutting your eyes to the neat English fields below, imagining instead the haunted, misty swamps that Arthur would have known, it is possible to see him and his companions riding out to battle along the rough and narrow causeway. They ride down, not in the glittering panoply of medieval warfare, but with embossed cuirass and close-fitting helmet, carrying whitewashed shields, long spears, and heavy iron swords, wearing gold collars and strings of beads; men rough and hard and violent but fighting in a noble cause, stemming the tide of Saxon paganism, so that when at last they were defeated, they left behind them a legend that was one of the lasting inspirations of the English Christian kingdom.

 

Summit of Cadbury Castle.

Horizon – Spring 1968 – 1

Tags

Conscription, Correlli Barnett, Draft, Duchess of Alba, Francisco Goya, Horror, Jagiellonian University, John Canaday, Medieval universities, Morris Bishop, Vietnam War

The cover of this issue shows the portrait of the Duchess of Alba by Francisco Goya:

It illustrates New York Times art critic John Canaday’s ‘Goya and Horror’, an extract from his soon-to-be-published The Lives of the Painters, following Goya’s journey from court painter to creator of the ‘swirling, screaming apocalypse of Black Painting’:

Of all the great masters of the past to be claimed as ancestor by modern artists, Goya is easily the favorite. Romantics are nourished by his violence; realists point out that in a time of artificialities he found his point of departure not in formulas but in the streets; social rebels or painters of social consciousness feel that they are descendants of Goya the liberal thinker, who drew and painted his indictments instead of writing them down; fantasists recognize a kinship with a master of nightmare. And even artists who have renounced the pictorial image, or at least one large school of them, can seize upon passages in his late work as approximations or prophecies of the abstract-expressionist aesthetic.

And yet Goya is also the antithesis of all these modernisms. He was a first-rate rococo decorator; in many portraits he revealed himself as the natural follower of Velázquez’s baroque tradition. It is never safe to stand in front of a Goya and exclaim over its beauties, its power, and its significance from any standard preconception of what his art is all about.

 

The article includes a portfolio of Goya’s works tracing his interest in the fantastic:

Saturn Devouring One of His Children…must stand as Goya’s ultimate vision of ravening evil: time itself. For Saturn, or Cronus, the god of time, ultimately consumes all creatures. The painting was done on a wall in Goya’s dining room.

Also in this issue:

In ‘On the Raising of Armies’, Correlli Barnett gives a historical perspective to the controversy of the United States sending conscripted soldiers to Vietnam:

The essential point about volunteers in major wars is that there have rarely been enough of them. Only some great patriotic cause, some dearly held – if poorly understood – principle, draws a mass of volunteers from the whole social body of the nation; thus the citizen armies of France in the Revolution, the Union and Confederate armies of 1861, and the British ‘New Army’ of 1914-16. Even the spur of great principles is of limited duration. Wars last longer than anyone expects; mud, dust, and disease dim the enthusiasm; the possibility of death or mutilation becomes increasingly apparent. The flood of volunteers dries up; the demand for men does not. Compulsion in some form follows: compulsion sanctioned or condoned by national opinion.

Small wars constitute an entirely different problem, and it is this problem that the United States now faces in recruiting for Vietnam. The war in Vietnam, like the earlier French war in Indochina or the British war with the Boers of South Africa in 1899-1902, is not a life-and-death struggle against a great power. It divides rather than unites home opinion. It is essentially a war on an imperial frontier, although ‘empire’ has ceased nowadays to be manifested by direct annexation and rule by governors general, and the word itself is much out of fashion.

This description of the Vietnam war does not imply an ethical judgment; it is simply a military definition. It is the small wars in Korea and Vietnam and the continuing commitment they represent, rather than the great but brief crises of the world wars, that really mark America’s emergence from isolation; the abandonment of the Founding Fathers’ hope of an inward-looking nation of citizen farmers. Since 1945 America has faced for the first time the far-off permanent involvements of a great power, and the current agonizing over Vietnam and the draft are symptoms of a profound and painful adjustment.

The British experience in the years after the Second World War probably constitute the nearest parallel to the present American situation. A combination of the Cold War and colonial unrest kept the British army at full stretch all over the world. During that time there were, in particular, the terrorist troubles in Palestine, Kenya, and Cyprus, the long struggle to smash the communists in Malaya, and participation in the Korean War. National servicemen saw active service in each of these military involvements, and no public disquiet or resistance to call-up was evinced.

However, none of these emergencies much stirred or divided British public opinion; on the other hand, had the Suez operation of 1956 developed into a long campaign involving drafts of national servicemen, there would have been the bitterest opposition in Britain.

In ‘Scholares Medii Aevi’, Morris Bishop outlines the daily life of students at major medieval universities such as Paris and Bologna.

There is a portfolio of pictures of medieval universities from both the past and the then-present of 1968. Along with Oxford, Padua and Bologna there is Cracow:

 

Horizon – Spring 1969 – 2

Tags

Appeasement, Charles B. Slackman, Climate change, Counter-Reformation, Duke of Wellington, Edmund Stillman, Elizabeth Longford, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ho Chi Minh, Mediterranean Sea, Munich Crisis, Mycenaean civilisation, Rhys Carpenter, Sahara Desert, Sanche de Gramont, Spanish Civil War, Stratfield Saye House, Trade Winds, Vietnam War, World War II

In ‘Is there a “Lesson of Munich”?’, Edmund Stillman considers one of the justifications for US involvement in the Vietnam War: that Ho Chi Minh was like Hitler, and that the failure of the policy of ‘appeasement’ in the 1930s demonstrated that Ho had to be stopped in the way Hitler should have been before he became too strong:

The lesson of Munich must, in retrospect, seem a curiously specific one – that this Hitler, this Germany had to be stopped, just as the lesson of the Korean War was that Stalin, lord of a monolithic Communist empire, needed to be stopped. But that all aggressors everywhere, fascist or otherwise, need to be forcibly checked is questionable. The by-now canonical lesson of Munich simply will not bear the weight we put on it; it has already cost us too dearly.

Indeed, if there is any analogy between the 1930’s and the Vietnam War, it is not Munich but the Spanish Civil War – a bloody conflict in which surrounding states invested some men and material – and much delusion and emotion – to little ultimate effect.

…We are always looking for the Great Lessons of History when there may be none at all – only the smaller lessons: that wisdom lies not in ideological imagining but in pragmatism; that turmoil and aggression are likely to be with us always, sometimes threatening us and sometimes not; that any nation, however strong, must husband its strength against real challenges from real quarters; that no generation can truly replay history, redeeming ancient follies. And finally, that the elders must not carelessly bleed the young.

In ‘Bernini’, Sanche De Gramont writes about the Baroque sculptor and architect:

In the Saint Theresa and in his Death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, in the Altieri chapel, Bernini adopted the Counter Reformation belief in ecstasy as an attitude of sainthood. Instead of the naïve, untroubled saints of a Fra Angelico, his are shown with muscles contorted in religious devotion, and faces expressing divine love in explicitly physical terms.

A pitiless, unromantic view of death was another Counter Reformation theme. Bernini went to the macabre iconography of the Middle Ages and borrowed the death’s head for his tombs. The skeletons holding an hourglass in the tomb of Alexander VII and a scroll in the tomb of Urban VIII proclaim that even such illustrious men cannot triumph over time, and that their judgment is yet to come.

Because his sculpture is narrative, Bernini experiments with techniques for conveying movement and emotion in stone. He sought sculptural alternatives for the painter’s use of shadow and color. In his depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence marble flames lick up towards the saint. (To get a lifelike expression, it has been said, Bernini scorched his leg with a brazier and sketched the reflection of his own grimaces in a mirror.) In Pluto and Proserpina, the god is carrying off the terrified maiden, whose flesh yields beneath his grasp. To show grief, Bernini sculpted its visible expression: a marble tear.

 

All this, as his critics have shown, is a highly theatrical sculpture of overstatement. Bernini had the hand of a sculptor and the instincts of a scenic designer. Not only are the religious figures intended to communicate intense devotion, but the composition of the chapels inside the churches serves as a link for the faithful between heaven and earth.

‘Climate and History’ is an excerpt from Rhys Carpenter’s Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (1966), in which he outlines how the Sahara turned from fertile land to rocky desert, why empires collapsed in the 12^th century BC, and what brought desolation to Greece in the 7^th century BC:

In brief, during an ice age there should not have been any desert where the Sahara is today, and geologists, zoologists, and ethnologists all agree that this was indeed the case. The geologists say that rivers were running full stream, carving out the gorges and stream beds whose dry courses may be seen today. The zoologists say that tropical varieties of fish and aquatic animals such as crocodiles and hippopotamuses made their way up these now dried-up rivers, to live and reproduce themselves in what is now the very heart of the desert. The ethnologists report that on the rocks of what were once the walls of water-filled gorges there are engraved drawings of giraffes and elephants, crocodiles and leopards, and others animals such as do not exist, and could not survive, in the present environment. When the great ice sheet retreated over northern Europe, the polar front moved back with it, and the zone of the trade wind expanded, thereby creating the desert that exists today.

Carpenter turns to the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation around 1200 BC:

Historians have made their usual suggestions – foreign invaders, barbarian hordes overwhelming the eastern Mediterranean; in Mycenaean Greece the Dorians, driving down from the Albanian highlands; in Asia Minor the Phrygians, crossing from the Balkan highlands. But archaeology does not bear out these explanations…It was a widespread collapse of prosperity and power almost unparalleled in any other place or period in the civilized career of man. Yet no one has been able to offer any adequate explanation for its occurrence.

To my thinking, after puzzling for many years over this, the greatest still-unsolved problem in Mediterranean history, there is only one solution that will meet all the varied aspects of the case, and that solution is – famine, a dropping of the food supply below the critical level for subsistence. And by famine I do not mean an occasional failure of several consecutive harvests, but such an enduring and disastrous destruction of the annual yield as only a drastic climatic change could have occasioned.

A third example of devastating ‘cultural retrogression’ caused by climate change in the Mediterranean

…deserves much more extensive treatment than it has received from historians. If it is discussed at all, its terrible toll of human misfortune is generally ascribed to disastrous contemporary events of a political or political-economic kind. But in most histories of the Mediterranean the seventh century A.D. is largely a blank; and of this blank in cultural history I have myself had some experience while digging on the site of ancient Corinth…Except for an occasional stray coin, the seventh and eight centuries are missing. What went wrong in the seventh century that it should have left no trace?…Elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean there are signs of similar catastrophes…The real problem seems to have been the failure of the local water supply due to a lack of adequate rainfall over a long period.

In ‘The Duke of Wellington’s Search for a Palace’, Elizabeth Longford, author of a two volume biography of Wellington, writes about how a grateful nation hoped to honour its hero suitably in 1814, when the Napoleonic wars appeared to have ended, and the difficulties that ensued. Illustrations are by Charles B. Slackman:

Stratfield Saye…stands today much as it stood when the Great Duke first set eyes on it in 1817, with the lovely river Loddon flowing through rushes and water crowfoot between its rising deer park and sloping green lawns. True, much valuable buhl furniture arrived from Paris in 1818, to be followed by marble columns from Italy (some of which, however, remained in their packing cases for a hundred and thirty years), a continual stream of books and pictures to take their places beside Stratfield Saye’s original rococo chimney pieces and Chippendale mirror, and the construction of two new outer wings for the west front.

But the “capabilities” of Stratfield Saye on which the Duke really concentrated were of a different order: windows with double glazing copied from Russia, nine water closets attached to bedrooms for his guests; patent Arnott stoves to warm his new conservatory; and a powerful central-heating system with indestructible iron pipes, to remind visitors, both then and now, that the Great Duke always put service before show.

 

 

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Horizon – Spring 1969 – 1

Tags

Alphonse de Lamartine, Cave art, Charles de Gaulle, Diane Arbus, E.M. Halliday, J.H. Plumb, Joseph Barry, Karl Marx, Kenneth Lamott, Lascaux, Leisure, Marin County, May 68, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Revolutions of 1848, Roy McMullen, Thomas Rowlandson, Tony Ray-Jones, W.P. Frith, William Hogarth

This issue’s cover illustrates Roy McMullen’s ‘The Lascaux Puzzle’ describing the cave art discovered in France in 1940:

…[To] refer to Lascaux as the birthplace of art is to trade a high mystery for a cheap piece of romanticism. Art is forever being born, and its birthplace is the nature of Homo sapiens. We ought to avoid being condescending in our judgment of the achievement of the typical Lascaux artist. One way of being condescending is to be excessively tender toward him: to ignore, for example, the plain truth that his crudely scribbled ‘dead man,’ whatever interest it may have for anthropologists, is poor stuff by any artistic criterion. And another, more subtle way of being condescending is to speculate on his supposedly nonpainterly reason for painting.

Horizon caption: ‘Opposite is the depiction of the “dead man,” seemingly victim of a wounded bison. Curiously, the depiction of human figures, when they appear at all in Palaeolithic art, is crude in comparison to that of animals.’

…Who, back in 15,000 BC, constituted the public for the Lascaux paintings?

…[The] conclusion seems inescapable. Execution was all, looking was nothing. There was practically no public at Lascaux (nor at other decorated caves, for the evidence is about the same everywhere).

Horizon caption: ‘…a painted and engraved black cow seven feet long.’

This conclusion can be neatly fitted into the assumption that the typical Lascaux artist was not so much an artist as a priest or maker of hunting magic…But all this does not get us out of the difficulty of believing that such expert and loving rendering of the visible world was simply a very private sort of action art, like bathroom singing. Can a situation so repugnant to our sentiments and our common sense, and so unparalleled in the history of naturalistic art, have really existed? Have I missed a clue somewhere?

Horizon caption: ‘…in a gallery off the main hall, a frescolike ceiling decorated with cattle and horses, the latter somewhat reminiscent of those in Chinese art[.]’.

Also in this issue:

The issue contains a special section on the subject of ‘Leisure’ – with Horizon’s trademark approach of seeing the issues of the present in the light of the past.

The section begins with a cropped version of Diane Arbus’ 1968 photograph ‘A Family On Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, New York’:

In an introduction, E.M. Halliday writes:

The essays that follow are by way of taking an eclectic view of what leisure has meant in various cultural environments throughout history – ending with a hard look at American leisure in Marin County, California, a place that seems to epitomize almost too well the current American ideal of the good life.

In ‘The Beginnings of Modern Pleasures, frequent Horizon contributor J.H. Plumb explores how in eighteenth-century England ‘the games of kings became accessible to all’, with horse racing, prize fighting and cricket all becoming popular in the 18^th century:

Soccer, the game of the peasants and workers, did not become organized and a public spectacle until the nineteenth century, when the working classes first obtained a little leisure. The process was twofold: eager public participation turned amateur sporting activities into highly professional organized games involving stadiums, capital, and traditions of all kinds. The road to Santa Anita, Madison Square Garden, and the Houston Astrodome had been started.

The same popularisation was happening in culture, where in the mid-17^th century:

Culture was personal or the affair of a narrow, rich, and generally aristocratic social class…Genteel places of amusement scarcely existed.

A hundred years later all was changed, and again England, with its ever-increasing prosperous middle class, led the way. Concerts were now a commonplace, as well as opera and ballet. The Royal Academy, founded in 1768, provided a yearly feast of art, but, better still for the growing culture-minded public, artists secured a copyright for engravings of their pictures by an act of Parliament passed in 1735 [sic]. William Hogarth leaped in at once, and soon handsome etchings of his masterpieces – Marriage á la Mode, A Rake’s Progress, etc. – were festooning the walls of middle class houses, along with the famous beauties of Joshua Reynolds or Thomas Gainsborough. The British Museum came into being in 1753, the very first of the great metropolitan museums

…Leisure had come to stay; man was at last on his way to turning his world into a playground.

Horizon caption: ‘Thomas Rowlandson, a merciless observer of his countrymen at play, made this etching in 1810, showing some English travellers in France setting out by coach from a French inn.’

In ‘A Few Hazards of the Good Life,’ Kenneth Lamott writes about the dissatisfactions of living in the seemingly-idyllic Marin County, one of the most affluent counties in California. He begins with a conversation with a man who ran an institute for treating alcoholics who told him that ‘a survey had shown that the hardest-drinking people around San Francisco were the American Indians in the Oakland slums and the residents of the Tiburon peninsula in Marin County’ on which Lamott had lived for seventeen years by 1969:

Having three children myself, I have given a good deal of thought to the lives they lead and have arrived at the considered judgement that Marin is a lousy place for kids to grow up in. Like the Negroes [who made up 2% of the population in Marin in 1969], they stand outside the Good Life, which is largely a white adult notion. For the kids, it’s great to be able to camp out on the slopes of Mount Tam or dig in Indian burial mounds or play tennis after school seven days out of ten the year round or sail an El Toro out of the back yard, but the real thing that’s on their minds is What’s it all about, man?, and the style of life we’ve evolved here doesn’t give them a very convincing answer…

The pathetic and dreadful secret is out: Nothing really matters very much. Winning a yacht race is just as important as winning a case in court. Playing a first-rate game of tennis is just as important as painting good pictures. Remodeling a house with one’s own hands is just as important as taking a class of freshmen through Heart of Darkness. Nothing really matters very much, but the view of the bay is great.

The section ends with Tony Ray-Jones’ 1965 photograph:  ‘Belle Isle Park, Detroit’.

Horizon caption: ‘Sunday afternoon, Detroit’

In ‘1848 – Again?’ Joseph Barry writes about the wave of revolutions which swept across Europe in that year, which seemed to be echoed by the events of May 1968 in Paris, where he was living at the time. He asks whether 1968 would, ‘like 1848, be called in Toynbee’s phrase, a turning point where history failed to turn? Or, as the Germans viewed the earlier revolt, that “crazy and holy year”?’:

Does reaction follow revolt as inevitably as one tide the other? Or was it simply the swiftness of reaction that was so extraordinary in 1848? In any case, everything about that year has a breathless quality. The Age of Metternich, which had extended from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 ad infinitum, it seemed, came to a sudden end in February 1848; and within the next six weeks a dozen conservative rulers fell like so much ripe, if not rotten, fruit…

‘France is bored,’ the political correspondent of Le Monde wrote less than two months before the student revolt in May, 1968. He was quoting, with an uncanny parallel, a statement of the poet-politician Alphonse de Lamartine on the eve of the 1848 revolt.

But there was more than boredom that soon shook the French regime of 1848. The revolution of 1789, Lamartine had also pointed out, had simply replaced the ‘domination of a king by that of wealth…instead of one tyrant, there were now several thousand.’ It was the propertied who constituted le pays legal, the legal country: less than 250,000 were privileged to vote in a land of thirty-five million.

Barry concludes:

[L]ibertarian movements…were to await, like nationalism, a riper moment. In France there was also the prophetic element of a purely proletarian movement. Marx explained its failures: ‘The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpenproletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself.’

In any handbook on How to Steal a Revolution, the first principle, based on the 1848 experience, might well be: insist on immediate, democratic elections. It was a lesson de Gaulle heeded last June when he called for a swift vote to end the risings of 1968. Civil strife, the sound of violence, the great uncertainties, bring cries for the maintenance of order – that is, generally, the old, familiar order. And there is nothing so frightening for a majority as the first stages of a revolution.

On the walls of the student-occupied Sorbonne last May was scrawled: ‘Universal suffrage is counterrevolution – Proudhon.’ Lenin and Castro were not to make that mistake.