Yıldız, Part 1, Living With Art 1

HISTORY OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE I

(From Prehistory to the end of Gothic)

PART ONE

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Netice Yıldız

LIVING WITH ART

In this course, the evolution of Western Art and architecture through the centuries until the end
of the Gothic period will be discussed. In order to protect the historical inheritance, the artistic objects
and the historical architecture of our environment, we have to know at least a little about the history of
art and architecture. Today, so many successful statesmen, businessmen or scholars are also the
patrons of art. This has been the same throughout the centuries. The artists created so many artistic
objects for rich, noble men who were governors, merchants or clergies. But, it is a well-known fact,
that at the same time they were the protectors of the cultural heritage, which mostly inspired their
creations. As for the patrons, even today, so many rich people try to make collections of high artistic
values or commission some new works to the artists or architects. Also, it should be bear in mind that
a successful architect, interior architect or fashion designer is the one who has also a deep knowledge
about the universal cultural heritage.

First of all, we have to talk about art or this magic world. What is art? How or when was it created?
What is the place of art in our life? So many questions are asked about art and so many answers are
given to these questions. But, all of these define only some certain aspects of art.

We may talk about a 20th century modern artist to explain things about art. The world of Henri
Matisse is a world of colour and pattern and beautiful things. In fact this is a world of lovely women
and wonderful indoor spaces. In his work called "Pianist and Checker Players" (Fig.1) we can see his
world. Two boys have a game of checkers at a table draped in a printed cloth; they are the artist's sons.
A young woman plays at a piano that seems to float upward on a wall of vividly patterned wallpaper;
she is the artist's daughter. In the background are a sculpture and paintings displayed against the
furnishings of a French gentleman's home. Matisse chose to live with art, and he shows us his world
through his own artistic vision. His eye sought the beautiful, the colour against colour, the pattern and
the lushness of everyday life. He might pose a model in a coat of brilliant scarlet and following pink
trousers and call her odalisque, a harem woman.

Henri Matisse, Odalisque with red trousers

Henri Matisse, Piano Lesson, 1924.

Here, we may enter the world of Vincent van Gogh. Follow him as he takes up residence in the little
yellow house on a street corner in the southern French town of Arles: The artist was so eager to settle
in this house that he began sketching it immediately, as soon as the rental was assured. Then he began
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the sketches into any important painting, called Vincent's House at Arles (Fig.3). Later he made
another painting of his bedroom inside the house (Fig. 4). Van Gogh chose to live with art, and he
spent most of his adult life painting images of his life -his own likeness, his friends, the landscape he
inhabited, his house and his special chair. For Van Gogh, living and art were practically the same
thing. This is Van Gogh's world.

Relatively few of us will commit a lifetime to art, as Matisse and Van Gogh did, but that doesn't mean
we are not involved with art. Who lives with art? You do! Everybody does! It would be impossible
not to live with art, because art is inextricably connected to human existence. Art that is with us since
the earliest cave dwellers made their first steps towards civilisation, and will be with us as long as
civilised life continues on our planet.

You probably have more art in your life than you realise. If you live in a city or town, artists have
designed almost everything in your environment. The buildings in which you live and work, the
furniture inside those buildings, the clothes you wear -all were designed by artists in specialised fields.
Very likely the walls of your home are decorated with posters, prints, photographs, maybe original
paintings that you have hung to give personal meaning to your world. Perhaps your school or office
building has a large-scale sculpture out front, or a fabric hanging or mural inside.

Whether we know it or not, all of us make choices -every day, every minute- with respect to art. We
choose one product over another, one garment over another, one way to walk from place to place,
basing our decisions largely on the visual attractiveness of the preferred option. We choose to study
and enjoy particular works of art or to ignore them. We choose to plan encounters with art, as in
museums and galleries, or not to do so. Some people choose to devote their entire lives to the pursuit
or art, thereby acquiring the designation or 'artist'.

Collecting artistic objects and exhibiting them in big museums is an old tradition. This is more
common today and it is done in a rather organised way.

Whatever our involvement with art, we must remember that it is a choice. We can go through life like
sleepwalkers, ignoring or taking for granted the art around us. Or we can enrich our lives by
developing a more active appreciation of the art we live with. This course is about the appreciation of
art, which means a combination of understanding and enjoyment. It is possible to heighten our
appreciation of art, to learn to see, to take an active interest in the visual world. When we do so, we
are only following a basic aesthetic impulse -a need to respond to that which we find beautiful.

The Impulse for Art: Art is connected to human existence. Before going on it might be well to
explain this statement. Is it true? Do we really need art in the same way, that for instance, we need
language? In fact, why is there ‘art’? Are such things as paintings and sculptures necessary to human
life?

The history of civilisations suggests that we do need art, that it is basic to human expression. This
seems equally true for those who make art, those who buy or support it, and those who simply
admire it. To begin with the people, who make art, there are three areas we might consider to see how
the artistic impulse works. In none of them have the artists always been aware of making "art". They
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have simply done what seemed to them perfectly natural, and it remained for others, to declare that
their efforts constitute art. The three areas that we can see this characteristic are:

1- Prehistoric art
2- Children's art
3- Folk art.

These are also considered as the beginnings of art: The prehistoric art as the beginning of art in the
history of civilizations; children art as the beginning of art in the life of an individual human being and
the folk art as the art in the societies which remained at that primitive stage.

Prehistoric Art: The earliest people made art. We are not sure whether they called it art or not.
Archaeologists tell us that in the Ice Age about 35.000 years ago, Cro-Magnon peoples in Europe
"suddenly" began making objects that we would describe as art. They painted the walls of their caves,
carved figurines, decorated their tools and everyday implements with fine designs, and even made
musical instruments.
As primitive peoples advanced and learned to make more sophisticated objects for their daily use,
they nearly always decorated them with artwork. A pot will hold water or cook food over the fire just
as well if it is plain. Why do they decorate it? A plain garment will keep the wearer warm. Why do
they make it fancy? A shelter needs only to keep out the rain and wind. Why ornament it? The answer
to these questions may be that the life-and-death struggle for survival had eased off just enough to
allow time for artistic expression. We see that the Cro-Magnon humans suddenly developed a sense of
themselves as being human, of being unique in the order of universe different from animals or trees. A
work of art declares to the world. "I am here. I am unlike anyone else. I am special." It is true, this
theory supports the conclusion that there is an inborn human urge to create and enjoy art, to be
"special".

Childern's Art: Children come to art as readily as they do play. For them, painting and drawing are
play activities, not much different from building with blocks (a kind of architecture) or playing with
dolls (a kind of theatre). No one is likely to tell children their artistic efforts aren't good enough to
qualify as "real" art, so they can create happily. Given the opportunity and the right materials, they
will draw and paint and sculpt and build, and have a wonderful time doing it.

A group of seventy five children, ranged in age from five to fifteen, and most of them homeless, living
in the city shelters or welfare hotels were encouraged to paint the wall of a post office in the East
Harlem section of New York City. The painting called Dream Street created by these children were
reflecting their dreams. The painting included Mc. Donald's, skateboards, and free apartments some of
them were meant for children, no bedtime, everyone friendly and happy. The Harlem children cannot
create the world they dream in real life, but they readily embrace the impulse to create that world in
art.

Folk Art: Folk art is a term applied to works made by individuals with no academic training in art and
often with little or no formal education. This art is not handled mostly by art history books nor
occupying the main galleries of important museums.

Nevertheless, this art has a living current in itself. Some folk artists work within a long standing
tradition. Skills are handed down from parent to child over many generations.
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Like the art of children, it often reveals a quite direct expression. Most folk painters and sculptors
would become impatient if someone tried to tell them how art is "suppose" to look. They form images
of what they see, coloured by their feelings about what they see, and they are satisfied. They invent,
they play with forms, they delight in colours and shapes and they decorate.

Let us give example from our environment. The motifs woven on the Anatolian rugs or carpets have a
language of its own: The weaver usually knows about the meaning of each of the motif she is making.
If you ever happen to ask her, the answer is that she had learnt this from her mother.

So we return to our initial question: Is art necessarily connected to human existence? The group just
considered- prehistoric people, children and folk artists-suggest that it is, that art is a natural form
of expression.
But suppose one does not choose to make art. Many people don't, yet still can participate in the artistic
impulse. Everybody lives with art, artist and non-artist alike.

There are three different ways in which people can live with art by making it, by supporting it, and
by observing it.

After talking about these, we could also ask the question for each specific monument or art
object: “What is the purpose of the creation of this?” “Why was it made or what is the main
theme or subject?”
It is generally known that there are some certain themes (main subjects) of art or architectural
creations:

1. Magic and survival.

2. Religion;
3. Pride and politics.
4. Art as the mirror of everyday life.
5. Art and nature.
6. Imagination and fantasy.
7. Birth, marriage, and death.

The first theme “magic and survival” is the reason fro the creation of art objects in the earliest
times of the civilized human life. That is, the life of human beings who were able to walk erect
like us and use their hands for cutting, shaping objects that make their life easy as well as the
times after the invention of fire.

1. Magic and Survival:

A group of little statuettes of a fat woman, found almost in every large museum including the ones in
Turkey, is nearly every body's favourite way to begin studying art history. She is made of stone, was
formed about twenty three thousand years ago and have similarity almost with all country's work.
This type of statue is called Mother Goddess in Turkey while it is called Venus of Willendorf in
Austria. Modern scholars, possibly supposing that people many thousand years ago considered this
sort of a figure as a sexual idea applied (Fig.1) the title of Venus. It seems clear that the little Venus
was a fertility image, perhaps meant to be carried as a pendant, as an object of good luck charm.
Careful observation show that only the features associated with childbearing have been stressed- the
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belly, breast, and pubic area. Venus's face is observed, her arms, crossed above the breasts, are barely
defined, and her legs paper off to nothing. If we take this figure literally, she could not see or speak or
walk or carry. What she could do was bear and nurture children.

For our own day, it is difficult to guess the necessity of childbirth. But for those people living
thousands years ago, children were needed to help in the task of survival, and there may also have
been an instinct to continue life through future generations. On the other hand, however, the process
by which children are conceived and born was a mystery to these early people. The Ovum and sperm
were unknown. Bringing forth a child must have seemed very much like the magician's trick of
pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Obviously elements of magic became associated with childbirth. Many
scholars nowadays think that this kind of sculptures were for magical reasons and these figures
would result in a child (or children) being born.

Much primitive art seems to have been created for this purpose; to exert control over the forces of
nature. Not only sculptures but also some architectural monuments were also created with the
same idea. Stonehenge in England (Fig. 2) on a plain in the south of England stands the enormous
megaliths known as Stonehenge. It was built perhaps as early as 2000 BC. It consists of four
concentric rings of stones, the outermost ring being 100 feet in diameter. The basis of the structure is
post-and-lintel construction in which two upright posts are surmounted by a horizontal crosspiece, the
lintel. The size of the stones is enormous- almost 50 tons each. How did they cut and carry them to
this spot. Even more interesting is the problem of why Stonehenge was created. Astronomer Gerald S.
Hawkins that appears to have solved the riddle of Stonehenge advanced a theory. By feeding complex
measurements into a computer, Hawkins found that, at the moment of sunrise on the summer solstice
(usually June 21) the sun shines through a key opening directly to an altar at the centre. Similar
computations showed that the position of the stones was organised to predict the winter solstice, the
spring and autumnal equinoxes, and even eclipses of the sun and moon. In other words, Stonehenge
apparently functioned as a giant calendar, codifying the mysterious changes of seasons and stars. Is
Stonehenge a tool of magic, or the beginning of science, or a link between the two? Whichever the
case, whatever the case, it provided the means by which its makers could plan for survival.

Magic would be directly linked with the desire of survival of the tribe in the primitive cultures of the
past and present. The masks worn in Africa, in the Pacific islands, and among native peoples of the
Americans are usually ceremonial, magical, and related to such basic aspects of survival, as birth
healing, puberty, marriage, fertility, success in the hunt and death.

Art whose theme is magic and survival has at its purpose the establishment of some sense of control.

Now, at this point let us start to study history of art and architecture in the whole history of civilization.
After this subject, we will once more start asking ourselves the important question: “What is art?” “Who
creates art objects or architectural monuments” and “What is the purpose for their creation?” By
answering these questions, we will see the evolution of art and architecture in more civilized societies like
Egypt of Mesopotamian people.