Sumer and the Modern Paradigm

By Pedro Azara

 

Joan Miró used Son Boter, a 17th century mansion at Palma de Mallorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) as his studio for sculptures. On its walls were images of what most most scholars believed were ethnographic or traditional art. But in reality these were Sumerian masterpieces from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad . This discovery has led the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona to organise a large exhibition of the relationship between “Sumerian art” and modern art.

 

Entrance to the exhibition. All photo courtesy of Pedro Azara except where otherwise noted.

 

General view of the Ancient and Modern Sculpture room.

 

Modern artists discovered Sumerian art between the world wars, at a time when British and American archaeological missions were working in southern Iraq. But archaeologists like Leonard Woolley, head of the mission in Ur were less fascinated by their finds. They considered Mesopotamian art inferior to Egyptian and to Graeco-Roman art and thought Mesopotamian iconography was an expression of a violent culture. Sacrificed bodies found at the Royal Tombs of Ur were the proof that the Bible was right about the Mesopotamian barbarism.

 

Ur, The ‘Death Pit’

 

The archaeological discoveries, however, were published by popular magazines such as the Illustrated London News and newspapers, found a very favorable reception outside the archaeological world. Artists and collectors were influenced by modern and surrealistic writers like Michel Leiris and George Bataille, and Christian Zervos, publisher of Cahiers d´Art, who wrote illustrated articles of “Sumerian” culture. They considered it a new “primitivism” at the time when fascination for African art was vanishing.

Zervos asked the well-known Argentinian photographer, Horacio Coppola, then working in the photographic studio at the Bauhaus, to photograph Mesopotamian works of art and artifacts at the Louvre Museum and the British Museum for his journal. Coppola took black and white frontal and oblique pictures of different parts of sculptures, mostly heads, shown isolated against an abstract background. These magnificent black and white pictures – shown publicly for the first time at the Joan Miró Foundation – framed the way modern artists perceived and judged “Sumerian” art.

 

Enlargement of a photo of a Gudea head by Horacio Coppola, taken in the early 1930s, used as an introduction to the exhibition

 

Showcase with a statuette from Assur, III millennium BCE, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin

 

During the same years, instalments of L´Encyclopédie de l´Art, with short commentaries by the purist painter Amédée Ozenfant (who worked with the architect Le Corbusier) on Mesopotamian art and culture promoted black and white images that structured and conditioned the way “Sumerian” art would be perceived. These journals and magazines mediated between modern artists and ancient art. For instance, Giacometti, who drew a large number of Sumerian heads, did not work from life; his drawings of Gudea heads are of a plaster copy he bought at the Louvre museum. His other drawings of “Sumerian” heads are of photographs by Coppola.

 

Gudea Head (Louvre Museum) and Alberto Giacometti´s drawing of the plaster copy of the Gudea Head he owned  (Nature morte dans l´atelier, 1927, Graphische Sammlung ETH Zurich)

 

Even Miró, whose sculptures from the 1960´s were inspired by Mesopotamian art are based on photographs published in the Arts & Loisirs magazine. Miró loved Mesopotamian art and considered it not only the first but also the only true art, as he declared to the French writer Pierre Schneider during a visit to the Département des Antiquités Orientales at the Louvre Museum. Thus, knowledge of Mesopotamian art, and the way it was looked at, was not due to museum exhibitions, which were rare before World War II, but to illustrated publications on modern art. “Sumerian” art appeared as a new and different form of “primitive” art.

The exhibition Sumer and the Modern Paradigm would like the spectator to stand in the same position of surrealistic artists. What he or she should look at is not archaeological material but its interpretation by modern photographers, graphic designers and writers. For instance, a book on Neo-Assyrian reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with black and white pictures and a careful layout by the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, published during the Second World War, was an important contribution to the appreciation of these “barbaric” reliefs.

The exhibition combines graphic and written original documentation, modern works of arts by Miró, Moore, Hepworth, Giacometti, le Corbusier, Smith, de Kooning, Baumeister, and a few outstanding archaeological items from the Louvre, the British Museum and the Vorderasiatisches Museum. The exhibition visualizes networks of relations between ancient and modern works and documentation. We would like the spectator to look at works and their connections, not as isolated works of art. Written and graphic documentation, such as pictures by Coppola or texts by Bataille, are part of the archaeological material, part of its meaning.

 

Detail of Joan Miro´s Project for a Monument (1964, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona) in front of a still image of Samuel Beckett´s Film (1966)

 

Head of Henry Moore´s Girl (1931, Tate, London) with at the back a vintage print of Horacio Coppola´s photograph of a Sumerian female head from the time of Gudea (c. 1930)

 

Detail of Joan Miro´s Project for a Monument (1964) and a view of the exhibition room dedicated to Ancient and Modern Sculpture

 

Sumerian worshipper Kur-lil (British Museum, London) and Henry Moore, Seated Figure (1929, The Henry Moore Foundation)

 

Back of the Assur worshipper statue (Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin) in front of Willem de Kooning’s coloured drawing Woman (1952, Centre Pompidou, Paris)

 

Barbara Hepworth sculptures from the 1930s (Estate of Lord Zuckerman & The Pier Arts Centre Collection) in front of Kur-lil worshipper statue (British Museum, London)

 

The exhibition deals with what some modern surrealist artists have seen in early Mesopotamian material. What has attracted their attention? How they have communicate their interest? Some artists, like Moore, who wrote an early article on Mesopotamian sculpture, Hepworth, de Kooning, or Miró focused on the interpretation of “Sumerian” worshipper statues. For them, the gravity of the statues, the large eyes, the clasped hands, were formal solutions to express feelings of tranquillity and restrain.

Meanwhile, the French poet and artist Michaux was fascinated by cuneiform, which he considered primal writing, able to express directly, without any mediation nor distortion, the being of the called and described things. North American sculptor David Smith focused on cylinder seals, as a means to create compositions without any beginning nor end, endless compositions able to suggest the distorted or destroyed times of the war. During World War II the German painter Baumeister looked at the Epic of Gilgamesh and other recently translated “Sumerian” texts as way of looking for a refuge in the past when there was no future, trying to find an explanation for violence and destruction. The Epic, dealing with the human condition, was a way to accept the present.

 

First exhibition room dedicated to modern interpretations of Ancient Near Eastern myths. On the right, Le Corbusier drawings for the Mundaneum project (1927, Le Corbusier Foundation); at the back, Willi Baumeister paintings (c. 1940) dedicated to the Poem of Gilgamesh (Private Collection & Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart)

 

Henri Michaux Alphabet (1927, Private Collection); at the back the cylinder seals influence of Willi Baumeister and David Smith works (Private Collection and Kuntsmuseum, Stuutgart / David Smith Estate)

 

But this poem was not the first Ancient Eastern text known in the 20th century. The Old Testament, of course, includes myths and legends inspired by Mesopotamian texts. One of these, the Tower of Babel, was a mythical recreation of the ziggurat of Babylon. Architects like Le Corbusier and Loos used the ziggurat image for projects symbolising the mixture of languages. Loos created a hotel called Babylon, while Le Corbusier was inspired by the power of human knowledge to design the Mundaneum, a museum for all kind of arts and technics.

The exhibition is not the last word on Mesopotamian influences in modern art, but it tries to find an answer to the unexpected interest in artists, apparently so far away from near ancient motifs such as Miró or Le Corbusier. They did not copy Mesopotamian art; they looked at it (or at images of it) for clues to understand the complexity of the modern world.

 

Pedro Azara is an architect, curator, and professor of aesthetics at the ETSAB School of Architecture in Barcelona.