Horizon, Autumn 1968 – 1

Tags

1968, Antoni Gaudí, Barcelona, Dark Ages, Decline of the Roman Empire, Diocletian, Edmund Stillman, Gordon Childe, Isaac Newton, Joseph J. Thorndike, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Mechanical philosophy, Natural philosophy, Optics, Park Güell, Robert Hooke, Roy McMullen, Sagrada Família, Seagram Building, Walter Karp

This issue’s cover features the finial on one of the four spires of the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona, subject of ‘Gaudi’ by Roy McMullen:

Also in this issue:

In ‘Before the Fall’ Edmund Stillman deals with the questions ‘How decadent are we? What, really, is a “sick” society? Are we Rome in decline? How worried should we be?’ The upheavals of the 1960s, and especially of 1968, lent these questions urgency:

The problem with the popular notion of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is that, at bottom, it has no basis in fact. In our distorted view centuries are compressed into decades; the eras are transposed – profligacy being assumed to flourish at the end, while stoic virtues are believed to characterize the years of power. The reverse is true. As the celebrated Roman gravitas – weightiness, seriousness – of the republican character deteriorated, the empire increased in size. Macedon was crushed in 197 B.C., the Seleucid Empire in 192, and Carthage in 146. Macedonia was annexed as a province in 148, and Greece itself was annexed in 146. Thus the enervating effects of fun and games! Perhaps too many weepy gospel movies in the style of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. de Mille have warped our imaginations. For profligate Rome endured and endured, and the easy moralizer will find none of the stuff of sermons in its story. Why Rome fell in the end is something else again…

 

[A] century of turmoil could only be brought to an end when Diocletian, who ruled from A.D. 284-305, transferred to the office of emperor all the trappings of Oriental divine monarchy and destroyed most of the individual liberties of the Roman people under the crushing conformity of a protototalitarian state – a state that fixed prices, wages, occupations, and the poor man’s place of residence, in a new Pharaonic stasis destined to endure, in the east at least, for close to ten centuries.

But most of all, the economy decayed. Taxes grew burdensome; the civil service grew, but the gross national product shrank…

As the late Gordon Childe, one of the most distinguished archaeologists of our day, put it: ‘The bankruptcy of the Roman economy was nakedly exposed. It was proclaimed to the biologist by the decline in fertility that is notorious in all classes of the population of the later Empire. Economically, as well as scientifically, classical civilization was dead a hundred and fifty years before barbarian invaders from Germany finally disrupted the political unity of the Empire and formally initiated the Dark Ages in Europe.’

Looking at the then-present (1968) he concludes:

Is Saul Bellow a Proust – or even a Fitzgerald? Is Marshal McLuhan really an I.A. Richards or a Wittgenstein? Is not our vaunted technology for the most part a working out in practical detail of basic theories and perceptions that are by now nearly a half-century old? In what sense is the Apollo program a fundamental breakthrough comparable to Max Planck’s quantum theory? And even if we reply that the biological sciences – witness DNA – are on the eve of great things, the test-tube creation of life itself, is technological expertise a true index of a society’s growth or inner health?…The technology of Europe after Rome was more advanced than it was in Rome’s great days.

In ‘Sir Isaac Newton’,  Walter Karp writes:

Newton is, beyond dispute, the greatest scientist who ever lived, the only one of whom it can be said: had he not lived, the course of science might have been radically altered.

Horizon caption: “An apple tree shades a worktable at Woolsthorpe Manor, where Newton was born in 1642. His gravitational theory came to him when an apple fell at his feet one autumn day in the garden.”

He describes Newton’s discovery of the properties of light:

With increasing vexation Newton tried to explain to his critics that they had turned his discovery upside down. He had not invented a hypothesis about color and then fitted it to the facts. The very reverse was true. He had found directly from experiment ‘certain properties of light…which if I did not know to be true, I should prefer to reject as vain and empty speculation, than acknowledge even as hypothesis.’ He had not supposed that white light was a confused bundle of rays differently refrangible; he was driven to that conclusion by his experimental findings. These findings could not be explained by the prevailing theory, as he pointed out to Hooke with biting scorn. His critics remained unconvinced.

Horizon caption: “Simple scientific instruments of Newton’s…include a prism, a mathematical dial, upper right, and a box of ‘Napier’s bones’ for calculating logarithms.”

For Newton it was a bitter experience. He felt cheated and victimized. He had offered the world a great new discovery, but the grandees of science had robbed him of his credit because his discovery did not square with their own mechanical preconceptions. To Newton, who had not the smallest doubt about his own immense superiority, there was only one recourse:  the grandees must be taught like children what the true method of philosophy is. He told them: ‘First, to inquire directly into the properties of things, and establish them by experiment; and then proceed more slowly to hypotheses for explaining them. For hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them.’ To call an experimentally discovered property false because it contradicts a plausible hypothesis is to reverse the order of inquiry. Such was Newton’s advice to his elders, and its implications are profound. Natural philosophy, he was arguing, must rid itself of the shackles of mere rationality. The properties of things, experimentally established, may seem unintelligible and inexplicable according to prevailing principles of reason and philosophy. Yet properties they are, and they must not be rejected a priori according to the principles of any philosophical scheme, including the one of mechanical philosophy. But Newton was only a young and obscure mathematics professor, and it would take more than a few irate letters to imprint his conception of science on the minds of men.

In ‘Gaudí’, Roy McMullen considers the Catalan architect famed for Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia church:

Do you like Gaudí? Not so long ago you could smile indulgently when you answered. Liking or disliking the bizarre buildings of Antoni Gaudí I Cornet was in about the same cocktail category as liking or disliking Tiffany glass, cast-iron lilies, and other turn-of-the-century fantasies…Whatever you thought did not commit you to much, for Gaudí was presumably the great outsider of twentieth-century architecture, a provincial freak generated by the chance encounter of genius with the Gothic revival, Moorish influences, Catalan craft traditions, Art Nouveau, Spanish religiosity, and a Barcelona building boom.

Horizon Caption: “Shark Fins on a Roof: These weird shapes, covered with a crazy quilt of broken tiles, adorn the roof of a gatehouse that Gaudí built as a part of the Park Güell, outside the city of Barcelona, between 1900 and 1914.”

Today the context for the question has changed. In recent years many visual-art consumers, aided by such taste makers as shelter magazines, paperback professors, modern museums, abstract-expressionist painters, and antique dealers, have shifted their allegiance from geometric forms to organic, from the rational to the emotional, from progressivism to historicism – in general, from classicism to romanticism. Many architects anticipated or have joined the shift: Alvar Aalto even before World War II; Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eero Saarinen, in such familiar monuments as the Ronchamp chapel, the Guggenheim Museum, and the TWA Terminal at Kennedy Airport; Philip Johnson, Edward Durrell Stone, Louis I. Kahn, Paul Rudolph, and a score of lesser creators in dozens of trend-confirming works.

Horizon caption: “Window for a Crypt: This teardrop window, set in a wall of irregular bricks and debris, admits a dim, stained light to the inside of the crypt of the chapel at Colonia Güell.”

He concludes:

… Gaudí was not, after all, a really great architect. He lacked the ultimate humility of the really great ones, and their sense of architecture as a practical delight, a beautiful necessity. Somewhere inside the rough realist who enjoyed inclined piers and random rubble was an arrogant 1890s dandy…

However, having made these unavoidable judgments, I feel obliged to qualify them immediately. Granted, Gaudí was not a great architect. Granted also, one is enough. Can we not still say that he was an extraordinary man and a great artist? Evidently we can, and so the critical problem is to find an artistic category for him. Perhaps he ought simply to be called a great maker of habitable sculpture.

But a letter from the editor Joseph J. Thorndike, as well as challenging Stillman’s view that the West is in decline, also differs with McMullen:

The high priest of the functional modern school is Mies van der Rohe, and his temple is the Seagram Building on Park Avenue. It is indeed an architectural landmark – perhaps as great in its way as Gaudí’s cathedral of the Sagrada Familia. And whereas Gaudí has no direct followers, Mies is the most widely imitated of architects. One has only to look up and down Park Avenue from the Seagram Building to see the dreary results. Block after block, the steel-and-glass boxes seem to proclaim: ‘One Mies would have been enough.’

As for functionalism, what is the function of a park or cathedral? Not, surely, the same as that of a kitchen or an office. A park is to delight; a cathedral is to inspire. In these, his major works, Gaudí was triumphantly successful.

Horizon caption, quoting Salvador Dalí: “A ‘Terrifying, Edible Beauty’: This phantasmagoric neo-Gothic Art-Nouveau jungle clusters around one of the church.”

Horizon, Spring 1975 – 1

Tags

1973-1975 Recession, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, Ashburnham House, Bury St Edmunds, Churchill Club, Dean's Yard, ecriture, Edith Sitwell, Francis Russell, J.H. Plumb, Osbert Sitwell, Price revolution, Roland Barthes, Roy McMullen, Rus, Sacheverell Sitwell, St Edmund the Martyr, Still Falls the Rain, V-1, Varangians, Vikings, Volga Bulgaria, Westminster, Writing Degree Zero

This issue’s cover features a twelfth century English miniature of Viking ships from a manuscript called The Life and Miracles of St. Edmund (Edmund was a ninth century King of East Anglia killed by Vikings). It illustrates ‘The Lure of the Vikings’ by Lionel Casson

 

It was not that that the Vikings were invincible in battle. Their favoured weapon, the battle-axe, had long been abandoned by less primitive nations, their swords were inferior to the Frankish swords (which Viking chieftains preferred to the local products), and they never got the hang of besieging a fortification. What made them so formidable were their superb ships and skilled seamanship. These gave them so total a command of the water that no force ever dared engage them there, and as a consequence they had unlimited mobility. They were able at will to make swift and sudden onslaughts and, if pressed, beat hasty and safe retreats.

Horizon caption – ‘Adding injury to insult, Vikings bind King Edmund, flog him, and drag him away. Later they used him as a target for archery practice and finally beheaded him. Ultimately he was raised to sainthood and his cult flourished at Bury St. Edmunds.’

 

The Danes and Norwegians, though active enough traders, preferred the pleasures of fighting and the quicker profits of plunder. The Swedes, on the other hand, were as much interested in trade as in fighting and found their best customers in the rich caliphate of Baghdad. As a result they were drawn deeper and deeper into Russia.

The Slavic population called the newcomers Rus – whence the name Russia. We think of Igor, Vladimir, Oleg, as typically Russian names. Not at all: Igor is a Slavic version of Ingmar, Vladimir of Valdemar, Oleg of Helge. As a matter of fact, many historians argue that it was Swedish Vikings who founded the first Russian state, although others, particularly Soviet historians, do not agree.

 

Casson extensively quotes a report of a full-scale Viking funeral by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, secretary of an embassy from the caliph of Baghdad to the Bulgars on the middle Volga , whose route took him through a community of Rus in 921.

Also in this issue:

In ‘The Rear Guard of the Avant-Garde’, part of the ‘Man of Ideas’ series, Roy McMullen describes French philosopher Roland Barthes:

Does pop culture make you morose? Have you stopped smiling at television commercials? Do you have the suspicion that we are all getting more and more phony? On the positive side, are you trendy enough to be fascinated by linguistics? If so, you qualify as a member of the growing public for the social and literary criticism of Roland Barthes.

 

 

…an écriture is for Barthes a manifestation of an ideology and to some extent a form of double talk. To adopt the écriture classique is to commit oneself, intentionally or not, to notions about common reason and the universal nature of man that reflect the bourgeois ideology that began rising to power in the late seventeenth century. To adopt the écriture of the traditional French novel, which is also that of straight historical narrative, is to commit oneself to notions of fate and causality that falsify, at least in the modern existentialist view, the reality of choice in human life. To adopt the Communist écriture is to…but there is no need to belabor the point. No écriture is innocent.

In ‘Waiting for the End’ Francis Russell writes about going to a poetry reading by the Sitwells at the Churchill Club in Dean’s Yard, Westminster during a V-1 attack in October 1944. Edith Sitwell was reciting Still Falls the Rain:

Now the roar had all but drowned out her voice. Air raid wardens on the roof had begun to blow their whistles. This meant a direct hit was imminent. People were getting down on the floor, trying to shield their heads with chairs. Edith kept on reading without the slightest change of voice or expression No one was listening to her. No one could.

The flying bomb must have all but skimmed the roof. Then the roar of its motor began to fade as it headed across the Thames. Some seconds later there was a dullish boom, all the windows rattled and several of them cracked. Edith read on until the end, immutable.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man

Was once a child who among beasts has lain –

“Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood for thee.”

Then, barely perceptibly, she winked at us.

In ‘Inflation’, part of his ‘In the Light of the Past’ Series, J.H. Plumb looks at the scourge that was rising again in the 1970s after the long post-war economic boom, and looks for historical parallels. In contrast to examples such as the post-World War I German hyperinflation,

…inflation can also be widespread and long-term – an intermittent fever that crests sharply from time to time but never dies away, lasting, perhaps, for a century.

It was this variety of the disease that afflicted Europe between 1540 and 1620, a variety more like our present circumstances than the dramatic inflationary spiral of Weimar Germany or the temporary, if sharp, inflation in France and England during the Napoleonic Wars.

Plumb notes that governments ‘attempt complex remedial measures that rarely have any effect except to intensify class bitterness on the one hand and distrust of government on the other.’

 

 

 

Horizon, Autumn 1967 – 1

Tags

Bamyan, Battle of Carrhae, Edward T. Hall, El Greco, Ginevra de’ Benci, Illinois Institute of Technology, James Morris, Kushan Empire, Leonardo da Vinci, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marshall Williams, Northwestern University, Palmyra, Pan-Asian Highway, Parthians, Proxemics, Roy McMullen, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, The Silk Road, William Kloman

This issue’s cover features Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, which had just been purchased by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, for a then-record $5 million. Contributing Editor Walter Karp writes about the painting’s history and its subject:

Also in this issue:

In ‘The Silk Road’ James (now Jan) Morris writes about the overland route from Rome to China:

The fortunes of this road have fluctuated down the centuries. Sometimes it followed this path, sometimes that; now it was blocked by wars, brigands or zealots; now secure beneath the protection of conquering empires – a road of many stages and legends, stretching from the frontiers of China at one end to the Mediterranean coast at the other. The trans-Asian route was the tenuous link between the two supreme civilizations of the earth, and there was a time when it seemed almost ready to unite them, East and West, in the marvellous richness of a common culture.

The powers at each end of the route knew nothing of one another. Each was only a rumor. The Chinese had heard whispers of cultivated nations far beyond the Asian steppes – possibly their first inkling that there existed any civilized people other than themselves. The Romans knew that somewhere far to the east, beyond India, there lived a powerful people to whom the Greeks had given the name “Seres”; but just where the country of the Seres was, and what kind of people they were, nobody knew. Nobody in the West had seen a Chinese. Nobody in the East had seen a European. Eratosthenes’ map of the world, drawn in 220 B.C., begins to peter out at the Tigris and ends altogether at the Ganges Delta, which is shown pouring into the unknown seas of the farthest East. Rome and China were like islands separated by an uncharted ocean.

Palmyra:

By the middle of the first century B.C. the gap was closing. The four empires along the route had given it a certain security. The Han emperors had subdued much of the wild country on the western marches of China, south of the Gobi, making the route safe against Huns and Tibetans. The Kushans firmly policed the eastern approaches to the Pamirs, the Parthians controlled the western. The armies of Rome, under the command of the proconsul Crassus, were vigorously at war with Parthia in eastern Syria. Only a single great impulse, of war or of commerce, was needed to pierce the veil that lay between the eastern and western civilizations.

Crassus led the Romans at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 B.C.:

As the Parthians moved in for the kill they suddenly unfurled some majestic battle standards, such as the Romans had never seen before – brilliantly dyed and made of a material unimaginably sumptuous. Tradition says it was the abrupt appearance of these arcane devices that finally broke the morale of the legions; certainly the banners lingered in the Roman memory, and in the and it was the fascination of that astonishing fabric, first glimpsed by the Romans upon the battlefield of Carrhae, that brought the trans-Asia route to life and established a thin and transient connection between Rome and China.

Bamiyan:

Horizon caption: ‘Afghanistan’s valley of Bamian was one of the most overpowering sights on the caravan road. Here, at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains, in the fourth century A.D., Buddhist missionaries from India carved a 175-foot-tall statue of their lord, around which they hewed out chapels for themselves in the sheer cliff. From these eyries they could watch the caravans arriving from Samarkand, Palmyra, the Khyber Pass. The huge statue (in the niche to the right of center), once painted in polychrome and gilded, is now weathered and partially defaced.’

Gibbon says it took two hundred and forty-three days to travel from China to the Syrian coast; if modern trade routes are anything to go by, many a bale lay for weeks at a time under a trader’s counter waiting for clearance, or a bill of lading or camel space – or simply forgotten. Still nobody knew the Silk Road from end to end, and no European had set eyes upon the inconceivable settlements of highest Asia beyond the Pamirs: Aqsu and Hotien, Qara Shahr and Kokand, or the remotest of all, Sera Metropolis, the silk capital, somewhere in the heart of China.

Eventually the secret of silk making leaked out of China, which withdrew behind its frontiers, and the route was abandoned and forgotten. Morris describes 1960s plans for the Pan-Asian Highway : ‘But even these Olympian enterprises stop short at the Chinese border, and the dotted lines of the projected routes shy warily south. The contact of the Silk Road has never fired; the void separating China from the West remains a hazard and a tragedy.’

In ‘Anatomy of a Masterpiece: The Burial of Count Orgaz’, Roy McMullen describes El Greco’s painting:

Anyone who doubts the transfiguring power of art should reflect on the genesis of The Burial of Count Orgaz. The central incident in El Greco’s painting…is a rather vulgar and morally pointless miracle. Most of the circumstances preceding and surrounding the execution of the work smell of money – literally to high heaven. Yet the result is a genuinely mystical masterpiece and, for us at least, a vivid image of several crises.

Here, refracted by the neurotic sensibility of a Cretan immigrant, is that discouraging moment in the history of European thought when one part of the Renaissance lost its rationalist nerve and turned back towards the Middle Ages. In terms of art history, here is one of the high points of the sixteenth century mannerist style, with its warping of a classical language into unclassical statements. At the level of national history, here are Spain’s nobly unteachable hidalgos, assembled for a class portrait two years before the Armada revealed their obsolescence.

In ‘E.T. Hall and the Human Space Bubble’, part of Horizon’s ‘Men of Ideas’ series, William Kloman interviews the anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who developed the study of proxemics, the human use of space and the effects that population density has on behaviour, communication, and social interaction. His book The Hidden Dimension had been published the previous year:

“New York City may already be dead. We may not be able to bring it back. And if we lose New York it could be the death of the nation.”

The speaker was an anthropologist named Edward T. Hall; his audience a select gathering of scientists, city planners, architects, and environmental experts at the Smithsonian Institution last spring. A man who has made a career of probing the communications blocks that exist between cultures, Hall has developed ideas about men’s varying needs for space that could have important implications for the future of our urban centers. Recently appointed to a professorship in the study of intersocietal communications at Northwestern University, he is one of a growing number of scientists seeking ways of making our cities fit for human habitation…

Besides food, water, and shelter, Hall says, we need a certain amount of space in which to conduct our lives. Each organism, he has written, “no matter how simple or complex, has around it a sacred bubble of space, a bit of mobile territoriality which only a few other organisms are allowed to penetrate and then only for short periods of time.” The bubble varies in size, depending on such factors as the emotional state, immediate activity, position in a social hierarchy, and cultural background of the individual. What may be a comfortable living space for a Latin American who requires a certain amount of physical contact with his fellows, may be unbearably crowded to an Englishman, who requires a somewhat large bubble of space around him to feel at ease. Similarly, other unspoken needs – for variety, visual beauty, and quiet – differ from one culture to another.

We must begin to study these needs, recognizing that if we do not take them into consideration, life can become intolerable. Given the cosmopolitan nature of our cities, we must design dwellings, office buildings, and transportation systems in accordance with the diverse requirements of the people who must use them. The melting pot, Hall says, is an illusion.

Kloman concludes by sitting in on one of Hall’s classes at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (where he taught before moving to Northwestern):

Horizon, Spring 1971

Tags

Adam and Eve, Akan, Asantahene, Ashanti, Black Volta, Cortauld Institute, Dahomey, Elizabeth Taylor, Family, Feminism, Giorgione, Golden Stool, J.H. Plumb, Jan Morris, Kate Millett, Kenneth Clark, La Tempesta, Landscape into Art, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Nebraska, Richard Burton, Robin Morgan, Roy McMullen, Sexism, Sexual Politics, Sisterhood is Powerful, Toda, Walter Karp, West Africa, Women's Liberation, X-ray

This issue’s cover features Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting of Adam and Eve in the Cortauld Institute, London. It illustrates a section on ‘Liberated Women’, beginning with ‘The Feminine Utopia’ by Contributing Editor Walter Karp:

The family…is not a natural or a biological institution. It…is a human contrivance and it invites the question, which the women’s movement asks, why has the family division of roles been drawn up the way it has? That women bear the children is a biological fact; that those who bear children must carry the chief burden of tending them is not a biological necessity. It is certainly ‘convenient’…but convenience is not necessity. There is even less reason for women to maintain the household simply because they are female. Among the Todas of southern India, where women may have more than one spouse, the men, interestingly enough, consider housekeeping too sacred for women.

…many spokesmen [sic] for the women’s movement conclude that males have deliberately confined females to the domestic sphere in a concerted effort to maintain their dominance. Employing an analogy with racism, many today speak of the present system of human life as ‘sexism’– ‘the definition of and discrimination against half of the human species by the other half’, according to Robin Morgan, editor of a recent collection of women’s movement essays called The Sisterhood is Powerful. The most rigorous exponent of this view is Kate Millett, who has coined the term ‘sexual politics’ (in a well-known book of that title) to designate the ways in which males contrive to keep females subordinate under what she calls ‘patriarchal government.’

Also in this issue:

In ‘Odd Couples’, part of his ‘In the Light of the Past’ series, J.H. Plumb considers how the family has evolved:

Basically, the family has fulfilled three social functions – it has provided a labor force, transmitted property and educated and trained children, not only in accepted social patterns, but also in the work skills upon which their future depended…The unitary family was particularly good at coping with the small peasant holdings that covered most of the world’s fertile regions from China to Peru. In the primitive peasant world a child of five or six could begin to earn his keep in the fields, as he still can in India and Africa.

After the revolution in agriculture, property and its transmission lay at the very heart of social relations and possessed an actuality that we find hard to grasp…

The family as the basic social group first began to fail, except in its property relations, among the aristocracy. The majority of the affluent of western Europe have always created for themselves a double standard, particularly as far as sex in concerned…The family as a unit of social organization was remarkably appropriate for a less complex world of agriculture and craftsmanship, but ever since industry and highly urbanized societies began to replace that world, the social functions of the family have steadily weakened. It is a process not likely to be halted.

In ‘The Ashanti’ James (later Jan) Morris explores the history and culture of the West African people:

…It was during the seventeenth century that the Ashanti entered history. They immediately began to display a talent for organization, both civic and military, altogether exceptional among West African peoples. Gradually they constructed a federation of Akan tribes whose separate customs were respected and whose ruling chiefs preserved their own stools, or thrones, but who were subject to the suzerainty of the king of Ashanti – the Asantahene.

The Ashanti empire was never static or absolute, varying rather in its degree of central control and shading away from the pure Ashanti districts in the center to the less indoctrinated tribal areas on the perimeter. Nevertheless, the Asantahene became the most formidable indigenous ruler of West Africa, whose writ ran in one degree or another from the Black Volta to the sea.

The revelation of the Golden Stool consolidated this power by providing a supernatural focus for loyalty. Through its agency the Ashanti came nearer than any other West African people, except perhaps the people of Dahomey, to a concept of nationalism in the Western sense.

In ‘The Tempesta Puzzle’, Roy McMullen considers the many theories about Giorgione’s mysterious painting:

…And then in 1939, modern science added a fresh note to the discord: beneath the figure of the dreaming young man an X-ray examination revealed a seated woman with her legs in the water. Had she once had a role in the narrative? Was it possible that Giorgione had never had a narrative in mind and had just improvised an inhabited landscape? Or did the hidden bather prove only that he had thriftily made use of an old canvas?

In 1949 Kenneth Clark, meditating on the X ray and reflecting an opinion already widespread in Britain and America, decided that heavyweight Tempestry had demonstrated its futility. ‘The Tempesta,’ he wrote in his Landscape into Art, ‘is one of those works of art before which the scholar had best remain silent. No one knows what it represents…and I think there is little doubt that it is a free fantasy, a sort of Kublai Khan, which grew as Giorgione painted it…’ He added that if we cannot say what it means, still less can we say ‘how it achieves its magical power over our minds.’

 

Horizon, Summer 1971 – 2

Tags

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, American Civil War, Charles II, Correlli Barnett, Georges Seurat, Karl Maria von Clausewitz, Nell Gwyn, On War, Pointillism, Roy McMullen, Samuel Pepys, Vietnam War

Part 2 of this issue:

In ‘How Not to Win a War’ the eminent British historian Correlli Barnett writes about the book that was a key influence on him, and which he says could help explain what he calls ‘the American defeat in Vietnam‘, though the end of the war was still four years away:

General Karl Maria von Clausewitz was the first man to make conceptual sense of war as a social and political activity and to deduce its governing principles. Clausewitz is the starting point of all later theorizing about war, and often the finishing point as well. He significantly influenced the German and French general staffs before 1914; he is the fountainhead of present-day Communist thinking about war; and he ought to be a part of every Western young man’s education. His great work On War (Vom Kriege), casts more light than any other single book on all the facets of collective human rivalry…

…Clausewitz’s philosophy of war has been garbled into dogma, with regrettable results.

Horizon caption: ‘Who would have won the honors if Clausewitz had taught a seminar on war? In Edward Sorel’s reunion portrait, the bright students sit up front below their master.’ Front row, L-R: Marx, Mao, Frederick the Great, Bismarck. Second row, L-R: Elizabeth I, Lenin. ‘Dunces’ in the rear, L-R: Napoleon, Eisenhower, F.D. Roosevelt, Churchill, Wilson, Marshall.

War for Clausewitz was no meaningless episode of violence, nor was it absolutely distinct and separate from peace. War, on the contrary,

‘belongs…to the province of social life. It is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others. It would be better…to liken it to business competition, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still more like State policy, which again…may be looked upon as a kind of business competition on a grand scale.’

This simple proposition is Clausewitz’s greatest and most illuminating insight. In the words of his most quoted aphorism, “War is only a continuation of policy by other means.” Clausewitz returns again and again to this theme of the continuity of international relations, from peace via war to peace again, speaking of a diplomacy that (in war) employs battles instead of notes. It follows that the conduct of war ought to be constantly governed by political considerations.

In Clausewitz’s view, it is absurd to try to “win” wars by military means alone, because, as he says, no major plan of war can be made without political understanding and insight. The political setting not only determines the aims and decisions of war strategy but also colors the whole character of the war…

It was not the nature of nineteenth-century warfare that made the American Civil War so long and bloody but the irreconcilable political and social issues of secession and union, slavery and emancipation. And it is political, not military, considerations that have prevented the United States from using nuclear weapons in Vietnam – on the contrary, nothing would so economically and efficiently block the Vietcong supply routes.

In his study of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Roy McMullen explores the hostile response to it:

Nervousness and defensiveness are, of course, unprovable, but they become at least a faint, mischievous possibility when we remember that viewers in 1886 were still uncowed by avant-garde art and were without our modern emphasis on the formal and abstract elements in painting, and were therefore more sensitive than we are likely to be to the figurative message – the moral, to use a nineteenth-century term – of La Grande Jatte.

For there actually is such a message, or moral, in the picture, however much it is ignored by art historians intent on optical effects and spatial organization or by ordinary appreciators engrossed in summertime and bustles. And a similar message can be detected nearly everywhere in Seurat’s mature achievement, rising like a slightly corrosive odor from his characteristic mixture of loveliness, banality, delicacy, and pedantry.

A whiff could have made a boulevardier at the Maison Dorée feel obscurely menaced. Consider, as an example, the pipe-smoking boater and his two elegant neighbors in the left foreground of La Grande Jatte…At first glance these impressively monumental figures – naked, the boater could be an antique river deity – seem drenched in the sedative bliss of a sunlit holiday; at second glance the bliss drains away. One of today’s veristic film directors could scarcely ask for more eloquent images of urban man’s loneliness in a crowd and his inability to communicate with his fellow men.

The same solitude seems to shroud, with a few doubtful exceptions, everyone in the picture, including the mysteriously motivated hornblower in the tropical helmet and even the “superb cocotte” despite her decorative pet and her evidently affluent protector.

‘The World of Samuel Pepys’ is a lavishly illustrated look at the life of the Restoration diarist:

Also included with this issue is a supplement: an eight-page panorama of London in 1647.

Horizon, Summer 1971 – 1

Tags

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Arabs, David Daiches, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Georges Seurat, Islam, Israel, James Morris, Jewish Law, Jewish Revolt, Jews, Judaism, Leslie Fiedler, Lubavitcher Rebbe, Palestinians, Pharisees, Rabbis, Roy McMullen, Sadducees, Walter Karp

A bumper issue, in two parts.

This issue’s cover shows a detail from Georges Seurat’s  A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte:

It illustrates an article on the painting by Roy McMullen.

Also in this issue:

In an introductory letter, ‘Arab and Jew’, Contributing Editor Walter Karp writes about the special section on The Middle East:

Writings about Arabs and Jews these days strike a common note. They sound like the claims and counterclaims of litigants in a protracted lawsuit, the suit, of course, being the Arab-Israeli conflict. As in most protracted lawsuits, the rights and wrongs at issue have grown increasingly obscure. This being so, we thought it useful to step back from the contemporary fray and look at matters from a different standpoint. Instead of airing the dispute between the contending parties, we asked two authors to help us identify the contenders. What is an Arab? What is a Jew? What kind of history, what fundamental experiences, have made these two peoples what they are and brought them to their present impasse?

In ‘What is an Arab?’, James (later Jan) Morris gives a brief history of the Arabs and Islam, then sums up the position in 1971, reflecting on moves for Arab unity, before the rise of Islamism both in and beyond Arab countries in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution:

Oil also gave the Arabs new confidence. They discovered, through no merit of their own, a new importance in themselves. They were not born to be poor after all, but to be immensely rich. They did not inhabit a backwater, but rode the mainstream of world affairs. The possession of oil gave the Arabs a tremendously powerful instrument of persuasion – or blackmail.

Horizon Caption: ‘an Arab version of Virgo – the red dots represent the individual stars – adorns a Treatise on the Fixed Stars, written in 1009. By then, Arab universities thrived in Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, antedating Europe’s by two centuries.’

Two more developments gave a new vitality to the Arabs. The first was the emergence, in the 1950s, of a remarkable young leader, the first Arab statesman of world importance since Saladin resisted the Crusades: Gamal Abdel Nasser, who made Egypt the epicentre of Arab progress and gave to all the Arab peoples, not prosperity, nor even serenity, but a new pride. The second was the existence of Israel, an alien body planted on the shores of the Arab world by the intervention of the West, which acted as a catalyst to the energies of the Arabs, spurring them on to a common cause and intermittently reviving their sense of camaraderie.

Horizon caption: ‘Palestinian refugee children undergo guerilla training. They are the “lion cubs” of Fatah, the Arab paramilitary force dedicated to the destruction of Israel.’

All these factors have combined to bring the Arabs nearer to political unity than they have been since the heyday of their empire. The dream of unity is vivid and inescapable: it enters every Arab declaration and is a sine qua non of political respectability…

Somehow, it never works. Arab co-operation, let alone unity, remains fitful and unreliable. The leaders of the Arab world seldom trust each other – and not surprisingly, for each country’s leadership shifts from figure to figure, ideology to ideology, incessantly down the years.

In ‘What is a Jew?’, David Daiches considers ‘the criterion of Jewishness’:

If the Jews are, as is sometimes maintained, a “socio-religious group,” then neither Freud nor Marx could be considered Jews – nor could Spinoza after his expulsion from the Jewish community. One cannot solve the problem by arguing that Jewish identity is cultural rather than biological: there is a far greater cultural difference between an American Jewish businessman living in Westchester County and a Yemenite Jew then between an American Jew and a non-Jewish American. There is today no cultural unity among the Jews of the world, or even among the Jews of America: The Lubavitcher Rebbe and (shall I say?) Leslie Fiedler have no common language. To be Jewish does not necessarily involve membership in a specific race, a specific religion, or a specific culture. Yet a Jew remains a Jew until generations of assimilation have removed the memory of his origins.

 

Horizon caption: ‘before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a youth in ritual shawl takes part in the ancient bar mitzvah ceremony initiating him into manhood. All that remains of the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans, the wall was taken by the Israeli army during the 1967 war with the Arabs: after 1900 years, it belongs to the Jews once again.’

He looks at the origins of current Jewish identity:

At the time of the rebellion against Rome, there were two main ideological groups in Judea, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The former were conservative and priestly, concerned with temple worship, and the latter were concerned with the interpretation of the Law and its application to daily life. The Sadducees mostly perished with the destruction of the Temple; in a way this was fortunate for Jewish survival, for it meant that the Pharisaic interpretation of Judaism, which was in any case the more popular, became dominant. More than a mere profession of faith or a pattern of ritual was needed to maintain the identity of the Jewish people. But the Pharisees made the Law adaptable to circumstances widely different from those that had prevailed in earlier periods of Jewish history. It was their insistence on knowledge of the Law and in interpreting it far beyond its literal meaning that enabled Judaism to survive as a way of life in all parts of the world. From now on the rabbi – the scholar and interpreter of the Law – and not the priest, determined the nature of Jewish religious life.

 

Horizon caption: ‘the frontispiece of a thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible is decorated with scenes from the Pentateuch, or first five books. In the center are the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning…”‘

Horizon, Spring 1968

Tags

1%er, Arnold J. Toynbee, Bobby Beausoleil, Botany, Botticelli, Botticelli’s Primavera, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Burning of the Vanities, Cecil Rhodes, Cromwell, Daisy Bates, Diamond Jubilee, Don Snyder, Edmund Stillman, Edward John Eyre, Florence, Francis of Assisi, Harley-Davidson, Hippies, J.H. Plumb, Jan Morris, John Stuart Mill, Lord Kitchener, Manson Family, Marshall McLuhan, Morant Bay rebellion, Queen Victoria, Ranters, Roman Empire, Rome, Roy McMullen, Savonarola, The Beatles, Uffizzi Gallery, Walter Pater

You can tell it’s 1968, as this issue has a special section on The Hippies. The cover features a close-up of Flora from Botticelli’s Primavera in the Uffizzi Gallery, Florence. Her resemblance to a hippie flower child is not coincidental:

Introducing the special section, the editors write:

The hippies’ credo, echoing Socrates, is ‘Do your thing’. Very well. HORIZON’s thing is the study of our own civilization in the long view of history.

Also in this issue:

In the ‘The Secular Heretics’, J.H. Plumb finds parallels between the hippies and the mediaeval ‘Brethren of the Free Spirit’, as well as the ‘Ranters’ of Cromwell’s England:

The hippies are secular heretics, for they reject the moral principles of society, claiming to return to a purer, less hypocritical morality. What this new secular heresy has in common with religious heresies of the past, to which it possesses so many resemblances, is that it has occurred in a very affluent society…Also, as now, it was a time of war and social dislocation…The philosophy of the marketplace had spread like bindweed over ancient morality and stifled it…Better get right out of it and dwell with the brethren, led by the inner light.
…Indeed some founders of religion seem uncomfortably close to the hippies. Beyond Saint Francis looms a larger, more formidable figure, who amid the vast riches and stupendous power of the Roman Empire had no use for it, not for riches, not for strife, not for hypocrisy; who preferred a prostitute to a prude.

But he didn’t think the hippies would effect revolutionary change because they possessed ‘attitudes but not an ideology’.

One side of the hippies is seen in this picture, illustrating ‘As It Was in Rome…’ by Arnold J. Toynbee, who shows how the early Christians were ‘Un-Roman! Un-American!’. The caption to this picture reads, ‘In a pile of junked cars two Californian hippies see a wasteful, materialist culture’ –

But here’s the other side, illustrating ‘A Reckoning to Come?’ by Edmund Stillman: ‘Resting on his Harley-Davidson, a member of an East Coast motorcycle club has a scowl on his face, a can of beer in his hand, and an Iron Cross over his heart.’ –

They could have added ‘A “1%er” patch on his vest’.

‘Modern life,’ Stillman concludes, ‘suffocates, but the hell of it may be that asphyxia is the price we pay for some modicum of order, some peace.’

And look who is pictured outside a house in San Francisco that is home to ‘a transient population of artists, musicians, and underground film makers’:

‘Bobby Beausoleil, leader of a rock group called The Magic[k] Powerhouse of Oz.’ It would be another year before people heard of the Manson Family.

Most of the pictures were taken by Don Snyder. ‘Because he is one of their own, he was able to win their confidence and to show them, in these remarkable photographs, as they look to themselves.’

Now for something completely different – James (now Jan) Morris writes about ‘The Imperialists’ in an extract from his 1968 book Pax Brittanica. He imagines himself at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and looks at the men (and one of the women – Daisy Bates) who built the Empire. They include Cecil Rhodes: ‘There was a shifty look to Rhodes, but it was shiftiness in the grand manner, as if he dealt in millions always – millions of pounds, millions of square miles, millions of people.’

Edward John Eyre is also seen in 1897 – the heroic explorer of Australia had by then become the Governor of Jamaica who put down the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion:

He became a figure of violent controversy at home. Ruskin, Tennyson and Carlyle were among his supporters; John Stuart Mill and T.H. Huxley were members of a committee that secured his prosecution for murder…The legal charges were dismissed but he was never offered another post…Through it all he had hardly bothered to defend himself – as though the sandy silence of the outback had muffled his soul.

And then there is Lord Kitchener, seen here with aides in Delhi in 1902:

Kitchener and all but one of his aides would be killed in World War I.

In ‘Anatomy of a Masterpiece’, Roy McMullen looks at Botticelli’s Primavera (Spring), with a ‘Gravure Portfolio’ giving close-ups of the work, including this one of flowers at the foot of Venus, titled ‘Botticelli: Amateur Botanist’:

Here’s the key:

If 1968 was the year of flower children, it was also the year of Red Guards. As Joseph Barry writes, in 15th century Florence they were led by Savonarola:

Dressed in white robes, carrying olive branches and little scarlet crosses, Savonarola’s sacred legion of child inquisitors roamed Renaissance Florence by the regiment policing the morality of its streets, penetrating its houses. They tore veils and jewellery from women, finery from men. They hounded gamblers, courtesans and blasphemers, and cropped the hair of youths. If a homeowner co-operated, they collected condemned “vanities” peacefully, pronouncing on his house a benediction especially composed by Savonarola. If he did not, they ransacked it for “lascivious” paintings, books, pieces of sculpture and “pagan” objects. These they threw into the street, mutilating them and piling them in baskets, carting them to the public square for the great bonfires that have come to be known as the famous Burning of the Vanities of 1497 and 1498 – the greatest catastrophe for Florentine art treasures until the flood that took place in 1966.

It is not confirmed if Botticelli threw his own nude drawings on the fire, but:

What we do know is that after he was converted by Savonarola, his canvases became far fewer, his Venus disappearing from them along with her spirit, his mood and style darkening with an acid sorrow that has intrigued critics since Walter Pater with the Botticelli Problem.

Did you think there was someone missing from this 1968 roundup? In ‘On Polyphony and a New Vocal Quartet’, ‘a certain musical ensemble, called The Beatles’ get a ‘critique of their musicianship’ by Frederic V. Grunfeld:

In years to come, when we look back on this epoch we now think of (tentatively) as the McLuhan era, we shall find that their four faces tower above the scene like Gutzon Borglum’s presidents carved from Mount Rushmore, and it shall hence henceforth be known to posterity as The Age of the Beatles.