The Scholarly Writings of Professor Williams

Wright Stuff

2009-01-11T03:06:00.001-05:00

Wright Stuff

A Brief Look at Themes in

Frank Lloyd Wright’s

Writings and Buildings

By Eric Williams

HUX 550: Key Individuals

Dr. Louise Ivers

September 24^th, 2002

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Writings and Buildings is an entertaining though somewhat daunting read. The text deals with Wright’s own musings as to his architectural roots and how his own unique vision of organic architecture came to be. Peppered liberally with drawings and pictures of his architectural plans and feats, the text offers a very straightforward look into the life and times of one of the most celebrated architects of any century. Throughout Writings and Buildings, Wright offers us a unique look into the various themes which dictated his life and his work.

To begin, Wright’s parents and especially his mother played a key role in the development of his particular architectural vision. His mother introduced him to the philosopher Froebel’s Kindergarten Method which stressed that children should not be allowed to draw from merely casual appearances of nature until they first mastered some of the basic geometric elements (Wright 19). These self-same geometric elements would teach young Wright the importance of the square, the circle, and the triangle. These shapes represented something deeper to Wright. The square was significant of integrity, the circle significant of infinity, and the triangle significant of inspiration (Ibid.). The introduction of toys of the same shape encouraged Wright to understand 3 dimensional composition while geometrically shaped paper could be folded and refolded to encourage and understanding of planar elements (Ivers 6).

This fascinating understanding of space within space was of paramount importance to young Wright. Arguably, through an understanding and a fascination with the blocks of building Wright was compelled to aspire to be an architect and execute, on a large scale, the very principle he learned from Froebel’s methods. He apprenticed under a number of different architects as a young man, including J. Lyman Silsbee, Louis Sullivan, and Henry Richardson. In every case, all of these employers and mentors of young Wright approached architecture in a somewhat non-traditional fashion. Silsbee didn’t cling to the Neo-Classical styles that were prevalent at the time and his works were very free and picturesque (Ivers 6). His designs frequently utilized irregular structures and he fostered within young Wright the freedom and desire to experiment with his own designs (Ibid.). Sullivan was even more influential in his rejection of classical Greek and Roman architecture all the while musing on the potential for skyscrapers (Ibid.). Perhaps even more important was Sullivan’s creation of rich surface textures which gave his creations the look of a living organism with the decoration attempting to mimic the motion of unfolding plants (Ibid.). Finally, Richardson’s works were free interpretations of Romanesque style with a flair for geometric design (Ibid.). This, too, was influential in shaping the mind and skills of Frank Lloyd Wright. But, the one thing they taught Wright more than anything else was a rejection of established forms and a desire to strive for the organic.

Writings and Buildings stresses over and over Wright’s passion for Organic Architecture and his disillusionment with the established norms. The theme of rebellion in the face of established trends weighs heavily throughout the book and Wright’s life. This was no more evident than in the disaster of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Here, in the cradle of Wright’s architectural vision, arose an opportunity for the world to see the progressive/rebellious designs of Wright’s mentors and others. Yet, in the face of their optimism, Classical architectural style still won the day (Wright 29). But it was not a total loss. Even though the budding organic style that Wright loved so much lost in the face of Classical tradition, Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building was the only picture building to win the coveted gold medal awarded by the highly distinguished Paris Beaux Arts (Wright 29). In the short term, a minor victory was won. But in Wright’s estimation, the loss was a crippling reversion – “a blight on progress” (Wright 29). It would push back the progress of modern architecture by 50 years.

The catastrophe of the World’s Fair would not dampen Wright’s saucy nature for very long. Eventually his architectural visions would take root and his rejection of established norms in favor of organic style would gain more support. Among his more radical ideas was the call for the abolition of symbolic forms in architecture. For Wright, symbolic forms were too literal – a tool used by literature that should not be used by architects. Wright states, “Let us abolish, in the art and craft of architecture, literature in any ‘symbolic’ form whatsoever. The sense of inner rhythm, deep planted in human sensibility, lives far above other considerations in Art” (Wright 75). This credo was significant to Wright in the execution of the Unity Temple, a temple like no other in its time. The Unity Temple introduced an H-Block patter that would become famous (Ivers 13). In this design, one ‘block’ was used for church service and worship while the other ‘block’ was used for Sunday School and administration needs (Ibid.). There was no steeple, no Gothic windows, and no cruciform floor design, the typical norm for churches for nearly 1000 years. Wright also introduced a skylight into the mix, adding a sense of openness to the Temple and offering more illumination and warmth. Furthermore, cheaper, but no less reliable materials like concrete were used to create a strong and fireproof building with an unorthodox, but equally effective flat roof (Wright 76).

His desire for innovative and progressive change can be seen in Japan with the creation of the Imperial Hotel. Again, Wright railed against the norm when mentions that foreign architects in Japan paid no heed to Japanese aesthetic tastes and customs. Wright wanted to design a hotel that would not insult the traditions of the Japanese in the ways other architects had (Wright 198). In doing this, he created an innovative new structure that was sympathetic to Japanese style but still benefited from the progress of modern industry. Foremost, he wished to make the building earthquake proof and desired to build the structure over a lake of mud (Wright 199-200). Wright thought that the mud foundation would offer buoyancy and stability to the structure, allowing it to ‘float’ much the same way a battleship floats on water (Wright 200). Further, he desired to make a great leap for the Japanese away from traditional wood and paper edifices to masonry constructs (Wright 199). The structure was erected in 60’ increments to make it light and flexible, and the cantilever design allowed for the building to balance rather than held in place (Wright 201). The flexible pipes and mixing of travertine oya to the cement walls created a sturdy edifice that would rattle but not break (in theory) in the face of an earthquake (Wright 202).

While the Unity Temple and the Imperial Hotel are admirable examples of Wright’s tendency to break from tradition, they do not illustrate his desire for organic architecture very well. Organic architecture was of itself a radical break from the norm. Wright rejected the architectural style of the Renaissance because he felt it was made beautiful for the purpose of being beautiful. Further, Wright hated decoration and rails against its use throughout Writings and Buildings. The Beaux Arts buildings were hand-me-downs of Renaissance architecture as they consciously sought to be beautiful (Wright 85). Organic architecture had its roots in folk buildings and in Pre-Columbian art. The architecture of the Mayans and Toltecs and Aztecs stirred the imagination of Wright as a boy, and he felt their works were constructed by earth-architects who planned the buildings and where it rests as one object (Wright 21). Architecture was beyond human need and truly monumental here, but nonetheless was an ever-present reminder of the strength of men’s will (Wright 22). Wright thought of this concept as key; that architecture should be married to its surroundings. He felt it was quite impossible to consider the building as one thing and the furnishings within it another thing and its setting and environment yet another (Wright 102). Organic architecture was designed to see all these elements as one working together as one (Ibid.). Wright saw this in folk dwellings, which he considered, as being of the soil of Nature. Folk dwellings are natural in color and are unburdened by heavy handed philosophy; these are dwelling not concerned with fine arts or fine living…these are structures that grew in actual proportion to actual needs and affixed environment to inhabitant (Wright 89). Folk dwellings are more valuable in their inherent beauty than those creations which purposely strove to be beautiful.

We can see the idea of organic architecture at work in the Wright’s own home of Taliesen. Wright felt that buildings should appear as though they were born as a flower is born on the roadside and that the natural order of the thing would create a finished grace and beauty inherently natural to the structure (Wright 86). This entered into Wright’s proclamation that his house, indeed no house, should be put ON any hill (Wright 175). Taliesen was to be OF the hill and given a natural appearance and grace that affix it as organic. The home is a marriage of wood and stone like the surrounding environment. The finished wood outside the home had a gray pallor like tree trunks and the roof tiles were left to weather to a silvery gray color not unlike the tree branches below it (Wright 177). There would be no gutters to impede the progress of icicles and the house sits very low, wide, and snug in an intensely human fashion (Wright 180).

In his designs for houses, Wright also pressed for more organic style while pressing for even more rejection of established norms. The basic house design used by Wright eliminated decades old components like attics and basements. He also proposed the use of flat or low steeped roofs and the inclusion of a single, functional fireplace (Wright 42). He also desired to bring the house down to human height, eliminating tall ceilings and vertically spontaneous rooms (Ibid.). Lowering the levels of ceilings and the like created a true human scale in architecture, a design which ushered in homes that were created to fit the needs of a human scaled figure (Wright 305). This also served to create a low slung home that was more natural to the ground and hence, more organic. This is part of Wright’s First Principle of Design where the building should have a kinship to the ground it is a part of (Wright 305). This is also related to the horizontal line of domesticity in where Wright contends that vertical inches added to a structure gains much more tremendous force in appearance than horizontal or planar inches (Wright 104). Horizontal, in Wright’s opinion, is the preferred idea and by scaling down structures to better serve human height, he helps to stimulate the horizontal axis of the structure.

Wright, understandably, imposes his own radical and rebellious nature to his students. He states that all architects should be radical by nature because it is not enough for them to pick up where others have left off in architecture (Ibid.). He and his contemporaries have proved traditions in architecture vulnerable. Further, modern architecture is no good as it is simply not in touch with nature and hence not organic. Wright also warns his young charges away from architectural schools as he feels they are full of critics who would not judge their experiments with kindness or good sense (Wright 240).

There is another theme that is evident throughout Writings and Buildings. Wright mentions the idea of open spaces in architecture on many occasions. Wright contends that there is indeed a 4^th dimension available to the architect. For an architect, the 3^rd dimension is never weight or thickness but always depth, and depth is an element of space. Thus, the 3^rd dimension is spatial depth that penetrates the inner depths of space. Walls can differentiate space but never obliterate it. If transparent screens or glass is used to allow the space from one “area” to mix with another “area” (as in space from outside the structure mingling through screen or glass with interior space), you create a 4^th dimension unique to architecture (Wright 313). Hence, a new sense of reality in building construction is born.

The idea of understanding and liberating interior space was a concept used by the Asians in their structure designs for generations. Wright, unfortunately, thought he had discovered this unique principle, but his eyes were open during his work on the Imperial Hotel (Wright 300). Yet, he knew something of this very principle long before he visited Asia.

What Wright was attempting to do through 4^th dimensional space was to “beat the box” By this, Wright meant defeat the age-old box-like style of architectural design that was so popular during his time. 19^th Century domestic architecture featured homes that were all built of the same mode and looked almost identical, and while the idea of radically changing the exterior has already been addressed, what Wright also thought needed changing was the interior. Living in a home of this style, Wright muses, is like living in a prison cell with all the rooms blocked/boxed off (Wright 43). Wright hated the vertical, box-structure and he began to make a concerted effort to beat the box in 1904 with the construction of the Larkin Building. Here he made the staircases freestanding and liberated from the box form (Wright 284). But it was the Unity Temple where Wright finally broke through. Unity Temple is where walls seem to disappear and enclosure ceases to be – where interior space opens to the outside and free related features replace the enclosing walls (Wright 284). A semblance of visual and spatial freedom is created and the enclosure of the box is no more. This idea of opening interior space can be found d in both Wright’s theories on theatre design and the execution of the Johnson Wax Laboratory.

The theory of the theatre called for a stage in the round with no screening walls on a revolving platform. The stage could revolve and a whole new sense of deep space could be created by not having a dividing screen. Further, the theatre could have flair for the organic by allowing staging to be like sculpture than like painting (Wright 290). With Johnson Laboratory, Wright offered no sense of enclosure and the supporting columns would stand up and be made part of the ceiling – hence continuity (Wright 286). There was a heavy use of clear light and space to help open up the lab floors and the departments would be segregated vertically via location rather than interior walls (Wright 291). Further, double panes of glass provide a window to the outside and allow for much needed sunlight to filter in to the structure (Wright 291).

Wright speaks also about modern materials and their place in architecture. Materials such as sheet-metal glass await a creative interpretation in Wright’s opinion (Wright 28). These same materials would become a viable part of the democratic world we live in and furthermore were a new potential needed in the culture of modern life (Wright 28). Insofar that Wright rejects traditional forms and means, he must accept new forms and means made available by technology. Despite the limitations of an artificial society, a new beauty could be created through modern materials and Wright believes that American architecture and its innovations could save the world from mediocrity and banality (Wright 28). These new materials, to the architect, are like a new palette of colors to the artist and the standard use of these new elements is merely a means to an end. New materials should only be used so long as it is desirable to the architect and so long as it remains the servant to new forms – never the master of the process that yields the form (Wright 229). That is the will of the Machine and the last major theme addressed by Wright.

The Machine endangers human life in the eyes of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Machine that was uncontrolled lived off the misery of and the abuse of humanity. Wright warns against becoming a slave the machine, letting the Machine rule Man’s fate. Wright contends that the nature of the Machine is to use power tools to create banality and to infect man’s spirit (Wright 26). Men were becoming no different than the assembly lines they worked on and this slavery to the Machine in the modern age was more deadly than slavery prior (Wright 27). The Machine should be used as a tool only for otherwise it will deny one’s humanity by “abetting the impotence of artists and architects already blind to fresh opportunity” (Wright 35). One need look no further than big cities like New York to see what, in Wright’s opinion, slavery to the Machine would produce. Cities are built by common greed and they grind people against one another, wearing them down in the name of profit (Wright 255). Cities are prisons of glass that forces anxiety on modern life and serve to defeat all the aspirations of the human heart by dehumanizing and demoralizing humanity (Wright 258-260).

In all, Wright speaks volumes to the initiate and the master of architectural study in Writings and Buildings. He offers us a unique look into the themes that dominated his life and craft decades. The book is no easy read and the language is at times obtuse and archaic, but the diction he uses speaks directly to the reader’s sense of understanding who he is. Obtuse and archaic he may be, but his radical and rebellious nature that manifests throughout the course of the text would likely have it no other way. Indeed, much can be learned from Writings and Buildings, not least of which is the tone of Wright himself. You can feel his anger at times in the face of mediocrity and you can sense his excitement when he speaks of he designed Fallingwater or Taliesen. Wright illustrates his points succinctly and one can easily pick up on the themes of space, slavery to the Machine, organic architecture, and rebellion contained within.

Works Cited

Ivers, Dr. Louise. Humanities 550. “Key Individuals, Art: Frank Lloyd Wright”. Course Guide.

California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1997.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. Writings and Buildings. Selections by Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn.

Meridian Books: New American Library, New York, 1960.

HUX 570: Shock of the View Part Two

2007-11-11T22:16:00.000-05:00

Shock of the View

Part II

Dadaism * Surrealism * Pop Art

Eric Williams

The 20^th Century has been a turbulent time for art and artists. Struggling to keep up with an ever-expanding society, artists have been hard pressed to create any movement that seems to carry longevity to them. Gone are the days in which art movements such as the Renaissance or the Baroque last for decades upon decades. With the dawning of the 20^th Century, modernism as artistic formula hit its stride, encompassing numerous minor artistic genres that only last for a few years. As the face of modern society has changed due to advances in technology, theory, and societal conflicts, so too does the art of the modern age undergo massive transformations, embodying the artist’s awareness of these self-same advances. Three of the more prolific movements of the 20^th Century have been Dadaism, Surrealism, and Pop Art. All three are movements based heavily on artistic responses to war, technology, and popular theory of the time. By examining the society by which these art movements were born, one can better understand what Dada, Surrealism, and Pop Art truly is. Furthermore, by introducing an example of each artistic style, a point of comparison will be created allowing one to better understand the physical, compositional, and theoretical differences between each movement.

The early portion of the 20^th Century was rife with political and social upheaval. Staring down the barrel of the first true World War, artists began to see that “the machine, which had been a source of optimism and euphoria, could no longer be considered a positive instrument, not even a neutral tool, but rather an agent for undeniable devastation” (Larinde 10). While these nations prepared for war, a handful of self-imposed exiles fled their nations in the face of heated nationalistic pride. Taking refuge in neutral Switzerland, these artists congregated in Zurich where, in 1916, Hugo Ball would open a small cabaret -- the Café Voltaire (Hamilton 251). Here the world’s artists would remind the world that there were still independent men “beyond war and nationalism, who live for their ideals” (Ibid.). A charismatic voice for these artists named Tristan Tzara came to the forefront and made scathing attacks on contemporary culture. At different times, both Ball and Tzara would dress up in bizarre costumes and howl bizarre chants or jumbled words over the blasts of music (Hamilton 252). With time, the meetings at the cabaret became commonplace and a name was generated to give a name to the artistic style of these exiles, hence Dada was both coined and born.

Where the term ‘Dada’ originated is not clearly known. The popular rumor us that these artists simply opened a dictionary and the first word at the top of the page would be their artistic term (Hobbs 440). Dada is also the French term for “hobby-horse” (Sporre 445). Regardless of its origin, the term is quite apt for the type of art it describes.

Dada is first and foremost an art form that seeks to reform the suffering and destruction of war through protest (Tansey 974). Dadaists sought to turn the art world upside down by creating artistic renderings and staging exhibitions that were designed to shock and outrage the viewer by their “lack of artistic convention” (Ibid.). In Zurich and eventually Paris, Dada was chiefly the art of the dissatisfied artists who wanted to “hurl gobs of spit in the faces of the bourgeoisie” (Matthews 533). They accomplished this by holding exhibitions in public lavatories, planning meetings to held in cemeteries, and holding lectures in noisy meeting halls that the artists themselves purposely disrupted. The message that these artists and their inane behavior was suggesting was that World War One had made all traditional values meaningless. No longer are artists able to hold onto ageless legacies and traditions put forth by the humanist artists of a bygone age; indeed Dada embraced anti-art as the only ethical position possible in the modern age (Matthews 533). No artist of the past or present was spared the scathing wrath of the Dadaists. They attacked the culture of their era on all fronts. “The founders (of Dada) were laughing at the pompousness of traditional artists and at the society that supported them” (Russell 385).

It wasn’t until the 1920’s that Dada would become fully developed in their new arena: post war Germany (Hughes 63). After the Armistice of 1918, the social and political tensions in Europe eased. This was also true in Zurich, whose citizens had far less tolerance of the antics of the Dadaists. However, Dada would find new life in Germany, among the political artists living there that were sympathetic to the causes of the radical Left (Hamilton 252). The art form would lose much of its childishness in lieu of a much more overtly political form. The war and the anti-logical feel of the world the Berlin Dadaists saw in a ravaged Berlin at the time was transfigured into their art. The imagery of the Berlin Dadaist was rippled with cynicism and nihilism typically created in the form of a montage or collage of clipped images. However, even this renewal in Dada by the Germans was short lived. After eventually crossing the Atlantic into New York, the Dadaist movement would fade by 1922.

There is no definitive style to Dadaist art. More than anything, the Dadaists shared an attitude towards the world at large that was emoted in their imagery and their behavior. Dada is the prevailing atmosphere of “meaningless malevolence” coupled with its disregard for the ordinary canons of artistic design (Hamilton 253). These artists did not wish to be understood and many felt they were living in an incomprehensible world – one that was inevitably bound for its own destruction (Russell 385). The early style of the Zurich Dadaists seemed completely experimental with chance being a major factor in its execution (Sporre 446). As Dadaists saw their craft as being the embodiment of anti-art, their compositions may seem repulsive and designed out of irrationality, malevolence, and harsh use of mechanical effects (Sporre 446). Further, by trying to craft the physical manifestation of anti-art, painters fled from the more typical representations of reality (Russell 387). Dadaists used non-traditional techniques like making rubbings of wood textures or the playful use of commonplace objects in their compositions that had never before been used in high art (Tansey 974). By utilizing a “variety of improvisational methods designed to disrupt reason and engage the full resources of intuition in the making if art”, Dadaists attempted to jolt the bourgeois art audience from their complacent behavior (Ibid.). Thus, Dadaist art was intentionally ephemeral, reinforcing a tendency to the whimsical, the spontaneous, and the intuitive with a dash of the sardonic, humorous, fantastic, and absurd.

By being the artistic voice of anti-art, the Dadaists liberated themselves from age-old conventions and a whole new world of artistic possibilities opened up. The Zurich Dadaists saw art as a practical means of “self-revelation and catharsis”, and that the images they produced that rose out of the conscious or subconscious mind had a truth of their own (Tansey 974). These truths were independent of the world of conventional vision. For them, art emerged to play an important new role in the expression of the different contexts they were now formed, and the free imagination of the artist could draw on materials deep in the human consciousness (Tansey 974). By this, the Dadaists endorsed the psychoanalytical views of Jung and Freud creating a new expression of a reality that were no less real because they were psychic (Tansey 974). Thus, Dadaists reveled in their outlandish pranks and jests, which they described themselves as being “cerebral revolver shots” (Tansey 977).

The Berlin Dadaists, more serious by comparison than their Zurich counterparts were no less eclectic. Two major elements had helped to form Dada style: blind chance and Automatism. The operations of ‘chance’ were a crucial part of improvisational art to the Dadaists (Tansey 977). The Dadaist filmmaker Hans Richter states:

Possessed, as we were, of the ability to entrust ourselves to ‘chance,’ to our conscious as well as our unconscious minds, we became a sort of public secret society. . . . We laughed at everything. . . . But laughter was only the expression of our new discoveries, not their essence and not their purpose. (We used) chance to restore to the work of art its primeval magic power and to find a way back to the immediacy it had lost through contact with … classicism. (qtd in Tansey 977-978)

Chance played a big role in the creation of the collages and photomontages of the Berlin Dadaists. These artists took to pasting images and words from postcards and catalogs and books together to create an image. These montages owe a debt to chance for two reasons. One because they were created almost entirely out of “found” materials (therefore chance plays a role in what was found and how it could be correlated), and in the practice of some Berlin Dadaists of merely gluing the various images or words onto a canvas based upon where they fell (Tansey 978). Further, the Dadaists were innovative in their use of photographs. Raoul Hausmann states that Dadaists “were the first to use photography to create, from often totally disparate spatial and material elements, a new unity in which was revealed a visually and conceptually new image of the chaos of an age of war and revolution” (qtd in Tansey 978).

Automatism in Dada art is the process of yielding yourself to an instinctive action of painting or drawing or sketching (Tansey 978). Automatism hinges on establishing a set of conditions ahead of time, such as the size of the paper and medium, within which an Automatist work would be executed. Dadaists such as Jean Arp specialized in Automatic drawings. By working within Automatism, the artist seeks to deny the operation of reason, which is seen as a learned or conditioned response (Tansey 977). Thus, Automatism must rely more on understanding the unconscious and trusting in what you feel rather than what you have been taught.

While Dada was a movement based on nihilism and buffoonery, it has left a legacy to the later generations of artists. Automatic Drawing, the act of spontaneous doodling, would anticipate the American abstract art styles of the 1940’s (Hobbs 440). Their nonsensical performances would be revived in the guise of Performance Art in the 1960’s and 1970’s (Ibid.). Their reckless graphics foreshadow in many ways modern advertising design and would be responsible for making the ironic, the absurd, and the manifestation of the unconscious meaningful in later art genres (Ibid.). But above all, Dada gave rise to a reassessment of aesthetic values which continues to this day.

One of the most prolific Dadaists was Marcel Duchamp. Born in 1887, Duchamp was a French painter and a major proponent of Dada. In 1914, Duchamp “bought and inscribed on a bottle rack, thereby producing his first ready-made, a new art form based on the principle that art does not depend on established rules or on craftsmanship” (“Mona Lisa” part 2). This radical idea precedes the Dadaist movement by 2 years. This one act helped to portray Duchamp as a rejecter, and the young, post-war protesters saw Duchamp as an almost mythical figure. Rejecting the norm was of paramount importance to the young Dadaist movement and Duchamp personified this (Cabanne 154). No one was more iconoclastic than Duchamp in the heyday of Dada (Ibid.). His form of anti-art, already established in his ready-mades, is seen perhaps no better than in his work L.H.O.O.Q.

This work, also commonly called “Mona Lisa with a Moustache”, was created in 1919. The work is quite simple. Duchamp bought a post card with the image of the Mona Lisa on its cover. Duchamp, with pencil in hand, scribbled a moustache and goatee on the image, creating another ready-made. The postcard, measuring 7 and ¾ inches by 4 and ¾ inches, was embossed with the letters L H O O Q along the bottom base of the postcard. While appearing to be quite simple, the undertones of this little work are quite serious. The image faithfully captures Leonardo’s masterpiece in all its grainy, faded glory. The Mona Lisa sits, hands crossed before her. She is dressed in a dark blue robe, the folds of the drapery evident in contrasting grades of light and shade. The face is pristine with the slightly curled smile that makes the Mona Lisa such a famed portrait painting. The background is a collection of grays and blues, creating a landscape of rocky outcroppings and twisting rivers that flank the Mona Lisa on either side. Her figure, triangular in its shape, dominates the foreground of the image, the soft illumination of her face is ringed by cascades of falling hair that escape the confines of her robe and hood. The three dimensional composition of the work reflects the touch of an artist of Leonardo’s caliber. Duchamp’s scribbled moustache, thin with the edges sweeping upwards, is easily seen. It’s dark, pencilled coloration contrasts sharply with the much lighter color of the Mona Lisa’s face. Further, the goatee lightly pencilled and sweeping together in a dark point erupting from the apex of the chin stands sharply against the light coloration of the face. The changes that Duchamp has made to Leonardo’s composition are merely cosmetic and are easily remedied if desired. But, the work itself, regardless of its simplicity, stands as important for another reason.

The Dada movement was one that crowed about anti-art. That same design to reject art also led to a rejection of artists of any artistic genre or age. Thus, what might be construed as a simple prank by Duchamp, in actuality has a much deeper meaning. In the years leading up to the Dadaist revolution, artists had almost universally revered the works of the great masters, especially those of the Renaissance. They were seen as untouchable by society; men and women whose works were so invaluable that no fault could be found and no criticism tolerated. The great artist, long dead, was seen as a divine creator (Hughes 66). As Hughes states, Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q is a “gesture by now synonymous with impish cultural irreverence” (Ibid.). For artists who had no problem poking fun or lambasting artists of any age, Duchamp’s ready-made satirized the “sacro-sanctity of this renaissance icon” (Larinde 12). This is even further driven by the peculiar title of the work. “ The coarse title – LHOOQ pronounced letter by letter in French mean: ‘She’s got a hot ass’ – combines with the schoolboy graffito of the moustache and goatee” (Hughes 66). Duchamp’s use of an image that had been reproduced so often that it had become trite, helped to knock down the seemingly inaccessible reputation of Leonardo. By mocking one of the most famous paintings in history, Duchamp created an image that is rather typical of Dadaism, “a rebellion against traditional… habits and values” (“Mona Lisa” part 1). While the basic premise might have been quite simple, Robert Hughes looks deeper at this work, assigning a psychology to it. Hughes believes that by giving “male attributes to the most famous and highly fetishized female portrait ever painted is also a subtler joke on Leonardo’s own homosexuality (then a forbidden subject) and on Duchamp’s own interest in the confusion of sexual roles” (Hughes 66). Whatever the case may be, Duchamp’s mock up of the Mona Lisa definitely stands as a Dadaist piece, both rejecting the classical masters and utilizing a semblance of chance and automatism in the creation of this piece (the chance of simply buying this post card and the automatic, spontaneous doodling that created the facial hair).

In the wake of the decline of Dadaism, a new artistic movement, Surrealism, began to flourish. Surrealism, however, grew in many aspects from what the Dadaists had created. The Dada poet Andre’ Breton was heavily involved in the manifestoes and direction of the Dada movement. His views on the direction that Dada was going and the direction he felt it should be going in were at odds with some of the more “traditional” Dadaists (if there even could be said to be such individuals). This was no more evident than in his very public differences with Tristan Tzara. Breton called for a world congress of Dadas to decide the direction that the modern artistic movement should take (Hamilton 261). Tzara vehemently opposed this idea, believing that Breton’s ideas were totally alien to the spirit of Dada (Ibid.).

Breton had not served during World War I. He worked in a hospital caring for shellshock victims (Hughes 212). Here, Breton helped patients to analyze their dreams, an experience that Breton himself said “constituted…almost all the groundwork for Surrealism…interpreted, yes, always, but above all liberation from constraints – logic, morality, and the rest – with the aim of recovering their original powers of spirit” (qtd in Hughes 212). Breton began then to try and give these dream interpretations form in literature, as in poetry or fiction. In fact, Surrealism as a movement originated as a literary movement in 1924 (Hobbs 441).

Rejecting Tzara and the more conservative Dadaists, Breton “soon assembled a circle of friends, some touched by Dada, but all sharing certain common preoccupations: mainly, a belief in the supremacy of poetry and a loathing of the parental generation whose values had led to the insensate slaughters of the war” (Hughes 213). Together with fellow poet Soupalt, Breton began to explore the dimensions of the inner psyche through “automatic writings” (Hamilton 261). Their writing was produced by what Breton called “the real process of thought”, and was heavily laced with metaphor used to create striking visual imagery in the poems (Ibid.). This use of “psychic” writing served to give some physical manifestation of the unconscious mind. In the poetics of these men, Surrealism was born. By utilizing the rich collection of metaphor and imagery, the poets sought to provide some foundation for the inception of a new type of reality, a sur-reality (Hughes 213). And, this Surreal reality would quickly find artistic voices to give a visual conception to the fantastical imagery of Breton’s poems.

Born out of the desire to capture dream imagery and the shadowy spectres of the unconscious mind, Surrealism is an art form that sought to give form to the formless. Primarily a pictorial art, Surrealism was heavily based on the Freudian idea that the mind contains fathomless, hidden depths (Matthews 533). In essence, one could say that Surrealist art wanted to create images of reality that would include truths hidden in the inner mind. In doing so, Surrealism would grow to capture hallucinations, fantasies, and dream imagery that would create a visual sensation far more startling than Dada. By this very definition, the natural enemies of Surrealism would be logic and reason. The purpose of Surrealism was to “merge dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality” (Hobbs 441). The heart of Surrealism, then, was the Unconscious, and it was to be given the highest priority whether one was absent-mindedly doodling, dreaming, or daydreaming (Hobbs 441). Thus, like Dada, spontaneous writing in the form of doodles and sketches were perfectly acceptable vehicles for the Surreal. In this way, Surrealist painters would “strip away the facades that often conceal…unconscious desires”, serving to create an art form that paid homage to the unexpected, the shocking, and the contrary (Russell 388).

The first artist to adhere to the Surreal was Giorgio de Chirico. De Chirico was the founder of and principal master of the Metaphysical School of painting that traces its roots back to 1917 (Hamilton 261). The works of de Chirico would attempt to shatter the conventional visual logic of painting with results even more expressively disturbing than the Cubists (Ibid.). His artistic style was very innovative and his works were quite popular, often being reproduced in periodicals almost as soon as they were completed (Tansey 974). An influence among both the late Dadaists and early Surrealists, de Chirico’s works were designed to treat everyday objects as dreamlike objects. His proto-Surrealist works made de Chirico a nice bundle of cash and had made him a well-known voice among the progressive art community until he strangely abandoned Surrealism in 1924 in favor of neo-Classicism (Hamilton 262). Max Ernst who would add his own innovative twist to Surrealist style would quickly fill the void De Chirico would leave: decalomania.

Decalomania was Max Ernst’s technique of compressing paint to the canvas while the paint was still wet (Hamilton 264). The images created in the way were mysterious created by the forms the paint had molded itself into. In this fashion, a whole new range of potential images was created. While perhaps a stretch in consideration to the Surrealist ideal that their art was a manifestation of the Unconscious, decalomania was nevertheless accepted. Surrealism still had some of the old ground rules of the Dadaists, especially the allowance for chance and spontaneity in its art. Breton writes that “the marvelous is beautiful, anything that is marvelous is beautiful; indeed nothing but the marvelous is beautiful” (qtd in Hamilton 276). Granted, this equation is far too simple, not taking into account the technical execution of the work, the purpose of the artist, or an allowance of any sort of critical evaluation. Yet, the equation does serve to indicate that Surrealism can be applied to any objects, no matter how unpleasant or disturbing, that still evokes a semblance of the sensation of psychic reality (Ibid.).

The style of Surrealist painting falls into two categories. The first is Realistic, sometimes called Veristic; the other is Abstract (Hobbs 442). Realistic Surrealism, according to Hobbs, is quite traditional. Realistic Surrealism indulges all the devices of “optical realism”: shading, perspective, and shadows (Ibid.). True to Surrealist ideology, it seeks to illustrate dreams through subject matter that is quite original (Ibid.). And, like dreams, Realistic Surrealism creates images that range from mildly puzzling to the exceedingly bizarre. “A dream was supposedly capable of transference directly to from the unconscious mind to the canvas without control or conscious interruption by the artist” (Sporre 448). Thus, these works reflected the dream-like condition, and the strange gathering of seemingly unassociated objects together was to reflect how dreams do that very thing. There was no explanation for the juxtaposition of strange objects, and there was no need for one (Sporre 448). Surrealism in this manner represented a world that cannot be controlled, and stands to show just how entrancing the irrational can be (Sporre 448). Abstract Surrealism took on two primary methods. The first was heavily reliant on “automatism”. Automatic methods like doodling or capitalizing on accidental effects allowed the unconscious to dominate in the creation of the work (Hobbs 443). Use of these sometimes planned accidents and automatism allowed the Surrealist to project the Dream Concept (Tansey 982). The other method of Abstract Surrealism belonged to artists who used for more conventional methods, perhaps uncomfortable with automatism (Hobbs 443). Regardless, both factions of Abstract Surrealists still managed to imply that the unconscious was dominant and that their art was to the end result of automatic thought processes and free associations (Ibid.).

In many ways, Surrealism, like Dada, was a lifestyle or an attitude than a definitive style. Their subject matter was at times dark and controversial. The titles for their pieces were equally bizarre. Typically ambiguous, Surrealistic art titles were purposefully designed to create an uneasy relationship with what the viewer of the art object actually sees (Tansey 983). Using titles that were rife with contradiction between image and word delivered a “blow to the mind” of the viewer – knocking them off balance as to what their rational minds expect to see, and the images placed before them (Ibid.). Much of the impact of Surrealist work begins with the title and the realization of being hit with a seemingly cerebral bullet, one that immediately puts at odds an awareness of the incongruous and the absurd in what is pictured (Ibid.). This may be no more evident in “The Rape” by Rene Magritte.

Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was a Belgian painter who created very provocative and sometimes shocking Surrealistic paintings. By 1927, Magritte had already begun to paint as a Surrealist. “A meticulous and skillful technician, he is noted for works that contain an extraordinary juxtaposition of ordinary objects or an unusual context that gives new meaning to familiar things. This juxtaposition is frequently termed magic realism, of which Magritte was the prime exponent” (“The Rape” part 2). Compared to many other painters in the Surrealist school, Magritte was tame by comparison in his personal life. “Yet this stolid enchanter possessed one of the most remarkable imaginations of the twentieth century” (Hughes 243).

Traditionally, painting had has its share of mythmakers and storytellers. Magritte’s work stands slightly askew, as his painting seemed secondary to the story being told (Hughes 248). His work, however, did not consist of “ slices of life or historical scenes. They were snapshots of the impossible, rendered in the dullest and most literal way: vignettes of language and reality locked in mutual cancellation” (Ibid.). Things hidden and things obscure seemed to be what fascinated Magritte.

The Rape, also called Le Viol, was executed in 1934 with oils on canvas. It measures 28 and ¾ inches by 21 and ¼ inches. The painting is one that reveals what at first looks to be a face flanked with a full head of brown, feathered-back hair with red highlights. The hair is not particularly long, but is thick and wavy, sweeping away from the plane of the face. The head itself rests upon an unusually long neck, which disappears at the base of the canvas to the joint of the right shoulder. The face of the figure, however, is not what we expect. The eyes have been replaced by small, but prominent female breasts. The nose has become the navel and the mouth has been replaced by a triangular patch of pubic hair, roughly the same shade and coloration as the hair upon the head. The crown of the triangle points down towards the chin. Quite obviously a human female torso, the face of Magritte’s work now takes on a whole new meaning, especially in light of the title.

Further aberrations abound. There are no eyebrows and no ridge where a nose would be placed. Instead, we have a very smooth torso complete with a line that would indicate the joining of the muscles of the abdomen running from between the eye/breasts to the nose/navel. The face/torso is pale with realistic shadows that play across the left side of the head and a curving shadows that runs down the neck, just to the left of center, meeting at the thorax. The face and neck dominate the painting, consuming almost the entirety of the image save for a space several inches in length where the top of the head ends and the peak of the canvas begins. The background is a simple gradation of deep blues at the top of the canvas, to bands of lighter blues to greens to nearly white where the sky meets the horizon of the land. The land, if it can be called thus, is a long, flat expanse of neutral grays where it meets the sky, to nearly black where it meets the base of the canvas. There is no sun, stars, moon, foliage, or animals in the image. Magritte’s work is designed to lock our attention on the “face” and nothing else.

Why did Magritte choose to create this? Magritte had “an obsession with the covered faces which. . . haunt(ed) him” says Naomi Elias. “In such hidden images Magritte was able to hide emotions, identity, conversations and thoughts of the subjects he painted” (Elias). The Rape was produced several times by Magritte in several versions and mediums between the years 1934 and 1948 (“The Rape” part 1). The image was so scandalous when it was first released that it was displayed at an exhibition “in a private room and shown only to initiates” (The Rape” part 1). The subject matter, while extremely controversial even today, was not altogether taboo to the Surrealist painter. Sex was “one of the great Surrealistic themes; but Surrealism was only interested in one kind of sexual freedom, the man’s, and a heterosexual man’s at that” (Hughes 249). This seems to be reinforced by the love Surrealist artisans seemed to hold for the works of the Marquis de Sade. Sade was a “blasphemer, an atheist, a traitor to his class, the aristocracy – no wonder Sade had such an appeal to the Surrealists, who were also atheists, blasphemers, and traitors to their class, the bourgeoisie” (Hughes 249).

Magritte’s painting of The Rape may be one of the best examples of the Surrealist celebration of heterosexuality. As Hughes states, The Rape is a

…magnificent protest against fixation and fetishization, where the woman’s face turns with frightful clarity into the ‘genital face’ whose blind, mute, and pathetic sexuality has a truly Sadeian character. In general, the image of woman in Surrealist art had no real face: she was always on a pedestal or in chains. Her preferred form was mannequin, itself…a somewhat compromised object… (Hughes 249-250)

Magritte creates a dream-image of what, perhaps, woman might be perceived as or amount to in the Surrealist world – objectified and left without voice, identity, or pity. Elizabeth Wright contends that Magritte's imagery in The Rape is a “metaphor…signifying desire and an invasion of the other’s desire: The Rape” (qtd in he Rape” part 1). One could contend that the image is one by which a Surrealist man may see a woman: nothing more than genitalia. But, by the very title, could Magritte be sympathizing with the plight of women and rejecting the Surrealist manifesto in regards to women? The possibility is there. Magritte, in a letter, addressed the meaning of perhaps this very work:

Questions such as “What does this picture mean, what does it represent?” are possible only if one is incapable of seeing a picture in all its truth, only if one automatically understands that a very precise image does not show precisely what it is. It’s like believing that the implied meaning is worth more than the overt meaning. There is no implied meaning in my paintings, despite the confusion that attributes symbolic meaning to my paintings. (qtd. in “The Rape” part 2)

The overly sexualized nature of this piece, and many Surrealist painting by and large, may be the leading difference between this art style and Dada. Considering that Surrealism grew out of many Dadaist styles and forms, it is no wonder that there are more similarities than perhaps obvious differences. Essentially, if Dada is the art of the rebel who is sick of the state of the world, then the Surrealist is the artists who seeks to bring to light the sickness in their own inner selves. Duchamp claimed that anything could be art, hence his ready made Mona Lisa. Further, by the simple addition of a scribbled moustache and beard, Duchamp’s piece readily embodies the Dadaist spirit. Magritte’s image, darker and yet more glaring, reflects wonderfully the legacy of the Dada’s, that anything could be art, while adhering to Surrealist take on women and the desire to create images of the bizarre that erupt from someplace deep within the psyche of the artists. But Surrealism is not the last art style to liberally borrow from the Dada’s. Pop Art owes a great deal to the trail blazed by the Dadaists too.

After World War II, a vast increase in the production and availability of consumer goods inundated the United States. Commercial arts helped to advertise and sell these items to a vast array of consumers through billboards, magazines, and newspapers. Artists of this age felt compelled to parody this increase in consumerism and the means by which products were advertised. Pop Art as a movement can trace its roots back to 1956 London, where a coalition of artists, architects, sculptors, and art historians calling themselves the Independent Group held some exhibitions that heavily utilized imagery and symbolism from mass society (Russell 442). British art critic Lawrence Alloway, in attendance at one of these exhibits, would coin their style as “Pop Art” (Ibid.). Eventually this movement would grow in the 1960’s, becoming a definitive force in the modern arts in its combinations of both fantasy and realism (Ibid.).

Pop Artists concerned themselves with creating an art to represent the feel of mass society. As a result, their subject matter of choice came from mass culture and commercial design as, these were considered by Pop Artists as being essential aspects of their visual environment (Sporre 453). They used the images, artifacts, and styles of American advertising as “emblems of the sumptuous, materialistic side of life. . . .The images spoke of unimaginable richness and surfeit, especially to foreigners” (Tansey 1057). Pop Art, then, is an art that adopts the look and technique of mass advertising, borrowing from such inspirational sources as billboards, Hollywood films, comic books, pulp literature, advertisements, and the machines which produced them en masse. To wit:

Pop Artists…take familiar images from the manufactured environment as the basis for their art. Pop was not a single group, but a number of individuals who all accepted the central premise that popular culture is a valid subject for serious art. The source of their imagery is the mass media – the slick magazine , the comic book, the TV images, newspaper ads and billboards -- and the imagery itself is the whole of the visual field of originating in the artificial, urban environment. Their statements are neutral, but of such nature as to compel the viewer to ponder the multiple levels of meaning made possible by their imagery and then to take a stand. (Larinde **** 23)

Quite obviously, there is no deeper belief in the spiritual, metaphysical, or philosophical per se. This stands outside of the rebelliousness of Dada based on their raging philosophy against the societal undercurrent of World War I, or the desire to bring to life the unconscious world as the Surrealists would. Pop Art was an art of the here and now and presented a sometimes humorous, sometimes optimistic, and sometimes inane view of the modern world of mass consumption.

Pop Art style reflected the awareness of the mass media. Pop Artists typically worked in two dimensions and rejected the modernist belief that spiritual values may be expressed in nonrealistic works (Matthews 566). Their works used a mixture of mass media imagery mingled with gestural (sic) paintings and “found” objects (Tansey 1057). This mimics the Dada principle of creating collages of imagery together or using “chance” to find/drop the correct object in its correct place. Some Pop Artists rendered advertising images with commercial art techniques while others used Pop motifs to pose questions about the nature of verbal and visual symbols (Tansey 1057). Pop Art has a tendency to create large-scale images to serve additional impact. In this monstrous images, Pop Artists would use repeated images to reflect the mass packaging of modern society, or emphasize some object or truth through sheer size in order to get us to not only see but also acknowledge those elements we might otherwise ignore (Russell 442). In this way, the viewer might finally become aware of images they see in the modern world for the first time. The images they show are presented without satire or antagonism; they simply are (Ibid.). This is what contributed to the success of Pop Art, due in large part to “its use of easily recognizable images, an iconography of commerce and culture as widely known in the modern world as earlier symbols tied to religion and government had been in pre-modern society” (Tansey 1057).

Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997) was one of America’s most prominent Pop Artists. His work is hailed as being perhaps the most widely recognized in the genre (Sporre 454). His work focused around magnified cartoon strips which he uses to maul the standard image of sentiment and violence in comic strips by enlarging them to enhance the impact on the viewer (Russell 443). And even though his imagery is enlarged dramatically, he still presents the work accurately, down the last pixel. To create these effects, Lichtenstein used a stencil to enlarge the dots to the size of a dime (Hamilton 393). “Using a stencil about the size of a coin, the image is built up into a stark and dynamic, if sometimes violent portrayal” (Sporre 454). Pop Art by its very nature induces people to confront aspects of their culture that generally go unnoticed because of habit or apathy. Lichtenstein believed that Pop Art looked outward into the world in an attempt to redeem popular culture:

Well, it is an involvement with what I think to be the most brazen and threatening characteristics of our culture, things we hate, but which are also powerful in their impingement on us. I think art since Cézanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art; it is utopian. It has had less and less to do with the world, it looks inward…

--Roy Lichtenstein on Pop Art—(qtd in Hobbs 486)

Lichtenstein is considered to be the most formal of the Pop Artists. This can be suggested though many of his works like Drowning Girl, painted in 1963. Executed with oils and synthetic polymer paints on canvas, Drowning Girl measures 67 and 5/8 inches by 66 and ¾ inches. It is a massive image rich with pathos but ironically shallow. The massive head, right shoulder, and left hand of a young, blue-haired woman emerges through a churning deluge which threatens to drown the poor lass. Prominent black eyebrows frame closed eyes, again with prominent black eyelashes. Transparent tears framed by heavy lines pour forth from here eyes. Obviously in distress, the girl is in fear of drowning in the sea of light blue waves highlighted by fields of black and tips of white to create striking effects of texture for the water. The water is presented as a mixture of Art Nouveau and Japanese Hokusai (Coplas 16). The girl dominates the better part of the work, her head placed slightly above the center of the piece, her mouth open. While we would assume she would be gasping for breath and much more animated, the girl stands almost defiant/calm in light of her situation. The enlarged use of Ben-Day dots help to create a fine modeling of form, realistic “comic-book” flesh tones, and agitated background waves (Hamilton 393). This helps to create a very compelling effect of seemingly monotonous repetition. These repeated dots serve to intensify the hypnotic impact of the enormous face, “distorted by violent emotions but projected by emotionless, almost mechanical means” (Ibid.). There is no sign of land or sky in the background, the woman is completely locked in the element which will likely spell her doom. Most interesting to this and other Lichtenstein pieces, is the inclusion of a word bubble. Long the staple of comic books, word bubbles are superimposed over the overall image and allows the reader of the strip to read the thoughts or aural mutterings of the various characters. In this case, the girl is thinking: “I don’t care! I’d rather sink -- than call Brad for Help!”. This simple set of lines completely changes our perception of the work as we now realize this lass had a lovers quarrel, yet stubbornly refuses to call to ‘Brad’ for help even if it means her life. The use of the word bubble makes the image much more concrete for us and not only points immediately to the intended irony of the work, but also serves to make ourselves aware of our own indifference to the girl’s impending death (Coplas 15-16). This ability makes the viewer suddenly realize the skillfully pictured “double entendre…and our own disquieting lack of concern” (Coplas 15).

What, then, do Dadaism, Surrealism, and Pop Art have in common? The same thing that Cubism, Fauvism, Impressionism, Minimalism, Expressionism, and Earthworks have in common: Modernism. All of these art ages, many discussed in the two sections of this very report, are modernist art movement. Stella Russell’s text defines Modernism as: “Early twentieth-century American movement that rejected traditional art values in favor of radical new European styles” (491). This is far too limiting a definition. If one is to define modernism based on the premises presented in Robert Hughes’ Shock of the New, then one must exercise opinion and associations created by Hughes’ own words. Modernism, (in the opinion of this writer) must be traced back to the closing of the Romantic age and the dawn of the Impressionists. The reason for this is that the three primary forces which were needed to create a modernist art movement, only began then in the much latter half of the 1800’s. These three forces were a rise in technology, a change in the social and political strata in Europe due to nationalism, and the new found desire to break away from Western Classical artistic tradition.

Technology has played perhaps the greatest role of the three, in large part affecting and effecting the other two. It begins with the rise of industrialism and the invention of a revolutionary device: the camera. The creation of the camera allowed for the quick and detailed capture (albeit in black and white) of landscapes, people, still-life’s, group, portraiture, etc. It allowed the camera to capture as much realism and depth and clarity as the best photo-realist paintings. Impressionism was a direct response to that – an attempt at capturing the same reality of the world in the amount of time a camera takes to capture said image. It was their attempt at capturing the fleeting moment. However, aside from the obvious schism between the speed accuracy of a camera versus the time consumption and “bare-bones”, technical accuracy of a realistic painting, even aside from Manet and other Impressionist’s attempts at capturing light in paint, one sees this as really the start of painting for the sake of painting. Photography may be able to reproduce life accurately, antiseptically, but paint adds depth, dimension, color and texture that celluloid couldn’t at the time. Technology also allowed the painter the means of escaping the studio for the first time and paint and work and create in the openness of the world. If this is not a break from traditional Western Classical values, then nothing is. Impressionists were taking an awful risk in challenging the established norms, but had they not, modernism as it stands today may not exist and visual arts may have suffered in the long run.

Technology also directly led to the art styles of the Cubists, Minimalists, and Pop Artists. Cézanne was the first to work an art style that related to the boom in technology in his time. Technology had shown to all men and women very clearly that the world was much more vast and infinite than once accepted; there was no single perspective or point of view available to look at the whole of the technological world. Cézanne tried to capture an awareness of this when he “insisted on an empirical act of fresh perception to clear away the cobwebs of the past ideologies of Classicism, Romanticism and Naturalism in order to structure a new vision of a world defined as infinite and dynamic” (Larinde 8). Cubism took this idea and ran with it, rejecting even newly established Impressionist styles that seemed progressive and radical in their time. Creating images based on multiple perspectives and the outright segmenting of large subjects and objects, Cubism helped to create an art style infinitely dynamic and radically different from classical style. Further, technology boomed following World War II, and the mass production of synthetic consumer goods boldly announced both that technology had come into its own and detailed its impending legacy on the arts. Pop Arts and Minimalism were born out of this time, striving to show how commercialized the world had become. Minimalism heralded this development by creating an art style that focused on the here and now, typically using discarded waste or some object like street signs or what not as the primary image in their art. Their painting became one-dimensional and this matter of fact declaration was the “total denial of any aspect of romanticism and its accompanying multiplicity of levels of meaning” (Larinde 21). This made art equivalent to a consumer product and innovators such as Warhol presented their art as just that. The further technology proceeded, the less aware we became of the nuances of our own society. Pop Art shows this in their renderings of white flags that infuriate Americans or their capturing of evident tragedy designed to make us uncomfortably aware or our own apathy.

Social and political changes in the face of awakening nationalistic pride also served to change the arts. The Expressionist movement was one that mirrored the immense anxiety of a world on the brink of catastrophic conflict just prior to World War I. If there had been any lingering notions of Romanticism and Classical form and values, they were crushed by the end of World War I. Until that time, the age-old notions of fighting in a grand and chivalric war for God and country still reigned supreme in the poetry of pre-war Europe. The poems young writers wrote in the service of the British Crown were poems that spoke of noble sacrifice and doing one’s duty. By the end, many of these poets were dead and replaced by men who were shell-shocked beyond repair and writing poetry that truly described the hell that war had become. Expressionist painters were extremely in touch with the ominous undercurrent of war that was seething beneath Europe at the time. These artists tried to place on canvas the fears and anxieties that crippled and paralyzed many of them, creating visual harbingers of the doom that failed notions of Utopia had manifested into. Further, the end result of World War I had an immense impact on Andre Breton and his time in the hospital caring for the mentally stripped and crippled war veteran. His observations would lay the foundations for Surrealism, an art based not on reality and not on the apocalyptic fears of the Expressionists, but on the inner feelings of the Id and the dark places it resides in the unconscious mind and the dream world.

More frightening to consider is how technology itself led to the changes outlined above. Technology had created the means to destroy, annihilate, corrupt, and savage society. The “progress” that technology made in saving people’s lives was nothing compared to the leaps and bounds it had made in taking people’s lives. The Expressionists were sensitive to this development and that was one of the inspirations/phobias that they used in the execution of their vision. Even architecture in the styles and codices of men like Mies van der Rohe utilized the progress that technology had wrought in building materials. Yet, while the Expressionists considered technology and the social currents of their time to be hazardous, van der Rohe and his architecture was the last gasp of the utopian society the Expressionists knew would be soon destroyed. His “International Style” led to a radical change in building designs, utilizing steel beams to create box-like skyscrapers that would precede the “modern corporate image, a symbol of power that imposed itself upon the needs of the populace rather than accommodate them” (Larinde 14). The innovative premises of the International Style would give rise to the Bauhaus and through their efforts, would come to spread the ideology of the International Style so that it became the dominant architectural expression of technological and cultural progress after World War II. Their skyscrapers would become living monuments of a valid and progressive modernism, one that rejected the means of age-old architectural conventions so successfully, that the world would scarcely be recognized by those old masters of the classical Western Ideal if they were to walk the earth today.

Finally, the desire to break away from western “traditional art”. Almost every art style we have mentioned (and even those we haven’t ala Op Art and Futurism, etc.) broke away from the conventions of traditional art forms either out of necessity or choice. The clearest example of this is the Dadaists. They felt so betrayed by the world at the time of World War I, that they felt alienated from not only the familiar aspects that society had given them for so long, but they also felt alienated from art itself. Believing that the world had destroyed any notions of reality and social and cultural identity, the Dadaists felt that the world of the old masters had failed them. In their mean-spirited rejection of their own artistic past, the Dadaists are probably the most prolific example of a style that rejected not only all the heritage and legacies built into art by such men as Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, or David, but outright rejected itself. Dada was a revolt against the past, the present, and the future in every respect. They hated what they thought technology had done to their world. They hated what they thought was a betrayal by their own governments and cultures against them. Their art broke away from the traditional norm out of necessity, not due to the advances of a camera, or the anxiety of the world around them. Their bold statement, radical even by today’s standard (especially when you consider they spat in the face of 2000 years or so of established Western Heritage) paved the way for more abstract expressions like Surrealism, more commercial minded expressions like Pop Art, and more naturalistic expressions lie Earthworks. Anyone would be hard pressed to not find some traces of Dada influence of any major art styles since its rise and fall. Ironically, the Dadaists probably hate that.

Addendum

Just what is modernism? That is the question posed in the end of this paper and prompted by the very document responsible for the creation of this essay. If I may be allowed to wax intellectual for a moment…answering this question was one of the single hardest concept questions ever posed to me. I truly felt challenged in trying to create a viable answer to this query. All the books and internet answers or definitions fell short, not living up to or including what I consider to be a major factor in the creation of Modernism. Robert Hughes states that it was the 1970’s which finally recognized modernism as its official culture (366). While it may be true that America accepted that inevitability then, modernism has been around for well over one hundred years. In all the chapters that Hughes outlines, technology always plays some role in the creation of art. If indeed Hughes’s book can be seen as being true to disseminating Contemporary/Modern Art as the title dictates, than no one should be able to dismiss the role that technology has had in shaping modern arts. The camera, while a trivial instrument today, must have outraged and frightened the artists who felt their very livelihood was at risk. The visual arts had to be saved for the sake of its own longevity. Their had always been artists who had sat outside the established parameters of what good art is or what traditional art is. Titian was just as controversial as Manet and Giotto was just as innovative as Lichtenstein. The major difference is that art then, I feel, changed for the sake of change, not for the sake of survival as it had to with the Impressionists. Technology first opened the eyes of the artist to the changes in their own lives and the lives around them. It has directly influenced the cultures and political strata of Europe and the United States in consideration to bombs that can obliterate a million lives and a new vaccine that can preserve a million more. It has caused the artists to need to break away from tradition, whether as an angry response to war, a way of rationalizing your fears, a need to understand the hidden depths of the unconscious, to make us aware of our own apathy, or to simply make us stand outside the convenience of our air conditioned and internet ready homes to see the world at large and how great works -- small, large, or mammoth -- can add a semblance of hope or awe, anxiety or calm to our own lives. Modernism is a reflection of the world and its own desire to try and keep up, nothing more.

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“Mona Lisa with a moustache L.H.O.O.Q”, Part 1 – Marcel Duchamp’s Most Disrespectful Brush

Strokes. July 23^rd, 2002. <http://www.finesite.webart.ru/shocking/lhooq-1.htm>.

“Mona Lisa with a moustache L.H.O.O.Q”, Part 2 – Marcel Duchamp’s Most Disrespectful Brush

Strokes. July 23^rd, 2002. <http://www.finesite.webart.ru/shocking/lhooq-2.htm>.

Russell, Stella Pandell. Art in the World. Fourth Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College

Publishers, New York. 1993.

Sporre, Dennis J. The Creative Impulse: An Introduction to the Arts. Second Edition. Prentice-Hall,

New Jersey. 1990.

Tansey, Richard, Horst de la Croix and Diane Kirkpatrick. Art Though the Ages. Ninth Edition.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, New York. 1991.

“The Rape”, Part 1 – Magritte’s Scandal. July 23^rd, 2002.

<http://www.finesite.webart.ru/shocking/rape-1.htm>.

“The Rape”, Part 2 – Magritte’s Scandal. July 23^rd, 2002.

<http://www.finesite.webart.ru/shocking/rape-2.htm>.

HUX 570: Shock of the View Part One

2007-11-11T22:13:00.000-05:00

Shock of the View

Part I

Modernism

Eric Williams

Dr. White

HUX 570-41

Contemporary or modern art is a phrase that is often met with a rolling of the eyes and an audible groan from the casual art critic. Typically, the vast majority of men and women tend to appreciate, or at least “understand” more dated artistic styles like Neo-Classicism or Renaissance works. The most often argued reason for this understanding is that the observer can clearly make out images in a well-defined manner; the figures are made realistically in every aspect of their creation. These same people, when faced with vibrant colors of the Impressionists, the anguished energy of the Expressionists, or the seemingly bizarre arrangements of rock or sand in the art of the Land or Earthworks artists, are simply confounded or confused by the images present. All too often, the casual art critic or lover will dismiss these works without truly realizing the underlying meaning or messages behind these pieces, or the level of actual skill involved in the creation of said pieces.

The age of modern arts begins sometime late in the span of the Romantic age of arts, sometime in the late 19^th century. The term “modern arts” is a catch-all type of phrase…one that involves multiple artistic disciplines and genres well into the 20^th century. Three of the more well-know genres of modern art are Impressionism, Expressionism, and earthworks. In an attempt to unravel the seeming complexities of these three artistic styles, a brief definition of them all will be presented. Further, a brief introduction to the theories, techniques, and histories of Impressionism, Expressionism, and Earthworks will be provided as well as a presentation of one example of each style. Through an analysis of these artists and their works, a better understanding of what Impressionism, Expressionism, and Earthworks will be acquired, leading to a better understanding and appreciation of these artistic forms.

Impressionism is defined in the text The Western Humanities as an artistic style “marked by an attempt to catch spontaneous impressions, often involving the play of sunlight on ordinary events and scenes observed outdoors” (Matthews ****). This definition is at best a broad overview of Impressionism and at worst a monumental understatement. Impressionism, by and large, was a product of its very age. The latter half of the 19^th century was marked by continual breakthroughs in technology and an ever-quickening pace to society and day to day living. At this time, the invention of the camera was of immense importance to the visual arts. Although universally hailed as a technological wonder, the camera was viewed as a threat to the painter of this era. “Because the camera could capture a sitter, an event, or a scene more quickly and more realistically than the painter could, no artist was needed to transcribe reality” (Russell 350). This forced many artists to seek no avenues or outlets for their artistic expressions. No painter could seek to capture the immediacy or the detail of a photograph. As a result, there undoubtedly was a marked decline in portrait paintings and other ‘realistic’ renderings of the artist’s brush. Edouard Manet first broached this dilemma. A French painter, Manet began to combine a number of styles sometimes referred to as “Protoimpressionism” (Russell 350). Manet’s works were provocative, often choosing exotic subjects and rendering them with broad or flat areas of color and seeking a way to capture the brilliance of the suns natural brilliance in brilliant, shocking colors (Russell 350). Manet broke away from tradition in a variety of ways and suffered the barbs and taunts of art critics everywhere for his aggressive innovations. In essence, Manet broke the rules and helped to lay the foundations for what Impressionism would become.

Stylistically, Impressionism owes a debt to Realism and Romanticism. Yet, at the same time, Impressionism marked the first true departure from the Realistic tradition that had dominated art since the 14^th century (Matthews ****). Further, it serves to bridge the “gulf” between the traditional and modern worlds (White ****). Impressionists saw the challenges the camera presented and responded in kind, creating a form of artistic expression that was designed to capture the fleeting moment as a camera might. Impressionists by definition sought to capture the immediacy of the moment. The application of paints reflects this ideology, often appearing to be applied in a haphazard or slapdash fashion. In effect, the Impressionist painter hoped to paint an image in the same amount of time it took to see it (Hughes 113). This was a challenge to the artists on many fronts. First and foremost, it was a challenge to the age-old concept of painting indoors in the studio. Even landscapes were rarely, if ever, painted outside the studio proper. Thus, the Impressionist needed to find a way to escape the constraints of the studio and, in effect, the constraints of generations-old rules of artistic style and creativity handed down since the Romanesque age.

In order to escape the limitations of the [L1] studio, the Impressionists embraced technology. The discovery of new chemical dyes and oils allowed for paint to now be kept in tubes (Matthews ****). With the addition of lighter or collapsible materials, the Impressionist painter left their allegorical cave, and like the man in Plato’s story, ventured forth into a world of unrestrained color. The effect was instantaneous. The artists realized that the world was wonderfully colored -- that not all grass was green and not all the skies were blue as had been represented faithfully in the visual arts for eons. Indeed, each “motif in nature is multicolored as a part of a screen of hues that change perceptibly with the shifting sun” (White ****). The colors the Impressionist used then were designed to capture the subtle shades the sun creates at various points in the day. In the effort to capture that “moment” artists vigorously painted without stopping to refine their strokes (White ****). The image then has that seem feeling of a sketch, the same spontaneity that defines that form. Further, due to their desire to understand and appreciate the colors in the world, any object might find its way to being the subject of a painting depending on how the light hits it at a particular time of day. Their eyes became attuned to capturing various atmospheric conditions as well as an eye for the subtleties of movement (Russell ****). Their colors were enriched by the fact that painters worked directly on primed canvases, not bothering with the typical umber hued base coating that was typical practice at the time (Russell ****).

What the Impressionists created then was their own vision of a transient moment imbued upon a canvas in broken colors, flat shapes, emphasized visual sensations, and unusual perspectives (Russell ****). To look at an Impressionist piece is to be transported to that transient moment; a moment where the artist has broken up seemingly solid surfaces, has concentrated on the play of light over objects and people, and has stressed the vivid contrasts between colors bathed in sunlight or immersed in shades (Matthews ****). Their works tend to focus on the fleeting or fragmentary, creating a vibrant and optimistic image of society with a sense of shimmering immediacy (Sporre ****). In the canvas of an Impressionist colors can stand for thoughts or moods with short and choppy strokes of the brush. At close range the objects seem unintelligible; a mish mash of colors thrown together. In the words of one critic, it seems that “Impressionists fired their paint at the canvas with pistols” (Tansey 923). Ah, but the canvas is not simply a perception of an object or group. It is a looking glass directly into the lives, world, and minds of the painters themselves; a world that is in a perpetual state of flux with no discernible focal point. It is a world “emptiness is given the same weight as fullness” (White ** **). These ideals are evident in the works of Claude Monet.

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a French Impressionist painter who made his mark rendering very non-traditional images like rivers, cathedrals, waterponds, and haystacks. Monet’s childhood was a happy one, gaining an early reputation with his caricature sketches until a chance meeting with Eugene Boudin in 1858 served to turn his passions to landscape and open-air paintings (Gaunt 279). His career was marked by critical and financial successes, allowing him to travel extensively and to engage in the lifelong passion of gardening (Gaunt 279). His last great work was painting a series of water-lily prints, using his very own gardens as the subject and inspiration for the work.

Monet’s water-lily prints began around 1904 and the dates of execution for many of them are unknown. The Waterlilies print contained in Robert Hughes’ text The Shock of the New (plate 78) will be examined. This particular figure is impressive in its size and scale for an oil painting on canvas. Measuring a considerable 79 by 168 inches, Waterlilies creates a feel for the spectator of being “enclosed by Monet’s vision of a nature which absorbs all sounds, all sights, all color, and all light into itself” (Hamilton 108). This work intersperses a hodge-podge of colors including visible yellows, blues, reds, and greens into a massive open form figure. There is no classical balance point and there is no discernible horizon. The viewer’s eye sweeps across the surface of the pond, skimming across the interspersed lilies. Water fills the entire frame of the work with flashes of light reflected upon the surface. The colors of the image are in accordance to perhaps a morning sun, the colors a vivid, yet not completely realized, locked into neutral dark shades. The heavy use of brush stroke is easily recognized here. We can almost imagine Monet standing before this pond, desperately racing to capture the play of sunlight across this image before it changes. Monet presents for us what the pond and lilies simply are, a flat image with an array of images evident across the surface: “the clouds and lilypads and cat’s-paws of wind, the dark patches of reflected foliage, the abysses of dark blue and the opaline shimmer of light from the sky…all compressed together in a shallow space, a skin like the space of painting” (Hughes 124). Monet’s creates for us a field of dynamic nuances comprised strictly from his energy and artistic vision (Hughes 124). The painting conceived here seems endless and rhythmic, bristling with life in the artists attempt to capture the fleeting moment. Everything about this image speaks confidently in the Impressionists tongue. An outdoor scene created with a thick and hurried application of paint, a rejection of the timed realism that the old masters would have been bound to, and presentation of simple beauty as worthy and representational of the underlying optimism of the age. Monet’s work stands as a giant in the Impressionist canon.

Expressionism, by contrast, was a very different art style. It does, indeed, owe its birth to the Impressionists and their attitudes towards color and light. The Impressionists had opened the door for the idea of color representing moods more than they had in the past. This fit perfectly well for the Expressionists, who sought to use emotionally fueled color to create a stark and sometimes frightening painted image of life.

Expressionism is defined as an “artistic movement characterized by the expression of personal feeling rather than objective reality” (Matthews ****). Simply, where Impressionists sought to create an impression of the moment, the Expressionist sought to express emotions. The Expressionists owe their art style to the vision of Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch -- two men who sought to transcribe their own inner struggles and paranoia onto the face of the canvas. These men used the canvas as the vehicle for their “autobiographical outpouring”, showing their vulnerabilities and their insecurities to the eye of the viewer (White ****). And while Munch and Van Gogh are often grouped as Impressionist painters, their desire to vent their frustrations onto the canvas is eerily recognizable and much more dramatic than the lighthearted subject matter of the nominal Impressionist. And while the Impressionist uses color to capture the mood of the atmosphere or the room or the subject, the Expressionist uses color to aggressively display the mood of the artist in an attempt to depict the stress filled realities of modern life (Tansey ****).

It might be argued that the works of the Expressionist is therapeutic. Indeed, Richard Tansey states in his text Art Through the Ages that Expressionist art is produced by an “inner necessity” (Tansey 968). Impressionism was an attempt to capture the beauty and versatility of colors on the earth, a way of showing exuberance, optimism, and trying to convey the image of the now onto the canvas. For the Expressionist, the task was much different. They were “troubled by the dehumanized and materialistic world they saw” (Russel ****). They were much more concerned with the Self by the time Expressionism hit its heyday in the early part of the 20^th century. The utopian ideals that had once seemed so promising in the previous ages now seemed distant and unattainable. The continuing progress of technology and society continually threatened to leave humanity behind. This insecurity on the hearts and minds of the Expressionist became so strong that the artist had not choice but to “recoil upon himself”; the Self being the only secure place in a hostile world (Hughes ****). As a result, the Self was in constant turmoil, a “battleground on which the forces of desire battle with social restraint” (White ****).

Stylistically, the Expressionists focused on a joint artist/respondent reaction to their composition of elements (Sporre ****). For them, any element, whether line or color or form, could be emphasized to elicit a specific response (Sporre ****). The subject itself mattered very little; it was the message the image and the colors conveyed that was crucial. It was also crucial that the image somehow evoked the same emotional response in the viewer that it had in the artist (Sporre ****). Thus, Expressionism refused to paint ‘safe’ objects, opting for more poignant figures that were designed to respond to the uncertainty of the world with despair, anxiety, and helplessness (Matthews ****).

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is an innovative trendsetter in Expressionistic art. Munch was a Norwegian painter who was afflicted with a crippling sense of “human isolation” who “expressed alienation, anxiety, and despair” in many of his works (Russel 362). While his legacy has been largely relegated to his homeland where the vast majority of his works are kept, he is important nonetheless because “he was the first modern painter to make a continuous study of the idea that personality is created by conflict” (Hughes 276). And if inner conflict is one of the necessary ingredients for Expressionism, then Munch might have been overqualified. His family consisted of a “ranting religious bigot” for a father, a mother who was a “submissive wreck”, and a sister who perished young by the ravages of tuberculosis (Hughes 277). By his own volition, Munch’s life was populated by “disease and insanity . . .the black angels on guard art my cradle” (qtd. in Hughes 277). As a result, much of Munch’s early years were spent in the sickroom, watching his sister waste away or his mother succumb to nervous anxieties. This undoubtedly led to creating an image of family quite retrograde to what most of us hope for in our own lives. The seeds were planted early for Munch’s aggressive Expressionistic images deathbeds, sickly women, and screaming souls.

The Scream, hailed as Munch’s most poignant work, was executed in 1893. It is an oil painting on canvas and measures a modest 36 by 29 inches. The Scream is dominated by a sexless, hairless figure in the foreground. The figure is very gaunt. Its hands, rendered with little detail, try desperately to cover its ears in an attempt to drown out the sound of the world. Its mouth gapes open in an oval shape, silently screaming at us from the void of its world. The screamer wears a simple, dark colored shirt or robe that undulates and swings with his body. The screamer stands on what appears to be a boardwalk with the railing of the fence rocketing past him on his left side. The urgency of the image is made even more prominent by the couple who stands beyond the screamer, apparently unaffected by what ails the poor soul. To the right, the water of either lake or ocean sweeps past with thick brush strokes, meeting the dominant tan shaded beach as well as the disturbing reds and oranges of the sunset sky that cuts a swath across the horizontal axis, separating sea and land from the air. The screamer’s face shows little detail other than the rudimentary inclusion of eyes and nostrils. The image stands as visual metaphor for modern alienation (Matthews 496). The railing racing past the figure can be construed as representing the passage of time; the ever quickening pace of society leaving segments of humanity behind, raging at a world that passes them by unnoticed as in the couple in the background. The railing, being the primary man-made construct in the work, reinforces the notion of technology and society. The swirling of the colors creates the feel of an unnatural world. The heavy orange and red of the sky could signify the emotions of anger while the deep recesses of the blue sea could represent a semblance of despair or melancholy. Further, as many Expressionists felt the apocalyptic despair of their modern age, the sunset could stand as a metaphor for the end of humanity. The screamer stands still in its twilight as the rail fence, again a token of progress and industrialism, races ever onward. Munch’s own screamer is study of bleak, neutral colors; a figure who stands off as a pall on the thick colored currents of the world.

The image of the screamer him or herself is based on a real figure of an Incan mummy, not Munch himself, which has been often surmised. The Incan mummy was displayed at the Parisian Great Exposition of 1889 (Hughes 285). It had been buried in the fetal position, one that was an emblem of fright, despair, and the heady need for a semblance of security (Hughes 285). The Incan mummy was quite the rage among European painter at this time. Paul Gauguin reportedly used its image in a number of his painted works as an image of death (Hughes 285).

While the figure looks nothing like Munch, we cannot be hasty to dismiss it as the mirror of his very soul. Munch had scribbled the words “Can only have been painted by a madman” in upper part of the picture, a bleak badge of Munch’ self-assessed self-worth. His emotional isolationism can be witnessed by the physical isolation of his screamer. Truly, “one senses the separation between normal and neurotic experiences in the two ordinary figures, walking on, for whom the sunset holds no such terrors; they cannot hear the Scream” (Hughes 285). Truly Munch’s The Scream stands identifiable as an Expressionist work. The colors are baleful and represent more emotion than images of the Impressionists. Further, Munch’s image conveys the human figures own fears as the driving force of the image creating a pessimistic world, one vastly different than Monet’s world of tranquil water-lilies and fleeting optimism.

HUX 523: Historic Sites -- Schoolhouse

2007-11-11T22:10:00.000-05:00

School Daze

Reflections on a visitation to the

Little Red Schoolhouse

Eric S. Williams

HUX 523-Essay 2

Dr. Harshman

October 16^th, 2002

Located on a nondescript little street on the East side of the City of Wooster sits the Wayne County Historical Society. Nestled on a grassy lot with tall trees marking the back perimeter of the lot, one small red-brick building sits near the back corner of the lot. This is an old 1800’s era one-room schoolhouse affectionately referred to as the “Little Red Schoolhouse” by the local populace. From a distance, with its white bell-tower and dual portals, the schoolhouse gives an impression of being a church. While it is debatable what, if any, spiritual learning went on inside this structure in its heyday, there is little doubt of the academic learning that was fostered within the hallowed halls of this little, out-of-the-way schoolhouse.

This schoolhouse was originally built in 1873 and was one of five one-room schoolhouses located in Wooster Township at that time. This particular schoolhouse was “Number 3” and its original location was on McCoy Road just off of State Route 250 on the South side of Wooster (Pilarczyk). The name of the original architect and construction company has been lost over time according to Anne Pilarczyk, Public Relations Coordinator for the Wayne County Historical Society. The school functioned as a one-room schoolhouse until 1939 when it was finally closed in a project to consolidate all five of the township schools into a single elementary school (Pilarczyk). This was due in large part to the advent of busing, which allowed children from all over the township to be bused to the new consolidated elementary school.

In a personal interview with Anne Pilarczyk, a wealth of information concerning the fate of the schoolhouse after its closing in 1939 was made available. Pilarczyk states that “Number 3” sat empty for a few years after its closing until it was eventually used for storage by the county. Likely, Pilarczyk adds, most, if not all, the desks and books and the like were removed for transport and use in the new school. Pilarczyk states that it is unknown what exactly was stored at the site (likely school records), but its function remained the same until it was scheduled for demolition in the late 1960’s to make room for a new elementary school on the site of the old schoolhouse. Pilarczyk states that an area teacher began a crusade to rescue the old schoolhouse from demolition, and plans were put into action to try and save the structure.

Unfortunately, neither Anne Pilarczyk nor her secretary Julie Chisnell could recall the name of the teacher who began the drive to save the schoolhouse. What is known is that various fundraisers and grants were created to preserve the site, but the county was still determined to build on the location of old “Number 3”. The Wayne County Historical Society received approval to zone their lot for the inclusion of the schoolhouse if it could be moved there (Pilarczyk). The Triway Board of Education agreed to give the building to the Wayne County Historical Society if arrangements could be made. Local architect/engineer J.R. Webster in conjunction with the D.C. Curry (construction) Company implemented an innovative plan in which the entire structure would be dismantled beam by beam and brick by brick. The Amish building crew of the D.C. Curry Company would then transport all the materials to the Historical Society and rebuild the schoolhouse in the exact fashion in which it was dismantled. J.R. Webster drew detailed schematics and labeled every piece, including detailed information on where each piece goes and how to reconstruct it (Pilarczyk). Unfortunately, funding for the project ran out after the schoolhouse was dismantled and moved. The raw materials were stored on the Historical Society grounds for a few years until enough money was raised to reconstruct the building (Pilarczyk). Eventually the money was raised and the schoolhouse was rebuilt in August of 1973, just in time for its 100^th birthday. A dedication ceremony was held commemorating its reconstruction and its inclusion on the state historic register (Pilarczyk). The very same Amish crew that dismantled the facility rebuilt it (Pilarczyk). A large sandstone plate created for the commemoration ceremony sits on the Little Red Schoolhouse front porch and includes both the architect’ and the construction company’s name.

Ann Pilarczyk states that the Little Red Schoolhouse was a bit of a prototype for its time due to the Gothic architectural influences noteworthy in the structure. Functionally speaking, the schoolhouse was pretty typical of its time, serving both academic and civic interests in the years it was used as a schoolhouse. It was a public schoolhouse meaning the children’s education was financed by the State of Ohio and it catered to the education of boys and girls from First through the Eighth Grades (Pilarczyk). Ann states that at various times the schoolhouse also had a proto-kindrgarten, but the decision to teach a kindergarten class was based on the teacher’s skill and desire to teach one. Typically, an Eighth Grade education was more than sufficient and rarely achieved by public school students at the time. Pilarczyk mentions that “achieving an Eighth Grade education was outstanding at the time, and the idea of education beyond and Eighth Grade level was a moot point”. Furthermore, being a rural school district meant that the majority of boys who attended classes were oft absent during the Spring planting season or Fall harvesting season. Pilarczyk states that when the boys would leave to work on their family farms, they would return and simply pick up their schooling where they had left off.

When asked why this specific building was preserved, Ann Pilarczyk states that the value of the site is immense to both the community and the schools of the area. The Historical Society lends the use of the building out for a number of different civic purposes including exhibitions, weddings, meetings, and seminars. Further, the school is still used by local educators for the purpose of field trips, taking elementary students of all ages throughout the county on a trip to relive the past through the schoolhouse. Inasmuch, the schoolhouse attempts to re-create the conditions and atmosphere of a schoolhouse of 1873. By this definition, the Little Red Schoolhouse is a representative site. As stated by Alderson and Low’s Interpretation of Historic Sites, the purpose of a representative site is help the visitor better “understand a period of history or a way of life” (Alderson and Low 12).

In what ways does the Little Red Schoolhouse present itself as a ‘representative historic site’? To begin, the physical structure itself is 100% authentic. The windows, walls, and porch all remain intact from its earlier days. The only exterior difference is the lack of the original coatroom that had decayed while the structure was used for storage for some 30 plus years. Regardless, the exterior is quite striking with dual portals for entry to the schoolhouse interior. Simple painted wood columns support the roof of the front porch and a original bellworks still function and can be rung from within. There is a stone tablet recessed on the front façade of the building. The tablet is round with four points, giving it the look of a Celtic cross. The tablet has the date of the school’s completion engraved on the round tablet. The true magic of the location, however, lies within the structure proper.

The interior is a vast, single room. The original slate blackboards run the length of the back wall. There are numerous period-accurate bookcases, texts, desks, and furnishings throughout the interior. The floor is hardwood and is interrupted near the back wall by two short steps which create a sort of stage along the back wall. This is where the teacher’s desk sits and the lecturing takes place. Six of the original gaslight fixtures line the walls between large, gothic-arched windows. The fixtures are original to the site but have been electrified for the modern times. There is also one hanging chandelier with four light fixtures suspended from the ceiling by the front doors. Where one might guess the second chandelier would hang, there are three recessed lights – the marking of the modern age. And while the original furnishings and the like were removed when the building was closed in 1939, the Historical Society has gone to great lengths to create a period accurate/period representational structure.

There are two rows of tightly packed wooden desks pushed along the left wall. During my tour of the structure, Julie Chisnell mentions that the reason the facility looks as it does (as you will see in the pictures) is that is was used that previous weekend for a square dance exhibition (hence the steel-folding chairs and open space in the center of the room in the photos). When used for academic purposes by the local schools, Chisnell mentions that it only take about thirty minutes to prepare the place for the school’s tour. Along the forward wall between the two doors is a large glass cabinet with an old Ohio State flag. Along the right wall are two glass and wood bookcases with period accurate cyclopedias, grammar texts, arithmetic texts, and numerous other schoolbooks and an old typewriter from 1881. There is also an old adding machine under the central window on that same side with simple white card that indicates what the adding machine is, who donated it, and the age of the object in large type, black print. Beside the adding machine is a glass top display case which features period accurate inkwells, quills, telegraph keys, gold point pen cases. Again, a white index card in this case accompanies every object with printed information indicating what the object is and who donated it.

Near the stage is an old, pot-bellied stove that would have been typical of the one-room schoolhouse (Pilarczyk). The stove has a stack exiting into the wall and is able to be opened and closed. The stove is not used as a furnace in the basement now heats the structure. Regardless, it does add to the overall theme of the schoolhouse and its accurate installation is yet another positive sign of a successful representative historic site.

On the stage proper is another bookcase in the corner with a large bust of Abraham Lincoln upon it. There are science, physiology, and McGuffy Readers inside the case and a large, beautifully crafted piano sits just before and slightly askew of the bookcase. The piano, according to Chisnell, still works and can be used by visitors. Furthermore, the piano is regularly tuned and maintained (Chisnell). Above the piano is a pencil drawing of the Triway area elementary school that was built in the 1930’s which was ultimately responsible for the closing of old “Number 3” (Chisnell). In the center of the stage is the schoolmaster’s desk with the schoolmaster’s bell, a wooden pencil box and a large Beacon Phonetic Chart that can be opened and suspended from pegs on the slate blackboards. Beside the schoolmaster’s desk are an old lectern, a music stand and a wooden chair, and a very old pump organ that no longer works (Chisnell). At the present time, the Historical Society can neither find nor afford a repair company to try and restore the pump organ to working order.

The blackboard has sentences written across it to simulate the look of a grammar lesson and there is a very large and yellowed ‘Self-explaining Music Chart’ on the left side of the blackboard near the pump organ. Finally, behind the lectern is a small wooden stool with the ever-popular dunce cap placed upon it. Above the blackboard are a portrait of George Washington and a modern age projector screen.

The left wall is basically barren so that the Historical Society can push the wooden desks to one side of the room. Fortunately, the sparse décor allows for one to better see and appreciate the tall, gothic-arched windows and beautiful brass wall sconces. The only other area of interest would be the basement, however it is off limits to visitors and is simply used for storage. Chisnell mentions that the original facility did not have a basement and hence there is no reason to tour it. Upon a closer look, one can see where the original stone foundation ends and the new textile-block cellar begins.

The displays used within the structure are simple, yet effective. They state in clear terms what the object is and its age. The large black type allows for easy reading and each tag lies behind the object it describes in the glass cases. In the case of bookshelves, simple white, large type labels have been attached to the front of the shelf lip and corresponds to whatever object lies on the shelf directly above it. Some additional information would be useful for some of the larger objects such as the pump organ and the schoolmaster’s desk. Typically, there is nothing else that describes the object's purpose or use other than a simple description.

The structure itself is in excellent shape. Professional construction companies and architects were retained for the moving of the facility as well as the upkeep of the place. The basement is waterproof and the roof had been recently replaced, showing the dedication of the preservationist’s to the upkeep and maintenance of the facility. This upkeep cannot be trivialized. The Little Red Schoolhouse is one of the most popular attractions in Wooster for students and tourists alike. Ann Pilarczyk states that this past year the Historical Society had put together a symposium on the history, use, and features of the one-room schoolhouse. This event drew visitors from all over the state. Further, the schoolhouse is continually used by the local schoolchildren on tours. Pilarczyk states the value of the schoolhouse for such a purpose is to allow children to experience history first-hand. It allows these children to better understand what life in a one-room schoolhouse was like and it further allows them to make a connection with what life for students was like for their grandparents or great-grandparents. These same children are struck by the interesting parallels between their educational experiences and those of their ancestors. Pilarczyk states that “paralleling lives makes an impression on school children visitors. It shows the children that history was created by real people in their own area; that kids just like them were essentially learning much the same way as what they learn today”. When asked what adults can learn or take from their experiences at the Little Red Schoolhouse, Pilarczyk says that “they have seen what we have done to preserve this building and they learn the value of preserving buildings in general”.

The Wayne County Historical Society draws interest in their schoolhouse in a couple of different ways. The exhibits notwithstanding, the Historical Society holds a quarterly exhibition of some sort in one of their many outbuildings. Admission into the facility as well as any exhibition includes access by the student or tourist to ALL the buildings. The typical fee is a very affordable three dollars and the facility is open to the public for walk-in tours from 2:00 till 4:30 Wednesday through Sunday. Larger groups or student tours are typically arranged ahead of time and the majority of school tours visit every building and end in the schoolhouse (Pilarczyk). Visitors, according to Pilarczyk, come from as far as Japan, Guam, France, England, Germany, Italy, and Canada.

Ann Pilarczyk is very much involved in the well being of the schoolhouse. Her information was very helpful in collecting data on this particular site. She states that to her, anything they can do to foster a love of history, to foster the idea of preserving history (whether document or building or etc), is important. These are the roots of the community and needs to be shared with this and future generations. She gets a satisfaction seeing adults who once visited the schoolhouse as a child come back and visit with their own kids, retelling stories of how they were allowed to ring the massive school bell, or how their own teacher made them wear the dunce cap during their visit.

I, myself, visited this site as a child and had fond memories of my visits as an elementary student. Nostalgia played a large role in the selection of this site as a historical structure to write about. The staff is very knowledgeable and very helpful to the passing visitor and any child visiting the site on a field trip. The staff allows the instructor who visits enough leeway to speak on the site as they wish. They also allow the teacher to hold class in the schoolhouse for a day and the staff are as involved as the teacher wishes. The Little Red Schoolhouse offers a unique experience to any visitor. Many might come to reflect on their own one-room schoolhouse experiences. Some simply visit the building as a part of the standard tour. Some bring their own memories of their own childhood visit to their children by having them share in a common experience.

The only deficiency of note is the Historical Society’s policy on photography. There is no photography of the interior of the schoolhouse allowed. The reason for this is because, according to Pilarczyk, others have come and taken pictures for “personal” use only to have the members of the Historical Society see the same images appear on websites or magazines without permission. This was a serious drawback in the completion of this project as photos are needed in the final draft of any essay handed in for HUX 523. Fortunately, my case was unique as I was a graduate student and I was additionally lucky as the gentleman who sits on the Board of Directors for the Historical Society, and who could approve photos to be taken, was a Probate Judge. And, this being an election year and my being a registered voter played well into a favorable outcome and photos were authorized.

The only other deficiency, and one that is of minor note, is that the printed materials for circulation on the schoolhouse are very vague. There is only one small paragraph dedicated to the schoolhouse as the pamphlet is more or less designed to sell all the different buildings and features that the Historical Society has to offer. More dedicated information detailing the actual history of the building, who built it, the names of the teachers and students of note, and pictures of some of the original classes would be helpful to the serious evaluator. But the staff is quite well informed, and these individuals could answer most of the questions any serious evaluator might have.

As far as being a representative site, the Historical Society has done an admirable job in attempting to recreate the feel and mood of an 1873 one-room schoolhouse. All the aged textbooks, the dunce cap, the pot-bellied stove, and the simple wood desks create a unique learning experience for any visitor to the site. Despite the loss of so much of the original furnishings and books, the preservationists have done quite well in attempting to accurately recreate the classic one-room schoolhouse. The schoolhouse, coupled with all the other outbuildings and features inclusive to the Historical society, makes this an invaluable tool for any visitor to learn from and enjoy.

Works Cited

Alderson, William T. and Shirley Payne Low. Interpretation of Historic Sites.

American Association for State and Local History, Nashville, Tennessee 1976.

Chisnell, Julie. Secretary/Receptionist – Wayne County Historical Society. Personal

Interview, October 19^th, 2002.

Pilarczyk, Ann. Education and Public Relations Coordinator – Wayne County Historical

Society. Personal Interview, October 11^th, 2002.

HUX 576: Tikal and Yaxchilan

2007-11-11T22:08:00.000-05:00

The classic period of Mayan art encompasses a period from 300 to 800 C.E. During this period, the civilization grew to an impressive size with villages and cities spread throughout the Yucatan. Magnificent temples were erected, a language was refined, and the arts were enthusiastically cultivated purposes both religious and secular. Engravings, sculptures, ceramics, and paintings were cast and created in the unique style which is the heart of Mayan culture. Their iconography is highly detailed, varies from region to region, and denotes a level of skillful mastery that has earned them the reputation as being the most artistically advanced civilization of Mesoamerica in their time.

Unfortunately, the climatic conditions of the Yucatan played havoc with whatever wooden carved figures the Maya created. Wood based artwork has always been fragile in any civilization, prone to burning, cracking, splintering, and rotting. The Maya were likely well aware of the fragility of woodworked pieces and though they probably still utilized wood in many products, stone offered them a stronger material with which to carve. Limestone, hematite, flint, and volcanic tuff are types of rock quarried in abundance in the Yucatan (Miller, “Maya Art” 81-82). Limestone was easier to chisel when fresh from the quarry, and it tends to harden as time goes on (Miller, “Maya Art” 81). Volcanic tuff found in the southern Mayan territories is another malleable stone that ranges from pink to green and was used for three-dimensional sculpture and mosaic facades (Miller, “Mayan Art” 82). The mountains yielded hematite (an ore that produces a rich red color) which mixed nicely as a pigment for paints and for use in burial rites and sculptures (Ibid. 83).

Flint was a popular material with the Maya as well. Strangely, however, flints were rarely used as tools. They were often carved into unusual shapes such as animals or humans (Miller, “Mayan Art” 83). “Archeologists call these odd flints ‘eccentrics’” (Ibid. 83). The human form was the most prized form in flint carving, and these icons included details as exquisite as “a pouty mouth or pronounced chin” (Ibid. 83). Eccentric flints were also used to personify one of their gods: K’awil. One of the characteristic symbols associated with K’awil is the torch, and Mary Ellen Miller points out that K’awil may have been the patron god of flint because of this; those flints which bore his image may have served as scepters or staves (Ibid. 83).

Stone sculpture is thought to have originated in the Mayan world in the “Early Classic” art era. The Early Classic era runs from 250 C.E. to 550 C.E. The stone monuments from Tikal, one of the major cities in the Mayan world, dates back to the Early Classic era and the surviving pieces of sculpture from their makes it evident that sculpture was actively commissioned then (Miller, “Mayan Art” 88). A number of dramatic stelae from Tikal and other areas still survive today. These stelae are richly detailed and carved quite deeply, denoting a master craftsperson.

Stela number 29 from Tikal is one of several excellent examples of Mayan sculpted form. It allows a clear look at the dominant iconography of Tikal and how their works differ from other Mayan art pieces of the distant cities of Yaxchilan or Caracol. Stela 29 has been dated back to 292 C.E. The Stela depicts a king, facing right, and holding the head of the Jaguar God, the patron God of the Underworld (Miller, “Mayan Art” 91). “The roughly hewn shaft of Stela 29 was carved on one surface with a portrait of a seated Tikal ruler” (Miller, “Mesoamerica” 110). Unfortunately, the Stela is incomplete – the lower half having broken off from the main image and remains lost at this time. Miller hypothesizes that the loss of the lower half may have been the result of violence in the 6^th century or so (Miller, “Mayan Art” 91). The Steal contains no refined borders; instead the slab was unfinished, creating a challenging surface for any artisan to work with (Ibid. 91-92). Miller guesses that the unworked stone would have likely been sketched with heavy charcoal lines in order to draw the figure out prior to carving and the carved glyphs most of the surface area, only pausing where deep recesses or pockets in the stone interrupt the natural flow of the carvings (Ibid. 91). Stela 29 features multiple heads across the surface which might serve to confuse to viewer. The king wears a mask, a convention which seems typical of Mayan iconography. The profile head of the Jaguar God erupts from the mouth of the serpent bar, held out on a draped cloth perhaps indicating a headdress (Ibid. 93). The Tikal king:

…wears abundant insignia, including a shark-like Jester God on his forehead and what may be the mask of Chaak – god of lightning, rain, and decapitation, directly rendered onto his face, but, interestingly enough, no feathers, and no headdress of his own…. Rather, the crown of the king’s head, from forehead back to his fontanel, features a spiky ‘mohawk’ haircut, studded with bones…. At the top of the monument, a disembodied head floats, facing down at the standing lord. (Miller, “Mayan Art” 93)

Stela number 4, also from Tikal, dates back to 396 C.E. and creates a vivid picture of some of the cultural differences the Maya had endured. In the years following the creation of Stela 29, invaders from Teotihuacán made significant inroads into Mayan held territory, and by 378 C.E. Tikal had fallen (Miller, “Mayan Art” 94). The Stela records the coming to power of the “curl-nosed” ruler Nun Yax Ayin (Miller, “Mesoamerica” 110). Technically similar in many regards to Stela 29, the work features an uneven surface area carved in shallow relief. The Stela features Curl-Nose in a seated position, “and he bears the Jaguar God of the Underworld on his right hand, but he is shown with a fully frontal face” (Ibid. 110). However, this figure wears a full headdress featuring a plumed jaguar and a collar of shells (Ibid. 110). The dress Curl Nose wears is similar to what would have been found in Teotihuacán at the time, showing very distinctly the relationship between the recently conquered Tikal and their northerly neighbors (Ibid. 110). The frontal face is also typical of Teotihuacano style and helps to reinforce the notion that Nan Yax Ayin was likely a usurper lord (Ibid. 110). Further evidence of this is revealed with the figure of the “Central Mexican god Tlaloc in the crook of the right arm”, while the feathers flanking the jaguar headdress are likely symbolic of the Aztec War Serpent (Miller, “Mayan Art” 95).

Stela number 31 is yet another surviving piece from Tikal, this one dated to about 451 C.E. This Stela was created by a ruler called “Stormy Sky” and we note a definite return here to the style and form of Stela 29 (Miller, “Mesoamerica” 111). The style is seemingly conservative in nature, perhaps an effort to legitimize the past (Ibid. 111). Stormy Sky wears an assortment of ritualized paraphernalia, holding the Jaguar God of the Underworld in the crook of the right arm while wears the “twisted –strands-and-knot symbol emblematic of Tikal, and he and the man who carries him probably both symbolize the site and its lineage” (Ibid. 111). Unlike Stela 29, Stela 31 is very smooth and even, having been quarried from a finer grade of limestone (Ibid. 111). Stela 31 has also been worked on every surface, making it strikingly different than its predecessors. This is due in part to advances in the use of exacting tools which allowed backgrounds to be stripped away and relief carving to substantially deeper and more detailed (Miller, “Mayan Art” 96). Further differences abound. Stormy Sky stands in an active (indeed almost aggressive) posture and holds his headdress up with his right hand (Ibid. 97) The headdress features “powerful earflares and chin straps, the headdress is the very image of those worn by Maya deities on monumental stucco facades” (Ibid. 97). The shield included in the work bears the image of Tlaloc, yet another indicator of Tikal’s domination by Teotihuacán (Miller, “Mesoamerica” 113). Also unlike previous Stelae, Stela 31 features carved images on all four sides with figures in profile on the narrowed left and right edges. And, while virtually every other piece of Early Classic sculpture was thick with layers of iconography in the form of ritual paraphernalia, Stela 31 is easily the most complex of these pieces (Miller, “Mayan Art” 98). Indeed, as the tools of carving became more sophisticated, complex and refined, so too did the very sculptures they made, clearly showing technical progress but also glaringly illustrating indigenous Mayan style and its differences from applied Teotihuacano forms.

The impressive city of Yaxchilan also commissioned the creation of a number of Stelae. Among the most notable is Stela 27, dated to around 514 C.E. Stela 27 features a bearded lord who is carved in what is called the “scattering pose”, a pose that would become typical of later Yaxchilan efforts (Miller, “Mayan Art” 101). “In showing his ability to cast this precious flow from his body, this early king presents himself as the regenerative force of his community” (Ibid. 101). The style is strikingly different in the mannerism and poses of the figure and allows for a glimpse of stylistic differences between Yaxchilan artists and their Tikal brethren.

Late Classic Mayan carved iconography can be examined with the El Peru statuary. The El Peru Stelae are two interrelated stelae which adopted a male-female format that was popular in Naranjo and Calakmul (Miller, “Mayan Art” 108).

Erected at the end of the seventh century in 692 to dedicate the widely celebrated ending of 13 periods of 20 years, the El Peru sculptures are worked in very low relief, with many additional small texts – probably naming the members of the atelier who carved this set – incised onto the female presentation but, tellingly, not onto the male. (Ibid. 108)

Like with most Mayan iconography, the pair of images is in profile with richly rendered religious paraphernalia. The couple grasps similar objects but their dress is markedly different. The woman wears “a long beaded dress belted at the waist, its patterned selvage vanishing from view once tied” (Miller, “Mayan Art” 109). The headdresses are feathered and shrunken heads adorn their chests while an attempt at drapery is made (Ibid. 109). The female figure of the El Peru group resides in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Information garnered from the Cleveland Museum indicates that Maya rulers celebrated milestones in their reigns with sculpted portraits of themselves (“Front Face”). The use of feathers on the costume was important to many (as illustrated in the previous examples). Feathers symbolized fertility to the Maya and were one of the most highly sought after possessions in the Mayan world (“Front Face”). The shield and sword are symbols of her royal stature and the hieroglyphs indicate the precedence of the event being celebrated. The hieroglyphs read as follows:

Four months and two days have passed since January 14, 686. Then came April 6, 686 when Jaguar Paw Fire (the male figure of the El Peru pair), divine lord of Calakmul, grasped the scepter [of rulership/took the throne]. Six years, zero months, and thirteen days have passed since April 6, 686. Then came March 15, 692, when the great stone [the stela on display] was raised in his honor…to Royal Woman of Calakmul, the provincial lord, planted the passing of k’atun on March 15, 692. (“Front Face”).

The Tablet of the Sun carving at Palenque is also quite typical of Mayan iconographic style. The tablet features an adult version of K’an Balam facing in profile a younger version of himself, also in profile, on the left side of the tablet (Miller, :Mayan Art” 114). In the center of the piece is the large head of the Jaguar God of the Underworld surrounded by additional images of minor gods responsible for trade and tribute (Ibid. 114). On the extreme right and left of the work lie numerous hieroglyphs. The Jaguar God of the Underworld in the center of the piece characterizes Maya “shield iconography. This is the god, then, that Maya rulers would cover their faces with as they charged into battle” (Ibid. 114). The great Jaguar God shield is supported by two additional, aged gods. “At left is clearly the God L, an aged deity who presides over the Underworld and who is the patron of merchants and traders; the unknown but similar god at right may be another view of him in a manner that recalls the similar but different sides of Stela 31from Tikal” (Ibid 114). The tablet makes a clear indication of the value of both warfare and tribute or trade to the Mayan ruling elite whether in Palenque or otherwise.

Sculpture at Tonina featured large, three-dimensional figures with texts running the length of the figures spine (Miller, “Mayan Art” 119). Here the figure is full frontal with the hands gingerly folded near the lower abdomen. Clearly marked areas on the neck and chest indicate where semi-precious gems might have adorned the work. Tonina also has some unusual works that betray a fluid/flowing style more closely attributed to the Palenque than indigenous Toninan artists (Ibid. 119). It is believed that in the many wars and skirmishes that took place between Mayan city states, artists and craftsmen were seized as well as green-stones, sacrifices, and other valuables. One such image is a two dimensional relief of the captive Palenque king K’an Hok’ Chitam II. The work is quite obviously not crafted by a Toninan hand. The typical Palenque two-dimensional style is prevalent; the piece carved fairly deep denoting the fallen king, stripped of his regalia and ceremony – now a common prisoner of a stronger city-state.

While stone has been the obvious favorite for Mayan artists, other materials were also frequently used. As illustrated in the aforementioned stelae, shells and bones were used as decorative ornaments for Maya rulers. Pecten shells were quite valuable and are found on much of Mayan iconography. Shells were cut and carved to make headdress spangles and other decorations such as earflares (Miller, “Mayan Art” 220). Much of the shell jewelry that was made served as neck adornments and cast striking imagery. Typical images of Maya lords in ceremonial masks were made, but one interesting aberration appears on the smooth side of a conch shell in which a relaxed Maya lord is depicted smoking a thin cigar.

Bones were also ornately carved. In Tikal, Hasaw Chan K’awil was interred with a bag of ninety carved bones, some with very delicate incisions and colored with vermillion (Miller, “Mayan Art” 78). Bones were also rubbed with cinnabar and hematite to reveal prominent lines of calligraphy (Ibid. 219). One such piece shows a bound captive and one must wonder if the man’s image was carved onto his very bone following his execution. At the Yale University Art Gallery, a highly carved human femur features the guise of a warrior reveling in his victory (Ibid. 220). Again, one must wonder if the femur on which the image is carved belonged to the victim of this mighty warrior. “the carved bone of a victim would have been a potent souvenir…(Ibid. 220).

Painted forms were also common. Most Early Classic paintings were

monochromatic or bi-chromatic and rarely, if ever, depicted mortal men and women (Miller, “Mayan Art” 168). A tomb at Rio Azul in Peten shows the Maya Sun God flanked by side walls with beaded symbols which serve to create a murky liquid effect, likely the Underworld (Miller, “Mesoamerica” 115). Late Classic paintings are more fully polychromatic and were applied liberally to many objects. Painted pots from the Altar de Sacrificios shows a bald dancer in snakeskin pants, his head thrown back in religious ecstasy as he swings a boa constrictor through the air (Ibid. 158). Entire rooms in Bonampak in the Usumacinta region were painted as with Structure 1. Here, vaults, walls, benches and door jambs were all painted with bright colors applied to damp stucco (Ibid. 159). Massive wall murals depict Mayan lords in profile complete with feathered headdresses and ceremonial masks while the bound prisoners, their hands bleeding, await their fate (Ibid. 160). At the base of the Red Temple in Cacaxtla, the aged God L walks along a painted stream in which the water seems to be running uphill (Miller, “Mayan Art” 179). God L stands in profile laden with a heavy pack of merchandise from trade and tributes. God L wears a typical Mayan mask and is adorned in skins.

As with carved forms, Mayan painting adhered to time tested traditions, featuring figures in static, stylized profiles adorned from head to foot with ceremonial devices such as masks or jewelry. Like European Romanesque and Gothic paintings, the Maya seemed to adhere to traditional depictions of gods. They seem to be carved with the same facial features to define age or youth, and they are rendered metaphorically with various devices and objects that any typical Mayan lord or commoner would readily be able to identify. Thus, regardless of regions, most gods seemed at least to be carved in such a fashion to be easily recognized either due to coloration or symbols associated with those figures. Meanwhile, carving tended to place figures in typical profiled poses heavily ornamented in Mayan finery. Some regional and stylistic differences are evident, and most of this comes from conquests of the Mayans by Central Mexico Aztecs. Still, Mayan iconography remained relatively stable through the 500 plus years of the Classic Era. Yet, as the various city-stets grew and developed, some marked stylistic differences can be noted. Regardless, Mayan iconography is highly detailed, varies from region to region, and denotes a level of skillful mastery that has earned them the reputation as being the most artistically advanced civilization of Mesoamerica in their time.

HUX 576: Pre-Columbian Maya

2007-11-11T22:07:00.000-05:00

Deep in the dense forests of the Yucatan peninsula, a civilization was borne; one which would erect great monuments to its gods, tame and cultivate the flora and fauna of its domain, and one which would live in a highly stratified society. It would be a society of social and ethical rules, of great celebrations and terrible conflicts, and of refined rational knowledge coupled with immeasurable superstition. Before this civilization was hispanicized and conquered in the name of the Catholic God, these people, the Mayans, had carved an empire of their own. Before the conquest of this paradise, the Mayans were a people of intense ritualized social customs, religion, industry and creativity.

The history of the Mayan people following their conquest has been well documented. However, the history and custom of these people would likely be lost if not for Friar Diego de Landa, a Spanish holy man sent to the Yucatan to help oversee the conversion of the natives to Christianity. His Yucatan Before and After the Conquest is the most complete first-hand account of how the Mayan culture grew and what there customs and practices were before they were conquered by Spain. Arguably, one must take Landa’s book with a grain of salt as he, a devout follower of less a tolerant time of Catholicism, looks down upon the natives of the Yucatan as savages who have been perverted by the devil’s influence. Regardless of Landa’s flaws, or those of his textual history of the Maya, his work is an invaluable source when beginning any passing or serious study of the Yucatan people.

Landa’s book cites numerous examples of the ritualized customs and practices of the Mayan people. Mayan women bathed almost incessantly and had the “habit of filing their teeth…as a matter of fashion” (Landa 53). Furthermore, they pierced their ears and noses and tattooed their bodies from the waist up (53). Mayan women also had the custom of rubbing themselves down with red ointment, similar to what their husbands would do (53). A woman preparing for marriage also had very a very ritualized process for preparing their hair for their weddings. According to Landa, the mother of the bride was responsible for arranging her hair with such skill that the final product creates a coiffure “as fine as those of the most coquettish Spanish women” (54). Mayan women also dole out punishments to their children, being fair but stern disciplinarians. Typical punishments included a strike or slap to the ear or arm or peppering the eyes of a child who rolled them at a parent (54). Those women without children entreated their various idols with gifts and prayers in the hopes of multiple pregnancies (55). Widows would not marry for a year following the death of a spouse and any sexual contact during this time was strictly forbidden as engaging in such would bring bad humors onto her(46).

The Maya people had very rigid customs regarding death and burial. Landa speaks clearly that the Maya fear death (Landa 56). They would weep in silence during the day and wail with “loud and mournful” cries at night for the deceased (56). The preparation of the dead required ritualized ceremony which included the wrapping of the body in a shroud after filling the mouth with maize (56). The body would also have been given drink and stones which the Maya used as money, perhaps in belief of paying their way to paradise or paying Death (56). Burial of the dead took place in the home. Furthermore, if the deceased was a priest or a sorcerer, Landa indicates that many of their idols, books or “divining stones” would be buried with them (56). Chiefs, however, were another matter. Following cremation, the remains of the chief were placed into an urn and placed in hollow gray statues (57).

The Mayans also baptized their children. This highly ritualized practice included the use of priests and other town folk. Priests were required to expel all evil demons and spirits from the house where the baptism was to be performed (Landa 44). The parent or parents would fast prior to the baptism and were responsible for preparing their children for the ceremony (43). The priest would place ground maize and incense into the hand of the child to be baptized, who would then throw it into a lit brazier (44). After adding a bit of wine to the brazier, it was carried from the house and away from the village by an attendant, removing any offending demons or spirits thus (44). After a spoken service, the priest would “menace” the head of the child with a bone nine times before wetting the bone in water and anointing the face/extremities of the child (44). After some further rites and prayers, the priest would then menace the child’s head with a tobacco pipe nine times before presenting the child with a bouquet and the pipe to smoke (45). A feast for the child happened in turn followed by ritualistic offering of wine to the gods (45). Landa makes note that the process of baptism was lengthy, but not a private ceremony. Many children could be baptized at the same time regardless of gender. Furthermore, Landa notes that communal baptisms would occur at a centralized location. Regardless, the night would end with a large party called the em-ku which featured good wine and drink (45).

Of great importance to Mayan society were priests and their religious duties. The High Priest was called the Ahkin May which means the Priest of May (Landa 12). This priest was held in high regard by the village chiefs and received offerings from both the village chiefs and lesser priests. The High Priest gave counsel to the chiefs, instructed younger priests in their duties, and taught the science of time and dates which the Maya had mastered through mathematics (12-13). Mayan priests also heard confessions from the people of their villagers. The villagers felt that torments, disease and death would “come on them because of evil-doing and sin” (Landa 45). Villagers afflicted with illness or hardship would either confess his or her sins to the priest, or their family and neighbors would remind them to do so (45). And although the typical sins confessed included homicide (whether intentional or accidental), indulging of the flesh, thievery and lying, acts of sexual misconduct with female slaves was not considered an offense as slaves were viewed as property (46-47).

Religious idols and ceremonies were very important to the Maya. Idols were carved from stone, clay, wood or terra-cotta and the artisan responsible for the crafting of the idol had to fast during its creation and follow many rituals (Landa 37). The Maya also prayed to a variety of gods and had deep fears of demons that cause misfortune. Their principle god was Itzamna, which literally translates into “iguana house”; he was the creator of the universe (Ivers 13). Itzamna was also in charge of crops and the more tangible elements like water and earth (Ivers 13). Beyond Itzamna, the Maya worshipped a number of minor gods as well including Kinich Ahau (the sun god) and Ix Chel (the moon goddess) (Ivers 13). There were also earth-bound gods such as Kukulcan. Kukulcan (also known as Quetzlcoatl to the Aztec), was a great lord who ruled Chichen Itza, where a massive pyramid built to honor him still stands. Kukulcan was a wise and fair ruler and was revered as a god due to his great service to the state where he settled the “discord caused in the land by {the chiefs} deaths” (Landa 10).

One practice that was reprehensible to Landa was human sacrifices. Sacrifices have been documented in many ancient and modern religious practices, whether human or otherwise. The sacrificed were slaves though some were sons offered up by devout father’s (48). The victim was “feted up to the day of the sacrifice, but carefully guarded that they might not run away” (48). On the day of the sacrifice, the villagers danced while attendants to the priest held the arms and legs of the victim down (48). From here, either a single arrow was shot into the heart of the victim, or the priest would make an incision on the chest with a flint knife before plunging his hand into the chest and ripping the still beating heart from the living victim (48-49). In either case, the face of an idol was doused in blood and the deceased might be flayed or have his hands and feet removed (49).

The Maya were a very industrious, organized people. They were excellent with ceramics and woodworking. Maya physicians (called ‘sorcerors’ by Landa) healed the sick using herbs and other superstitious practices (Landa 37). The most common occupation dealt with agriculture, “the raising of maize and the other seeds” which was gathered and stored in a large granary (38). Another typical occupation was that of trade, usually coco and “stone counters” for salt, cloth, and slaves (37).

The Maya also refined a manner in which to create books. Their books were written on a “long sheet doubled in folds, which was then enclosed between two boards finely ornamented” (Landa 13). The paper used in the making of these books was dredged from the roots of trees. According to Landa, the paper had a “white finish excellent for writing upon” (13).

Mayan homes were typically constructed of wood covered with thatch, or sometimes with the broad leaves of palm (Landa 32). The roof of the home was usually very steep to prevent rain from drizzling into the interior of the house (32). The first half of the house is reserved for meeting guests. As a result, it was typically adorned in a whitewash to help refine the appearance of the place (32). If this were the house of a chief, the front room may include carved frescoes (32). The rear of the house served as the bedroom(s) for the family while the front room is for formal reception and provided for “lodging of guests” (32). The area around the home was very clean and absent of plants or litter (26). The center of the town was built around the temple(s) while around the town center stood the houses of the chiefs and priests (26). The homes of the wealthy and the town elders (“leading men) radiated out from the homes of the chiefs and priests with the homes of the commoner creating the town’s borders (26). Outside the village proper was where one would find the great cotton, pepper, maize, and wine plantations which stimulated the Maya economy (26).

The political system of the Maya was one ruled by a chief who was advised at times by leading men and priests. Should the chief die, his eldest son would take his place while the lesser sons would be held in high regard as lords (Landa 32). The chiefs act as judge and moderator in the affairs of their people and the village as a whole (32). Important judgments were brought before the leading men who offered their advice and counsel on the matter. Serious matters such as war were left to be resolved by the Mayan soldiery who were outfitted with hatchets, lance, and bows and arrows tipped with sharpened animal teeth (50). The soldiers wore protective coats made cotton, wooden helmets, and defended themselves with small bucklers made of reeds and deer hides (50).

The arts seem to have been actively cultivated in Maya culture. The native peoples acted, sung, made music, sculpted, carved and made massive architectural wonders. Mayan actors, according to Landa, performed with great skill and he even makes mention of their performances as ‘art’ (Landa 36). The Maya made whistles of deer bones, small drums, and long, thin trumpets created from hollow wood (36). Idols, as indicated previously, were common and made with great skill. Carvings and statues were common for larger temples and frescoes were in use in the houses of the aristocracy. Heiroglyphic writing was common and helped to refine not only the written language of the Maya, but also refined their skills in relief carving. Stucco was used to create massive murals and panels of glyphs decorated with flat colors and heavy black line (Ivers 12). Maya temples were colossal stone constructs, megalithic in proportion. Some of the most celebrated are the stepped pyramids in present day Honduras. These pyramids often included finery such as carved designs or masks or statues on their balustrades (Ivers 12).

Before their conquest, the Mayans were a people of intense ritualized social customs, religion, industry, and creativity. The extent of their “civilization” is obvious to any modern scholar or enthusiast of Yucatecan history. With the exception of metal tools, the Maya were just as cultured and civil as any European nation in its time. An established language and well organized political and religious system is often cited as a benchmark for what makes for a true society. As such, the Maya are no different than the more socially advanced nations of their time. Landa continually reminds us through the text of how barbaric or primitive the customs of the Maya people were, and we must take his testimony with a grain of salt considering his background and occupation. Where we see custom, he saw blasphemous sacrifices. Where we see statues and carvings in relief, he saw idols--the tools of the devil. Landa was myopic in his views. Today, a modern reader can note a civilization steeped in tradition, rich in custom, firm in their faith, refined in their art, organized in their governmental and theocratic offices, and intensely ritualized in their day to day living.

Works Cited

Ivers, Dr. Louise. Humanities 576. “Key Periods and Movements, Art: Ancient Maya”.

Course Guide. California State University, Dominguez Hills, 2000.

Landa, Friar Diego de. Yucatan Before and After the Conquest. Translated by

William Gates. Dover Publications Inc. New York. 1978.

HUX 530: Way of the Gun

2007-11-11T22:04:00.001-05:00

Way of the Gun

Military Technology and its

Effects on Humanity

Eric Williams

HUX:530

Essay Four

Dr. Bryan Feuer

November 13^th, 2002

War is an evolutionary creature, feeding off the progress of humanity and its technological achievements. And just as humankind has evolved and undergone change, so too has warfare in its technologies, theories, and innovations. In the course of human history, technology, and more specifically gunpowder, has played a monumental role in shaping the dynamic of the world today. Furthermore, the impact of the gunpowder age on European social life has been equally dynamic. To some degree, it might be argued that the way of the gun and the way of society lived a semi-symbiotic existence. The fortunes of one have been inextricably entwined with the fate of the other. By looking at the impact of technology on warfare from the 1500’s on, the student of history can better understand how the advances of science and industry have affected the growth of society at large.

The greatest advance in warfare from the dawning of the Renaissance onward has been the implementation of gunpowder and firearms. Gunpowder was invented in China and was first introduced in Europe in the 14^th Century. At that time, the means of using gunpowder was severely limited, and as such limited its effectiveness on the battlefield. The inherent danger surrounding its use as well as the unpredictable nature of the equipment and the gross unfamiliarity soldiers had with the stuff limited the use and effectiveness of gunpowder in warfare for about 100 years (Feuer 67). Human ingenuity, however, soon learned how to harness the potential of gunpowder and slowly developed its uses from the massive brass bell cannons to the modern machine gun.

The cannon ushered in an era of unprecedented change in Europe. The campaigns of Charles VIII in Italy were the first decisive military campaign to truly show the potential of gunpowder. His great innovation was to order cannons made lighter so that they could be transported with his army – a considerable difference from the earlier days when cannons were fixed to immovable platforms during siege warfare (Keegan 320). With technological advances, cannon were made lighter and more efficient and thus would no longer slow down an advancing army. Prior to Charles’ campaigns, the general fear surrounding cannon use was that it would hamper an army’s advance or would be left behind during a hasty retreat as they were too heavy and bulky to be moved at the same pace as the rest of the column (Keegan 320). Charles’ campaign into Italy made an immediate impact with the siege of the Neopolitan fortress of San Giovanni (Keegan 321). This same fortress had once withstood a siege that had lasted some seven years; Charles captured it in eight hours (Keegan 321). This single event set off a chain of events which served to change the face of Europe forever. No longer were the old castles enough to repel this new technology. Fear spread though Italy and the nation-states of Europe took heed that they needed to create better fortifications, and quickly at that.

Fortifications had to evolve in order to meet the challenge of mobile cannon. Iron cannonballs leveled and fired along a similar horizontal plane could chew holes through castle walls (Keegan 322). This created a unique set of circumstances as the breach that was created by the cannon served to turn the physics of the castle wall against itself (Keegan 322). Walls tumbled down and oftentimes took one or two of the defensible towers with them. At the same time, the debris from the falling wall served to fill the channel of the moat or ditch that surrounded the castle (Keegan 322). The castle wall became its own worst enemy, allowing an easy passage for an assault force to cross the moat and oft times toppling a tower that likely held archers whose job was to prevent such an assault force from penetrating the breach. In response to these failures, nation-states spent enormous sums of money developing and building newer and better fortifications, eventually settling on the bastion fortress design (Keegan 323). The bastion featured an angled outer wall that served to make incoming cannon shot glance off the surface with a minimum of damage. Defensive technology had caught up to the cannon and forced more change on the attackers part. Essentially, what the invaders had to do was build a succession of three trenches and move their cannon from the farthest trench to the trench nearest the bastion walls (Keegan 327). At the closer range, the firepower behind the shot could impact significant damage on the heavy bastion wall and create a breach (Keegan 327). The effect of this on the soldiery, as one might expect, was considerable. To risk one’s life by forging ahead and digging a trench under cannon or arrow or bullet fire was suicide and many soldiers resented being, in essence, ditch diggers (Keegan 327).

The problem thus far is how to gauge the effect of cannon on society. It is easy to state that the success of Charles and his mobile cannon ushered in sweeping changes in fortification spending and design. War, as now, was big business during the Renaissance and many cashed in on become fortress engineers. So fashionable and trendy was it to design fortifications that two of Europe’s most prolific artistic talents, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo tried their hand at it (Keegan 325). Indeed a great deal of money was to be made in business of war.

While social impact of the cannon might be seen as vague when we try to consider how it effected nation-states and their domestic policy, the development of the handgun ushered in more visible social changes in Europe. Handgunners likely grew from the crossbowmen profession, and like crossbowmen, they were used in an ineffective manner in their early years in warfare (Keegan 329). Archers, whether using a crossbow, composite bow, or long bow, were seen as the dregs of the military by the more honorable, chivalric, and knightly aristocratic classes. No self-respecting knight would lower himself to using a bow and this same prejudice extended to the use of the musket. Furthermore, the musket required little skill to master because “accuracy at this point was less dependent upon the soldier than upon the weapon itself” (Feuer 67). Yet, while the knightly class refused to acknowledge the use of such a weapon, “their increasing use not only hastened the decline of the armed knight, but also emphasized the significance of non-aristocratic military elements” (Feuer 67). This was further compounded by the fact that as musket technology and firepower improved, the effectiveness of plate armor in the field was nullified and further hastened the death of the mounted knight (Keegan 331). Yet, the aristocracy refused to let cavalry die out right away. Knights attempted to learn how to fight with gunpowder from horseback, a disastrous enterprise (Keegan 341). The aristocracy did not want to see the chivalrous knight dismount his steed and essentially assume the role of a glorified crossbowman (Keegan 332). However, even as the aristocracy resisted the ways of the gun, the more traditional soldier class began to embrace it and see it as an honorable calling (Keegan 334).

The use of gunpowder made handgunners the heart of Europe’s armies as the years went by. Fewer and fewer were the mounted knights. For a number of years, handgunner and pikemen fought side by side, the handgunners to strike afar and the pikemen to resist an enemy charge. Eventually, with the introduction of the ring bayonet, the pikemen went the way of the mounted knight (Keegan 341). Yet, as formidable a force as handgunners were to their foes, they were still a danger to themselves. Another result of the technology of the gun came in the form of drilling. Drills were used to teach gun-wielding soldiers discipline and safe use of their weapon (Keegan 342). The dominant reason for this was two fold. One, the constant marching and training built a highly skilled soldier class and served to suppress the individuality of the soldier, making them fight better as a cohesive unit (Keegan 343). Secondly, drilling taught the important steps of gun safety on the firing line. Before, when archers were the ranged weapon specialists, a mistake at the firing line might result in the injuring of only their immediate neighbor should an accident occur. Now, with guns and highly volatile powders being used in such close proximity, an errant spark might literally ignite a catastrophic disaster that could affect the entire unit. Drilling, which focused on the 47 distinct steps needed to fire one’s weapon, sought to avoid any accidents by having the entire mass working in unison step by step (Keegan 342).

Now, with cannon being more accurate and deadly and with muskets and rifles becoming the same, additional social changes would take root in Europe, especially during a siege. Killing became a long-range enterprise. At the same time, the soldier classes began to wear distinctive uniforms and began to enjoy a rise in social status to befit their profession. This was especially true of the emerging officer class. Officers typically wore colorful outfits and could be easily seen on the battlefield. As one might expect, in a time where ranged combat was the norm, brightly colored targets were hard to ignore. As one’s conspicuous presence at the front increased their likelihood of being targeted by a foe, new definitions of courage and bravery had to be written (Feuer 68). Furthermore, as technologies related to attack and defense improved, sieges became a much longer process, taking months at a time. The result was the inevitable year-round siege that replaced the traditional sieges that only lasted while the seasons were fair (Feuer 67). Furthermore, as more and more conscripts or volunteers opted for military service, armies swelled to larger and larger numbers. The effect of this on society at large was enormous. In the rural regions, the brunt of wartime destruction was felt by these lower classes as passing armies might burn or steal or injure villagers while on their march. Furthermore, whether one lived in the rural areas of a nation-state or within the city besieged, numerous other hardships befell humanity. As sieges dragged out longer and longer due to technological stalemates, starvation, disease, and a great strain on the economies of these warring factions begin to be felt. Shortages occur and prices inflated to reflect this (Feuer 69). Taxes were raised to pay for these prolonged campaigns, jobs were lost, healthy males might be conscripted into military service, and other general unpleasantness (i.e. riots, murders, rapes, thefts, and social unrest) would occur (Feuer 69). Moreover, large bodies of troops needed shelter, supplies and food and the locals bore the cost of this (Feuer 68). So expensive was warfare after the introduction of the gun, that oftentimes nations ran out of war funds and had to sue for peace or withdraw from a campaign because the funds just weren’t there (Keegan 345).

Finally, as cannon and rifle warfare trudged into the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, inventions such as the telegraph allowed for news from the war fronts to reach that nations civilian and political populations quicker. Newspaper sales boomed, as did the technology of the gun. New military concepts such as “total war”, where the entire resources and population of a nation are brought to bear in assisting the war effort, are introduced (Feuer 71). Armies swelled to numbers topping 100,000. Casualty rates skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands as well. World War I saw the technology of the gun lay waste to 15 million tons of allied shipping, 8.6 million soldiers killed, 800,000 German soldiers die from malnutrition due to siege, Zeppelins dropping bombs on civilian targets, tanks roll into cities, airplanes command the sky and U-boats roam the seas, and a massive flu epidemic destroy the lives of some 20 million debilitated veterans following the wars conclusion (Feuer 75-77). This truly was, as King Henry V so succinctly put it, “the royal fellowship of death”.

The technology of the gun brought sweeping changes to the social climate of Europe ever since its inception. Those changes are still being felt today, and many are still happening. The gun and its technology served to exterminate the knightly class of soldier. It served to give credibility and validity to marksmen and offered new social status to the soldiers of the gun. Sweeping changes were made in defense spending among European nations after the fall of the Neopolitan fortress. Uniformity and drilling became commonplace resulting in highly skilled and highly valuable soldiers. Technology of the gun has served to carve out empires and lay waste to generations of people, soldier or otherwise. The evolution of war technology has served to brutalize, victimize, and lobotomize millions. Lives have been killed, lives have been exploited, and some have been stretched to the breaking point from shell shock or combat exhaustion. World War I ushered in the end of war’s patriotic innocence and the beginning of its brutal realities.

Works Cited

Feuer, Dr. Bryan. Humanities 530: War and the Human Experience. Course

Guide. California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1996.

Keegan, John. A History of Warfare. Vintage Books division of Random

House Publishing, New York, 1993.

HUX 530: Agincourt

2007-11-11T22:01:00.000-05:00

A Look at a Classic Battle

Through Three Media

Eric Williams

HUX-530

Essay 3

Dr. Bryan Feuer

October, 17^th, 2002

Any student of English literature has, at some point, become familiar with the works of William Shakespeare, the definitive master of English dramatic form. Further, those same students would likely become familiar with Shakespeare’s history plays like Richard II and Henry IV. Yet for many, Henry V stands off as one of the more enjoyable history plays written by Shakespeare for its depiction of King Henry as the model for all Christian Kings, the fate of the Eastcheap Five, the Battle of Agincourt and the very famous St. Crispin’s Day speech. Pomp and circumstance aside, while Shakespeare’s Henry V does retell the military campaign Henry waged against the French, there is a wealth of information about the proper battle that has been left out. By reading Shakespeare’s Henry V, watching the film version of Henry V starring Kenneth Branagh, and reading about the Battle of Agincourt in John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, the serious student of history can piece together what really transpired and gauge the relevant effectiveness of all three presentations.

Shakespeare’s Henry V, written about 1599, is a coming of age story in which we see the once madcap Prince Hal growing into maturity and respectability after having ascended to the English throne. The Church is worried that old laws will take effect that will cause them to lose the “better half of our possession…a thousand pounds by the year. This runs the bill” (I.i.94). The Church impresses on Henry to lay claim to the French throne, of which he has a right according to the Salic Law. The legal and religious right that Henry has to wage war is compounded by the arrogant gift of tennis balls to the young king by the Dauphin, the Prince of France. This gift, designed to insult Henry by his youth and vanity, provides the final impetus for war.

After waging a battle to take Harfleur, Henry’s troops are sick and enfeebled. They seek refuge at Calais but are accosted by the French army, led by the Constable, just outside of Agincourt. Fearful of the next day’s fighting and the unfavorable odds that face the English, Henry waxes poetical and intellectual – moving unknown through his host to calm fears and to understand better the mood of his camp. After a skirmish with one of his common soldiers Michael Williams, Henry sits alone and prays fervently to God, asking him to steel the hearts of his men and to not look at the sins Henry’s own father made in encompassing the crown. The next morning, all is in ready for the final battle.

It is here that Shakespeare’s craft is at its best. Act 4, Scene 2 opens with the French Constable, massing his forces and looking down over the sickly band of the English. He speaks haughtily, saying “behold yon sick and starved band….There is not work enough for all our hands…our superfluous lackeys and our peasants…(are) enough to purge this field…. A very little let us do and all is done” (IV.ii. 223-224). Shakespeare shows what slight regard the French have for their foe, outnumbering them by the thousands and the English in no condition to fight. The Constable scorns the English and prepares for the first charge after mentioning that the English have already said their prayers and are merely waiting for death (IV.ii. 226).

The English lords who mention the fearful odds mirror the desperation of the situation: “Of fighting men they have full threescore thousand. There’s five to one. Besides, they are all fresh” (IV.iii.227). The overwhelming odds are made known to the reader in two separate lines spoken by Warwick and Exeter. Shakespeare is working the feel of overwhelming odds into the reader’s psyche. This is further compounded by Warwick’s declaration that he wished there were one ten thousand of the soldiers left behind in England to come and help in this grim battle. Yet, when things seem their darkest, Shakespeare enters Henry onto the scene to utter one of the most famed inspirational speeches in history: the St. Crispin’s Day Speech. Henry wishes no other help at Agincourt and speaks with determination that they are enough to do their country’s loss and enough to share their country’s fame. Henry fires up his troops even as the French herald Montjoy comes to ask if Henry will yield and pay a ransom for the damage his forces have done on the French people and possession. Henry denies the French, saying they should “achieve me, and then sell my bones” (IV.iii.231) This is the only ransom the French will receive. With the departure of the Herald, the Duke of York petitions Henry to allow him the honor of leading the vanguard. Henry grants it and we must now to the battle fly.

The stage directions call for alarms and excursions. We can only assume how Shakespeare envisioned the battle happening, but he does offer us one important element true to warfare in Henry’s time: the taking of prisoners for ransom. In Act 4, Scene 4 the sharp-tongued but cowardly Pistol has taken a French noble prisoner. He is called Master Fer and says to Pistol that he is the master of a noble house and that a tidy ransom would be paid to Pistol in return for his life: 200 gold crowns (IV.iv.236). Pistol agrees and spares the French prisoner in favor of riches. This particular scene is for comic relief more than anything else. Pistol, along with Bardolph and Nym, are part of the Eastcheap Five, a comical gang of ne’er- do-wells that Shakespeare has used in Henry IV, used as friends and cohorts to the young Prince Hal. Pistol cannot speak French and he uses The Boy, a friend of his, to interpret the Frenchman’s tongue. Pistol continually misinterprets what Master Fer says and the audience gets a good laugh. Here we see Shakespeare catering to the needs of his audience. While the scene has little bearing on what actually occurred at Agincourt, it is used by Shakespeare to keep the play moving and also to stay somewhat true to the rules of engagement in Henry’s time.

Act 4, Scene 5 shows the routing of the French forces. Bourbon mentions the shame of their condition and Orleans makes mention of how the French are yet enough living in the field to contend with the English if only order can be achieved (IV.v.239). Act 4, Scene 6 shows Henry praising his “thrice-valiant countrymen. But all’s not done; yet keep the French the field” (IV.vi.240). Henry, with his prisoners, asks the fate of noble York and Exeter describes how valiantly York fought before being overwhelmed. Further, Exeter states that York and the Earl of Suffolk died side by side (IV.vi.241). Shakespeare describes the bravery and love English bear one another, how York did kiss the bloody gashes on Suffolk’s beard and spoke lengthy before he perished. This is also used as a dramatic device. Every death scene has to have some semblance of drama to it, especially with Shakespeare. The fact that York kisses the wounds of his countryman and speaks aloud a lengthy discourse before dying is appropriate to a drama, but is likely not what really happened. But again, Shakespeare is writing for the pleasure and entertainment of an audience, not the strict student of history and as such York’s death is appropriate. Finally an alarm sounds and Henry, in a seemingly rash action, orders the French prisoners executed because the French have rallied their scattered men.

We learn in Act 4, scene 7 that the alarm is actually two-fold. Not only are the French rallying for a possible charge, but a detachment of French apparently raided the luggage and tents of the English forces, killing all the attendant boys and looting the king’s own tent. Captain Gower mentions that it was “wherefore the King most worthily hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner’s throat” (IV.vii.243). Gower makes us believe that Henry’s order to slay his prisoner’s was merited due to the slaughter of the English boys. He enters with his prisoners: the Duke of Bourbon and Orleans. Henry bespeaks his anger at the French and orders his herald to ride “unto the horsemen on yon hill. If they will fight with us, bid them come down, Or void the field: they do offend our sight” (IV.vii.246). Shakespeare lets us know that there is yet another division of French cavalry that has yet to ride into battle. But before the heralds can ride forth, Montjoy comes to Henry and acknowledges French defeat. Henry asks what this field is called and Montjoy answers “Agincourt” (IV.vii.248). The battle of Agincourt ends with the resolution of the conflict between Henry and Williams (at Fluellen’s expense) and the reading of the dead. Henry notes that some 10,000 French lie dead in the field, including 126 Princes, and over 8000 knights and noblemen. Henry reads off the names of the French killed of note before reading that only 29 English were killed, including York and Suffolk. One can assume this number does not include the boys murdered by the French riders earlier as the numbers should be much higher. Henry pays homage to God and leads his men to the village.

Shakespeare’s play is designed around humanizing larger-than-life figures. As a read, it could be considered quite dry. The language is difficult for the beginner, the stage directions leave much to the imagination, and the battle proper takes place in only a handful of pages. What Shakespeare accomplishes is to further establish Henry’s legend while at the same time protecting him, in some ways, from criticism. It is clearly mentioned that Henry orders the execution of the prisoners only after the boys were killed, thus protecting Henry’s reputation as a just man. Further, Shakespeare is telling the final episode of a long story that had begun with plays featuring Henry’s father and King Richard. Shakespeare is under an obligation to not only relate the story of Henry’s military campaign in France, but also to provide the eventual fate of the Eastcheap Five and others. Speaking from a critical standpoint, the drama is quite good, but as everyone knows, Shakespeare is to be staged – not read. Hence, the textual version loses a lot of its poignancy. Additionally, the tale seems to gloss over the battle itself, focusing more on the arrogance of the French, the comedy of Pistol, the lofty speech of Henry, the death of York, and the murder of the boys. The battle itself is nearly lost in vague stage directions and the obtuse speech.

One can get a much better appreciation of the battle proper by viewing the film version of Henry V, starring and directed by Kenneth Branagh. The film medium allows the enthusiast of Henry V to put faces with names and allows Branagh to stage a much more dynamic and dramatic battle. We see the fears and concern on the faces of the men prior to Henry’s Crispin's Day speech. Branagh also shows us the English preparation for battle with the driving of stakes into the ground, the kneeling and praying and kissing of the earth prior to the skirmish, and the image of Exeter dressing the line as they await the French charge. Branagh also shows the preparation of the English archers and the distribution of packs of arrows to each man. Gower awaits the signal of Henry and we see, then hear the long charge of the French cavalry. Henry’s arm drops and volley after volley of arrows flies through the air (fifteen volleys can be seen or heard during the battle), striking mounted knight, horse, or footsoldier. The English attack and the film does an admirable job of showing essentially the English massacring the French with the camera shot switching between a struggle, then the cold and damp ground, and then back again. What Branagh does here is accurately capture the biting cold, wet weather of late Fall that beset the English in their march towards Calais. The film doesn’t focus on the capturing of prisoners, Henry does not order the execution of prisoners, and the foolery of Pistol’s scene and Henry’s poor joke at the expense of Williams and Fluellen is all but omitted. Of interest is how the film makes the pitched battle move in slow motion, all sounds muted save the score and the dull thud of metal on shield. Branagh’s film serves to better dramatize the battle of Agincourt moreso than the simple text, especially when we see the grisly death of York (minus Exeter’s fanfare noted earlier) and the fall of the French Constable. The battle is seen in all its ugly realism, from the cold drizzle of the rain to the looting of the dead by Nym and Pistol to the drowning of a French soldier in a deep mud puddle by John Bates. Branagh’s camera captures some amazing shots, as when the Constable falls and is being carried out of the battle by the Dauphin and Orleans with the French herald Montjoy seated on horseback just behind them. The image conveys the desperation of the French position when the Constable utters: “Why…all our ranks are broke….Shame and eternal shame. Nothing…but shame”(Branagh). We see a weak attempt by the French to reorganize and take the field, culminated by a scene where Henry and the Dauphin cross swords. The killing of the boys plays out much the same way, the French herald announces the surrender of their army, and the scene ends with Henry carrying The Boy to the carts while Non nobis and Te deum are sung.

Branagh’s film goes a long way to correcting some of Shakespeare’s flaws. Leaving out the prisoners and their execution places Henry even more as a Christian king than produced in the play. Further, with so much more attention placed on the filming and scripting of the battle, Branagh allows his audience a more directed view of the Battle at Agincourt – capturing accurate climate conditions, visualizing the fear and concern on the faces of his men, and capturing the arrogant then shocked looks of disbelief on the faces of the French nobility. What Branagh does is offer a more humanized look at the characters by seeing and watching them. He furthers the drama by having it staged in a grand manner as Shakespeare had intended. Indeed, enacting the play carries the realism and the drama of the battle to new heights. Branagh emphasizes the horrid conditions and the hellish battle, and creates a vivid and action packed sequence to sate the thirst of any film-goer and create a gripping war epic for those who may not have ever read the play. Branagh presents the battle almost exactly as Shakespeare presents it in the text. From that standpoint, the film is excellent. However, as John Keegan will show, Shakespeare and, by association, Branagh only get the battle ‘half-right’.

Keegan’s book spells out what really happened at the Battle of Agincourt. In many ways, what happened is infinitely more entertaining than either Shakespeare or Branagh presents. The English had attacked Harfleur and were on their way to Calais when the French army cut them off just outside of Agincourt. With no alternative, the English pitched camp and wait for dawn to fight. The Battle occurred on October 25^th and was likely very cold and rainy as Branagh presents. That morning, the English took up position “about 1000 yards distant. For four hours both armies held their ground” (Keegan 83). During this four-hour stretch, the English could not break rank for any reason, not even to relieve themselves (Keegan 89). Keegan implies that the cold weather would wear on the men wearing metal armor and that heavy drinking on both sides during the period of waiting likely happened. “…it is quite probable that many soldiers in both armies went into the melee less than sober, if not indeed fighting drunk” (Keegan 114). This very credible possibility was omitted from both the play and the film. Keegan also notes that the numbers of fighting men on both sides was quite different than what Shakespeare states. Keegan considers the English forces to be more around 5000 to 6000 archers and 1000 men at arms while the French likely had about 25,000 troops including 1000 cavalry (Keegan 87). This is a far cry from the 60,000 men Shakespeare claims the French had (threescore thousand), yet Exeter’s claim of the odds being five to one is still fairly accurate.

Henry eventually grew impatient and ordered his men to close the distance between themselves and the French. Keegan notes that Sir Thomas Erpingham (included in both film and text versions) inspected the archers and dressed their line as they advanced (Keegan 89). The English line, composed of a mixture of men-at-arms and archers with a grouping of archers at each flank, marched forward some 700 yards to close to within about 300 yards of the French lines (Keegan 90). The French, meanwhile, were set up in three main lines “of which the third was mounted, as were two groups, each about 500 strong, on the flanks. The two forward lines, with a filling of crossbowmen between and some ineffectual cannon on the flanks were each, perhaps, 8000 strong, and so ranked some eight deep” (Keegan 88). These figures are noteworthy for a few reasons. First, in no place in the film or text do we see the waiting period before the 700-yard march. Second, neither play nor film implies anything but one French line (though Shakespeare does show that the French had mounted horsemen atop a hill following the killing of the boys). Thirdly, there is no mention of cannon in either medium. Keegan’s brief description livens up the scope and design of the battle tremendously over the simple descriptions in the play.

Having halted 300 feet from the French line, the English archers, “who had each been carrying a stout double-pointed wooden stake since the tenth day of the march, had now to hammer these into the ground, at an angle, calculated to catch a warhorse in the chest” (Keegan 90). Again, this is an oversight in the textual version of the battle. But, Branagh’s film clearly shows the English infantry and archers driving stout wooden stakes into the ground. Thus Branagh, at least to some degree, knows of this tactic at the true Battle of Agincourt.

Having driven their stakes, the English then began to rain arrows on their foes from very extreme bowshot. Keegan notes that no soldier was likely hurt due to the volume of armor they wore, but their horses could be injured by arrows falling at a steep angle and penetrating their flanks (Keegan 93). Four such volleys were loosed and served to goad the already surly French into an ill-conceived charge. Keegan notes that “two groups of cavalry, each five or six hundred strong…led by Clignet de Brebant and Guillaume de Saveuse, made the English archer flanks their target” (Keegan 94). The purpose of such was to overwhelm and drive the archers from the field and leave the vastly outnumbered English infantry to fight alone (Keegan 94). The archers continue to rain arrows into the advancing charge, dropping horses and riders (Keegan 95). The result: a mad dash towards the English who, just before impact, stepped back and allowed the French cavalry to charge headlong into the pointed stakes, effectively stopping the charge as quickly as it started (Keegan 96). Horses died, knights fell, archers dispatched fallen knights, and some horses, with or without riders, turned tail and fled headlong into the now advancing French second line.

Of note, the majority if this episode is unseen in either Shakespeare or Branagh tale. In Shakespeare, Henry is alerted that the French are preparing to ride with all speed on the English line. Next, we see the battle met and Pistol taking a prisoner. With Branagh, we see the English preparation of their line but no arrows are loosed to goad the French into attacking. The English let loose only after the French cavalry charge. Again, neither version is accurate to the true details and Keegan’s discussion goes to great lengths to describe what ultimately defeats the French.

Horses that turned from the fray barreled right into the French infantry, obviously disrupting the flow of their advance. The English line gave way a few feet and the archers on the flanks pinch forward, trapping the French cavalry in a horseshoe. The interruption, according to Keegan, bought some valuable time for the English forces to dispatch enemies and brace for the next wave (Keegan 97). Furthermore, the close proximity played favorably for the archers whose arrows could penetrate French armor from close quarter combat. What the archers accomplished was to further bottle up the French in the center of the English horseshoe as French knights wanted nothing to do with archers from that close of range for a myriad of reasons (pride being the most foolish (Keegan 98)). The middle of the English line continued to fall back a step at time, to “spear’s length” in order to keep the advancing infantry off balance as they picked their way past mounted knights and the heaping dead (Keegan 98-99). Here, Keegan notes the prudent thing to do for the French would be to retreat, but retreat was impossible for three reasons. “One was the English fear of quitting their solid positions…behind the archers’ stakes…the second was the French certainty of victory; the third was their enormous press of numbers” (Keegan 99). The flaw here was the advancing second line of infantry continued to press into the throng, pushing knights and footsoldiers into the death dealt by the English army. Bodies were piling up and the stakes the English had planted slowed any consistent French advance. Those at the ‘front’ were essentially pressed to their deaths by their own reinforcements. English archers, with arrow or mace, joined the fray and the slaughter was on.

This entire episode is more or less omitted by Shakespeare. We cannot fault him though as he was telling the story of the king and several subjects primarily. Further, the limitations of staging and props and the like make the staging of this type of battle impossible. Branagh cannot be faulted either for even though the course of battle in the film barely follows Keegan’s facts, Branagh is going for dramatic appeal. The one-on-one combat between the French and English plays better on the screen and to be honest, watching the French bunch up and get mowed down in a straight line might be rather boring on screen if not handled well.

At this point, the majority of the French first line were either dead or captured. Huge numbers of French were captured for ransom by the English, a truth that is accurately portrayed by Shakespeare in the Pistol and Master Fer episode, as well as Henry taking Bourbon and Orleans captive. Keegan also notes that most of the second line that had not engaged in combat were likely aware of the disaster they were marching into and turned and ran from the field (Keegan 106). The remaining episode of note is the killing of the French prisoners. Here, both Keegan and Shakespeare present the same actions for pretty much the same reason. Keegan notes that the Duke of Brabant had arrived late to the battle and inspired the French to mass some 600 cavalry for another charge (Keegan 108). While the third line threatened a charge, mounted men under the Lord of Agincourt raided the baggage park. Henry, assuming perhaps the French army had performed this deed, acted on impulse. He sensed the impending charge of the third line, the luggage boys and wounded English had been killed (with looting of the King’s tent), and he feared the ill-guarded French prisoners would take up arms and fight from the rear. The killing of the prisoners, while reprehensible to some and a colossal loss of ransom income to others, is an understandable course of action. The killing was not met with uniform compliance and Henry had to order archers to do the dirty deed (Keegan 112). In Henry’s defense, he did order the prisoners spared after the French third line withdrew. Victorious, Henry books the dead, names the battle, and marches on to Calais with a sizeable group of French prisoners.

Keegan’s text is an amazing read if one is interested in the true Battle of Agincourt. Anyone who reads Shakespeare’s Henry V and/or has seen a filmed version of the same would be wise to read Keegan as a supplement. All three serve different purposes. Shakespeare attempts to tell an epic story of a young king waging a war for respect while humanizing very rich and eclectic characters. Branagh attempts to show an epic story through character interaction, musical scores, and grand battlefield scenes designed to better visualize the Agincourt campaign and enlarge the men to heroes who took part in the struggle of an undermanned force in the face of catastrophic odds. Finally, Keegan attempts to break down an epic story into what really happened, the conditions the men on the battlefield met, and the tragic error the French made in their ill-conceived charge and the carnage that ensued. Where Shakespeare gives the stories of the men in battle and Branagh gives us the actions and faces of the men in battle, Keegan gives us the soul of the battle. The truth lies in between all three.

WORKS CITED

Henry V. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Fox Video Company, 1991.

Keegan, John. The Face of Battle. Penguin Books, New York. 1978.

Shakespeare, William. Henry V. The Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor.

Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1998.

HUX 501: Preface to History

2007-11-11T21:16:00.000-05:00

A Preface to Gustavson

A Brief Look at History Through Carl Gustavson and his book: “A Preface to History”

Eric Williams

HUX 501-41

History

Professor James Jeffers

June 15^th, 2002

History. The term is one that tends to illicit thoughts of great men and women, revolutions, monumental events, and the progress of human societies. The lay student of history, that is one who approaches history in a novice as a high school student might, considers history to be a simple analysis of dates and era made important by various causes and effects. The novice historian is placated by merely understanding when some event happened coupled with a simple explanation as to the how’s and why’s. What the novice historian doesn’t understand is that the study of history is mush deeper than simple memorization and much more rewarding for the inquisitive mind.

What is the fundamental difference between the novice and the initiate historian? R.G. Collinwood states that “history teaches what man has done, and therefore what man is” (Holter 9). This seems a simple definition in light of what Carl Gustavson in his book A Preface to History teaches us. Gustavson states that to study history is to learn “ how the world…was put together” (Gustavson 3). A comparison of the two statements yields significant differences in how one might approach history. Simply understanding what man has done and what man is (to use outmoded gender identity – we all realize that, contrary to what the Greeks thought, man is not the measure of all things) horribly underestimates what history has to offer and an understanding of it’s true wit. Ah, but Gustavson’s term is much more apt. Learning how the world was put together, while true of the real nature of historical study, is so much more fascinating than a simple look at the people involved. Carl Gustavson’s book offers several approaches to understanding history and historical mindedness and utilizes several distinct examples to present how the world was put together through a look at the individual and the revolution in history.

Historical mindedness is a way of thinking; a form of reasoning that helps the historian deal with historical materials (Gustavson 5). Gustavson reiterates throughout his text that one must study more than simple names and dates in history. One must look at the various forces at work in the world to truly understand history. This is a difficult task for those who have simply approached history in the fashion of names and dates as mentioned prior. One must first realize that the past exists everywhere in the present, that civilizations, religions, and governments owe their present incarnation to thousands of years of historical evolution. This task seems daunting and in fact is so. Gustavson however offers us a roadmap to begin or slow journey to historical mindedness.

There are seven distinct tenets one must learn and utilize in considering historical mindedness. These tenets will help to reveal the multifaceted past to the ever-learning eye and mind of the historian. Furthermore, the historian can easily apply these self-same tenets to better understand their own lives, cities, states, and nations.

The first tenet Gustavson describes is in how we look at history. “The first characteristic is to be curious of what lies beneath the surface of history” (Gustavson 6). Essentially, Gustavson shows us that there are two ways of seeing history: one is a superficial observation of events or people in history and how we tend to simply focus more on the story of what these events or people are responsible for. A novice historian should note that looking at just the “story” is not enough. We tend to summarize these events to hastily and not completely think through the underlying causes or forces which may have been effecting this event or person for decades. The second way to look at history is to consider it as the powerful embodiment, terrible pleasures, or intense tensions of a society (Gustavson 6). The historian should look at other forces that led to the events, people, or occurrences glossed over in textbook or film or analysis. In all, the historian must be curious and delve for reasons not at first obvious to the untrained eye. Without this curiosity, the novice historian is doomed to only study dates and names from history. We learn about Abbot Suger as the man responsible for introducing stained glass to Gothic Cathedrals in France. We even learn when he created his church at San Denis. But we gloss over the why. Why did Suger decide to use stained glass? Where did he learn about it and how was it created. What battles did he have to fight within the church to get stained glass accepted in the churches? These all remain unanswered for the historian who only cares for names and dates.

“In studying any present problem, idea, or event the mind of the historian inevitably gravitates in the direction of the past, seeking origins, relationships and comparisons” (Gustavson 6). Events do not simply unfold without having some effect on other places or people. Further, we must be wary of finding associations between one event from the past and the series of events that invariably led to that event. We must be able to decipher the minute reasons as well as the monumental that led to an event. Consider for a moment the Titanic. There are a number of symptoms or reasons which led to the disaster. It is easy to simply say that the great vessel struck an iceberg, causing it to sink. But we must also consider the people, propaganda, and events which inexorably drove the ship to a watery grave. The known history of the ship Captain’s ineptitude, the desire to push the ship’s speed beyond safe capacities, the moniker of being unsinkable, the lack of lifeboats for all the people, the selective process of letting first-class women and children leave before even letting the women or children of the lower classes on deck to flee. There is a defined history to each of these elements rooted in the past where someone decided evacuation procedures. Where one placed a ‘value’ on the life of an upper-class woman or child above the woman or child from the slums.

The third tenet is where the student of society “must try to discern the shapes and contours of the forces which are dynamic in society” (Gustavson 6). Society is by no means a simple construct. Society has been brimming with great inventors, prophets, humanitarians, philosophers, humanists, extremists, and etc, since recorded history (and most likely before that too). We can break down the world into regional or religious or industrial societies like European, Christian, or Agrarian. But, to understand, say, Christian society we must be aware of how all the various elements of Christianity have effected it. We must do this to fully grasp what impact social forces have had on history, even a small part of it. We could easily say that in the United States you have Christian extremists, moderates, and liberals. Many of us are confused by the notion of a ‘Christian” man or woman premeditating the murder of an abortion doctor. Arguably, this is the work of Christian extremists as any liberal or moderate would point out. While the actions are questionable in legal and moral and ethical ways, by looking at the history surrounding this specific sect, their interpretation of God’s will, and their methods, motivations and morals, we could better understand why these extremists go about their plans (although it makes it no more acceptable).

“He stresses the continuity of society in all its forms” (Gustavson 6). The past never stops working. Its various effects are easily recognized in the present in a variety of ways. The world of today is nothing more than a simple cross-section of the entirety of history. One that dates all the way back to the emergence of humanity. The problem is that most people have a tendency to resist change. A level of complacency or comfort is established. The longer the complacency, the more resistant to change one becomes. History tends to remain in a state of continuity more than change. We can see this law to this very day in out own country. Blacks had been enslaved in our nation/colony for several centuries before their liberation during the Civil War. Blacks had been looked upon as second-class citizens, if not third-class. The freeing of the slaves did not bring about a sweeping acceptance of Blacks as equals. They were free, but the inequalities on the rights and treatments of Blacks proliferated until the Civil Rights movements of the 1960’s and still to this day.

“Society is perpetually undergoing a process of change” (Gustavson 7). Change is inevitable. Resistance is inevitable. The people and the planet have been evolving, changing if you will, for eons. Change is typically slow and very, very necessary. Society would stagnate if not for change; it would essentially be retarding itself without change. Nothing can invariably stop the eventual evolution of time, age, ideas, or practices. Change can be brought on by cataclysmic events like natural disasters or plague. These are the events we tend to see; yet small, almost insignificant events can also be the lynchpin for significant change. Johannes Gutenberg created a printing press during the course of Europe’s Middle Ages. The creation of the press allowed for the large-scale production of somewhat affordable Bibles to the people of Europe. One might consider the printing of the Bible to be a minor footnote; it was, after all, the most popular and influential book in Europe. What one might miss is the role the printing of the Bible played in the resurgence of literacy in Europe, the fuel it gave Scholars in questioning religious dogmatic law, it’s effect on the Monastic Society, and steps then taken to print the Bible in other languages other than Latin.

“He must approach his subject in a spirit of humility, prepared to recognize tenacious reality rather than what he wishes to find” (Gustavson 7). The historian must never wear blinders, must never have a preconceived notion of what he or she wants to find. By creating the image of what you hope to find before doing research in your subject, you are doomed to omit the very real facts which surround your topic. You have to be aware of what IS. We all have a tendency to look through rose-colored glasses at some point in our lives. We have a tendency to block-out criticism of our race, religion, nation, or family. If we approach history in the same way, we miss whole story. The haughty history we attribute to our own nation in respects to freedom, wars against Nazi fascism and their concentration camp agendas, and our opposition to ethnic cleansing look much different to those Black-American’s descended from slaves, those Japanese-Americans held in interment camps during World War II, and those Native Americans all but exterminated in our race to conquer the West. Only after we look at the ugly reality history can teach us can we finally make a real attempt to control or direct the forces of nature or society.

“Finally, the historian knows that each situation and event is unique” (Gustavson 7). History does not, in fact, repeat itself. There are no laws that govern history as their laws which govern science or mathematics. The factors which influence history are numerous and ever changing. As our own society progresses scientifically, culturally, religiously, and artistically, this same progress will exert its considerable will on changing the face of present history. We stand as the benefactors of what history might teach us so that we can learn from our mistakes and well as our triumphs. We take the hard-earned lessons from the stock market crash of 1929 and try to learn from them so that we might implement safeguards preventing a repeat of that same event. We learn from the terrible decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima the painful lesson of great power and the responsibility which comes hand in hand with it.

How might we become historically minded ourselves? The simple events listed prior are well known to most. They seem monumental in some ways….distant in others. But we can not take for granted what historical-mindedness can do for every one of us. One can apply these rules in discovering their heritage or family lineage. They can be applied to the study of one’s hometown, state, or nation. They can be applied to learning the fundamental differences between one’s religion and the mold from which it came. They can be applied to better understanding a social or political party or movement. The possibilities are endless, the only restriction is the ambition of the historian.

By applying these tenets, one may now approach history having many of the tools needed for rational analysis and deconstruction. History can be approached in a number of different ways. We can look at history like weather, as Gustavson outlines in chapter 3 of his text. The historian can not predict and never will be able to do so much like a meteorologist. Weather is full of high-pressure systems and anomalies just as history is. We tend to see weather as nothing more than wind or fog or rain, never regarding all the complex variable needed in order to actually create wind or fog or rain.

Gustavson also likens history to a clipper ship, saying that people must understand the forces that control the destiny of their ship just as much as the forces which shape the destiny of a people or a state (Gustavson 4). We also as individuals can approach history by actively seeking ties to the past. We touch history by our contact with our elected officials, our museums, our antiques, our observance of holidays, or a visit to historical sites just to name a few.

However, in our desire to touch the past, we cannot be blind to the driving forces which influenced and changed history. There are four specific principles that Gustavson mentions that we should be aware of in our studies. These are continuity, change, social forces, and causation.

Change and continuity tend to go hand in hand. There is no sudden or unannounced change. Both change and continuity are dynamic processes that never end. Change cannot exist without continuity and vice-versa. They are co-dependant entities. Gustavson uses the interesting metaphor of football as his example of change and continuity, detailing how various forces molded and shaped the sport into what it is today. The ways of scoring and the fundamentals of the game have remained relatively unchanged. This continuity is offset by the continuing changes to rules and regulations. This same set of circumstances can be modestly applied to social and political systems as well. Gustavson implies that each modification upsets the ‘game’ somewhere else, and that these modifications bring renewed demands for revisions (Gustavson 67). Most changes that happen in society are relatively small and imperceptible. The benefits of said changes might not be seen right away, and often the times in which these changes were enacted go by relatively unnoticed. The historian’s job is one in which they must emphasize the correct changes in the correct quantities. Gustavson shows us how:

1) Each historical event is conditioned by a background composed of various social forces

2) These social forces emerge very gradually

3) The expected process of social change is one of evolution, not abrupt change

4) Rapid-fire change might occur, but do not overlook the long term effects

(Gustavson 71-72)

The third principle is social forces. Social forces play a major role in the life and times of every individual and many of these forces exert pressure on a man or woman for the whole life. Gustavson defines social forces as “human energies which, originating in individual motivations, coalesce into a collective manifestation of power” (Gustavson 28). There are six social forces which play heavily into this definition: economic, religious, institutional, technological, ideological, and military (Gustavson 28). These six forces are quite expansive and cover the majority of social forces at play in the day to lives of people in their manifestation of power. Holter makes reference to a few other social forces including competition, awareness of one’s class, and education (Holter 19).

The fourth and final principle is causation. Gustavson begins his discussion by saying that all people inevitably ask what caused something to happen. Typically, many cite a simple answer, like a person was responsible (Luther caused the Reformation), or a single act (the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought us into WWII). The reason for this is blame. Gustavson writes that we assume one person or act is to blame for an act or event while never looking for other factors (Gustavson 54). Gustavson calls this tendency to blame one person or act “inadequate conceptions of causation” (Gustavson 55). Gustavson offers us two rules to follow when determining the cause of a historic movement or event. First is that no single cause ever adequately explains a historical episode. Using the term ‘cause’ is a matter of convenience to explain any number of factors which explains why an event happened. Secondly, while considering a historic episode, one must look for various factors (multiple causation) that entered into the event as it unfolded (Gustavson 56). Gustavson also presented a checklist to consider when trying to determine the cause(s) of a historical event:

· What was the immediate cause for the event?

· Had there been any background of agitation for those who are victorious in this episode?

· Were there personalities involved on either side whose strengths and weaknesses attributed to the outcome of the struggle?

· Were any new ideas stimulating the loyalty of a considerable group of people?

· How did the economic powers react and support this issue?

· Were religious forces active and involved?

· Did new technology influence the situation or outcome?

· Can the events be partially explained by weakened/strengthened institutions?

· Was the physical environment itself a factor in the situation?

We cannot overlook two last factors on our analysis of historiography: the role of the individual and the role of revolution. These represent two inexorable forces adding pressure to the façade of history.

The role of the individual in history has been debated between two schools of thought: those who support the Great Man Theory, and those who favor determinism. The Great Man Theory presses the idea that the major developments of human history are the work of one great man. This man seems to exert almost superhuman leadership, genius, and control over the fate of their and subsequent generations. These men are so gifted that rules governing society seem not to apply to them. They master and mold the circumstances of their time in accordance to their will. By this school of thought, the Great Man can be decisive during times of crisis where his personality and character are elevated to a high status.

The other side of this is the determinist mindset. Determinists consider that leadership is more appearance than action. Determinists believe that “history is a record of a constant process of evolution toward a predetermined goal in which interruptions may occur, and there may be unforeseen delays and detours, but the ultimate result is foreordained” (Gustavson 124). By this definition leaders do not truly lead. Determinists admit that an individual can influence events, but only if the circumstances are ripe for such influence. Here, the leader is simply the voice of change and can only achieve anything so long as he acts in accordance with the will of the group. The leader is dependent on outside factors.

Gustavson states very clearly that history is the story of the successful, that those who have succeeded are those who write history (Gustavson 127). However, Gustavson also points out that some social forces are too powerful for any man, regardless if he is a Great Man or a Determinist Man. The majority of long term trends are not the work of the individual. While there may be instances in which some one is inexplicably in the right place at the right time to enact a serious social change on his own, these instances are exceedingly rare and are typically through the will of the people who carry out the Great/Determinist Man’s legacy.

Revolution, the other force yet to be discussed, is defined simply as a deviation from normal evolution. We like to think of revolution in lofty terms of a cataclysmic upheaval of people who shirk off the bonds placed on them by the inequities of a selfish government and the tyrannies of evil men. This could not be any more incorrect. Gustavson lest us know in no uncertain terms that every situation leading to revolution is unique, and that any broad statement designed to cover numerous revolutionary episodes leave themselves open to be eviscerated by the keen historian (Gustavson 98). A revolution is a phenom, one that pits a social or economic group against another in an attempt to wrest control of the state under circumstances of violence (Gustavson 99).

Revolutions are few and far between and the vast majority end in utter failure. If this is the case, then why do we favor violence in trying to enact change? Why do we not continue with peaceful actions in hopes of speeding up the evolution of our state? Gustavson gives three reasons:

1) Powerful social forces may be driving society in a certain direction that is retrograde to the will of one specific group or force

2) Initial events disturb the traditional equilibrium in a community causing a ‘pressure point’

3) Violence might only be the “froth” in the turbulent undercurrents of a society

(Gustavson 99)

Furthermore, revolutions are not so simple as to be defined by conventional terms or beliefs. Revolution is not necessarily caused by the misery of the people. Gustavson points out that extreme poverty and suffering tend to breed apathy rather than rebellion (Gustavson 100). These people who suffer are too busy just trying to survive and are not committed or qualified to lead or follow a rebellion. At best, those who suffer might be the cause of mob scenes or uprisings, but typically lacking leadership, these events are doomed to failure.

The tyranny or brutality of government is not a principal reason for revolution. Governments are not overthrown, they commit suicide (Gustavson 103). They commit suicide by showing weakness or incompetence. The reason for this is that, again, the longer a government rules, the less likely it is to change, whether by enacting social reforms, tax reforms, legal reforms etc. When confronted by resistance to a policy, these governments tend to buckle, fueling the idea that they can be overthrown.

People do not rise spontaneously, storm the citadels of government, and seize power. While most revolutions claim to serve the interests of the people, many serve the interests of one specific group. Revolutions tend to be pressed forward by just a handful of insurgents who, if removed, can not rally the mob to their cause. These men speak enthusiastically to a crowd that was “heterogeneous…inspired by mass psychology and probably led by men who suddenly saw their opportunity” (Gustavson 105). Events of this nature tend to bring men of like mind together, giving them a greater sense of purpose. Typically, this group is made up of moderates and extremists. When the confrontation turns violent, it is typically the moderates who first take power, later ousted by the extremists who believe the moderates were not enacting radical changes.

Revolution is not designed to gain greater freedom for the people. Gustavson writes that the new administration will exercise more effective control than that which was ousted and will likely enact a positive lessening of personal liberties by disguising them as the removal of abuses of the previous regime (Gustavson 108). Hence, while revolutions have become a focal point of study for many a student, historical analysis of military revolutions like the French or American Revolution, can be dissected and deconstructed down to a multitude of complex forces all at work together, whether a weak government, political radicals, or financial instability not to mention religious forces.

Gustavson’s book fairly effectively in his presentation of historiography and historical mindedness. He begins by defining and introducing the ideology behind historical mindedness, presents a number of forces that help to define history through the ages, and finally discusses some of the more predominant pressures on history like revolutions. At the same time, Gustavson mixes metaphors and analogies in which to make the reader better associate hi or herself with the lessons being taught. Gustavson’s ‘voice’ is recognizable throughout the book and he gently prods the young initiate of history to further understanding through correlations to well-known events and examples. He writes rather effectively, though at times his language and verbiage is a bit lofty, emphasizing the logical, rational, and the analytical. While the examples are well-detailed and well thought out, they represent events of a by-gone age and at times Gustavson fails to tie it all together with the modern age. In his defense, Gustavson never interjects heavy-handed opinions, serving to let the facts he presents speak for themselves. In this way, he allows for a variety of conflicting viewpoints to be presented, as in the Great Man/Determinist Man discussion, and allows the reader to more or less decide for him or herself which they prefer. While he offers us this privilege, he also warns us about consequences of neglecting either argument.

Gustavson has left virtually no stone unturned. His use of example and episode is thorough enough to answer the questions one contemplates on the surface, but leaves one with enough of a taste to make them seek more answers on their own. All in all the book is quite effective, although it’s age leaves some speculation as to how some of the principles put forth in the text might respond to a society that seems to be evolving at the sped of light when compared to other previous eras.

Works Cited

Gustavson, Carl G. A Preface to History. New York. McGraw-Hill Company, 1955.

Holter, Howard. “Humanities 501: Defining the Humanities: History Course Guide”. California …..State University, Dominguez Hills, 1999.

Candidacy Essay One

2007-11-11T20:37:00.001-05:00

Heroism

A Case for Further Study of the Heroic Code and the Warriors Who Serve It

Eric Williams

Advancement to Candidacy Examination

Essay One

Humanities External Degree

July 3, 2003

Warfare has intrigued me for years. Throughout studies as an undergraduate, I gravitated towards those courses which featured focused looks at various battles in history and the major players within those conflicts. The Western Humanities courses I enrolled in looked at the evolution of the arts from a historical perspective and each chapter had a section dedicated to better understanding how warfare shaped the cultures of an age and how the arts reflected those changes. My literature courses also tended towards a look at warfare with selections covering Arthurian Legend, Chivalric Code, Revolutionary Writers in France, and further glimpses of warfare through the works of Heller, Vonnegut, O’Brien, and Hemingway.

My journey into Graduate School saw a continuation of this interest while enrolled in the HUX 530 class: War and the Human Experience with Dr. Bryan Feuer. Through this class, study was made in the historical and factual element of warfare through the writings of John Keegan and others. Additional study was made available through literary selections such as All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque and Henry V by William Shakespeare. By far the most enjoyable was Homer’s Iliad and the written assignment for that text has proven to be the most dynamic and interesting of the graduate papers I have written to date.

In the assignment I was required to discuss Homer’s concept of the warrior as a hero. Further, I was to explain the underlying relationship between the hero and the society of which he is a part. In researching this project, I came to learn much about the intrinsic values and qualities attributed to the warrior class of ancient Greece. Further, I came to understand the price of failure of these heroes and the penalty for losing their honor through cowardice or insult. I also came to understand the ideology of hero worship and how the institution of Greek warrior-heroes eventually waned and disappeared. With the completion of this essay and this class, I garnered a new respect for the Greek warrior-hero and was curious as to how other cultures affirm the qualities that make a warrior-hero.

The root idea of understanding the concept of the warrior-hero is quite worthy of further study. It lends itself nicely to further, expanded consideration as a possible final thesis topic in that Feuer has already provided the groundwork for understanding how one culture (if not more) views the warrior’s role in society, and which qualities make him heroic. Additional research could take one of three possible directions. First, a student could opt to study how other societies contemporary with the ancient Greeks formulated the criteria for a warrior-hero such as the Assyrians, the Hittites, or the Persians. A second possible avenue would be for the student to continue to study how elements of heroism are conceived in other war-like societies in Western Europe, focusing next on the Romans and eventually pressing onward through history till the Christian Crusaders are studied and onward still into knighthood and the chivalric code. Finally, a student could opt to explore the basic elements of the warrior class in foreign cultures and research what qualities make one heroic. Societies, nations, and cultures like the Mongols, Hutu, Aztec, Maori, Saracen, Magyar, and Viking could all be studied in an effort to correlate those warrior ethics which are universally shared and which are dynamically different. As the course is historical in its context, the additional study of other historical peoples would be a rational extension to an already worthy research topic.

Regardless, Dr. Feuer’s class taught me a great deal about the nature of warfare and how both the warrior class and the peasant class binge or suffer based on the prosperity of one another. The course masterfully weaves literary and historical accounts of warfare into a cohesive unit of study and by learning to look through these media, one would be quite capable of further pursuing study of the warrior-hero and his role in the society he represents.

Candidacy Essay Two

2007-11-11T20:25:00.001-05:00

L'art d'être humain

A Look at the Value of a Humanities Education

By

Eric Williams

Advancement to Candidacy

Essay Two

Humanities External Degree Program

July 3, 2003

There has been a trend in the United States to favor graduate degrees that are either specialized or practical or both. Pursuing a Master’s Degree in Educational Technology or Social Services, for example, has become quite popular, and the value of higher education in those practical and/or specialized fields is readily apparent when one considers the growth in these fields. But is there value in studying the Humanities? A wide variety of U.S. colleges offer graduate work in some discipline or area of the Humanities, but what is the value of its study? To some, study in the arts and sciences is akin to career suicide -- that there is no use or value in studying artists, musicians, philosophers or historical figures long dead in moldy graves. Scholarly study of the Humanities should not be taken for granted, however, for to study the Humanities is to study something revealing of the human condition through the Arts and Social Sciences.

To study the Humanities is to study the human world and to know what it is to be human. Scholarly study of the Arts allows one to explore human culture and history, human beliefs and human values. Studying painting or sculpture allows one to better understand how various peoples in history expressed themselves, represented themselves, and how they dwelled on the primary conditions of what it was to be human. Scholarly study of the Social Sciences further allows one to analyze human behavior in regards to their relationships with their god(s), government, and each other. History and Philosophy illustrate the relationships between environmental, social, and ethical processes used to mold and craft civilization.

The further value of the Humanities is that advances in technology and communication have served to bridge gaps between nations and cultures. Every day the world pushes inexorably towards globalized technology, economy and communications. Now more than ever, graduates entering the work force need an ability to understand the nature of these changes by becoming better prepared to understand this new world environment. The Humanities offers students the ability to quantify how humans think, how they interact with another, and how they interpret their experiences. Further, deeper study of Humanities allows one to understand how various social and political institutions evolved and function as well as the valuable skill of understanding some of the important root elements of a culture and how that has affected their current society.

Scholarly study of the Humanities should not be taken for granted, for to study the Humanities is to study something revealing of the human condition through the Arts and Social Sciences. To study the arts and sciences is to acquire study skills useful in the world of today and tomorrow. It is a lifelong learning process that fosters a dynamic mind well suited for applying ingrained lessons into the progressive workplace. Armed with a suitable knowledge of the Humanities, today’s graduates are equipped with an ability to look beyond the surface of issues and relationships, indeed it allows them to delve well beyond that surface to appreciate and relate to the underlying idiosyncrasies of the world and its people.

Intellectual Autobiography: Part of My Acceptance Into the HUX Program

2007-11-11T20:23:00.000-05:00

When I Consider How My Life’s Been Spent

When thinking back on my cultural experiences, I realize how intellectually, culturally, and artistically devoid my life had been. I found myself shocked at how little I craved or understood the arts as a child or as a young adult in high school. Although I had attended plays as a child, I never fully understood or appreciated the experience for its inherent value. This all changed for me as a freshman at Akron University.

I, like many other incoming students, had no direction or idea as to a possible major. I found myself mired in the core curriculum at Akron, trudging my way through a myriad of prerequisite courses hoping for some divine inspirartion that would choose my major for me. One such course was English Composition. The professor, Mary Tohill, took a unique approach to the coursework. She required us to attend movies, plays, and other cultural events and report our findings in our journals. On Halloween night, I attended a play called The Passion of Dracula. Being Halloween, the cast and crew naturally put forth a novel effort into the show, pulling stunts and utilizing new props to add a new dimension to what I considered an excellent play. My experience with this play sparked me on to searching out new artistic and cultural avenues in my life.

My love for theatre spread and my new hunger for it led me to seeing dozens of live perfomances. In the years following my Dracula experience I attended dinner theatre, seeing such shows as Will Rogers’ Follies, Damn Yankees¸ Ain’t Misbehavin’, and Gypsy. Furthermore, I found myself attending shows at my school, seeing such shows as Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night. Still I pursued theatre, witnessing shows at the State Theater in Cleveland and seeing wonderfully staged productions of Phanton of the Opera, Miss Saigon, and Taming of the Shrew. My love for theatre pressed on and even led me to trying out for a small production of Godspell at the local community college where I learned to sing and train my voice as the character Judas.

The experience of trying out for the role of Judas filled me with even more confidence to try new things. At this point I fancied myself a bit of a writer. I had taken a few creative writing courses through the school and found myself eventually taking over the reigns of Editor in Chief of the college’s literary magazine, Waynessence. Í poured over countless submissions, some of which were extremely well written. During this time I began to wonder why there was no forum for these poets and storytellers other than this magazine. I approached the Writing Center Director, Marjorie Kiel, and pitched an idea for a poetry night. Working diligently with Ms. Kiel, we set up a date and mailed out invitations for artists, musicians, and writers to attend the first ever Prose, Poetry, and Acoustical Jam night at Akron’s satellite campus, Wayne College. The event was a much needed forum for anonymous artists to get their work into the public eye. I myself emceed the event and had the honor of being the last reader of the evening. The event was met with remarkably good reviews and the Prose, Poetry, and Acoustical Jam has been an annual fixture of the college for eight years running.

The poetry night also served to bring very talented local musicians to the show. My brother was playing bass guitar in a band at the time and they played the inaugural show. They were invited back the following year and he asked me if I wanted to sing a song at the show that year. I eventually agreed and we learned Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World which I sang the lead. The experience I had gained from trying out for the Judas role combined reading poetry in front of a large group helped me get over the paralyzing stage fright I felt that night. The song sounded quite good and I found myself attending more and more band practices with my brother, eventually landing the lead singer job. We have played together for six years and have played a variety of parties, bars, and school sponsored events in that span.

Finally, about the time the poetry jam was taking off, I was involved in my humanities class at Wayne College. I had worked my way into a variety of artistic disciplines at this point, yet still had no real experience with painting. As part of the class we were required to take a field trip up to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I wasn’t sure what to expect, as I knew nothing of painting. We went to the museum and spent the better part of the day there. It was overwhelming experience. The sheer volume of works and themes was far too vast to process in one day. My eyes roamed over the canvases of Jacques Louis David, Frans Hals, El Greco, and Claude Monet to name a few. The overall experience of the art museum coupled with the enthusiasm of my instructor led me to taking the second section of humanities so I could warrant another trip to the museum. Since that time I have been to the Cleveland Art Museum six more times and always find something new to my eye.

There are more experiences that could yet be related. Trips to the symphony to hear Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, a trip to see the pyramids in Mexico, and a handful of others. When I look at how my life’s been spent, I find myself depressed at the fact that it took me the better part of 19 years to understand what the arts can do for me. My experiences have shaped and instilled me with the confidence to try new things in front of many people. And, with a spot of luck, I may yet inspire others to expand their own horizons in the same ways I have.

HUX 505: Evil

2007-11-08T09:39:00.001-05:00

EVIL

Its Roots and Role

Eric S Williams

HUX 505: Introduction to Philosophy

Dr. Eiichi Shimomisse

December, 2001

Men and women have wrestled with the notion of good and evil for thousands of years. Every principal religion is based upon some sort of supreme being responsible for creating the world and the plants, animals, and people which populate it. Further, each principal religion deals with some god, goddess, or force, which is responsible for evil in some way. While many people may agree that indeed ‘evil’ does have its roots on myth, legend, or religion it is a much more complicated monster to deal with in the Christian religion. As the Christian faith is based upon the concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and inherently ‘good’ God, then how can so much ‘evil’ exist and for what purpose. In order to answer this premise one must look at it from a broad perspective and begin by defining and quantifying ‘evil’. To understand ‘evil’ and it’s place in the Christian religion, one must first define and analyze the notion of ‘evil’ and the arguments for why or how it can exist.

The term ‘evil’ is a very old term, owing its origins to the language of the Indo-Europeans (the term wep- which is meant bad or evil) and first appeared in the canon of Old English in the form of yfel (American Heritage 1623). It is further defined using words or phrases like morally bad or wrong, wicked, causing ruin, pain or injury, malicious, and spite (American Heritage 476). The term is first used in the Bible in Genesis. In Genesis, the serpent tempts eve to eat of the forbidden fruit. Buy eating it her “eyes will be opened, and you [Eve] will be like God, knowing good and evil” (New Student Bible 28). This is the first mention of evil, yet it isn’t truly defined. It would make sense then that the idea of evil must be known as malicious or spiteful acts in some regard as the Bible here fails to define evil…we are expected to already know what it is. The intriguing point to consider is that humanity must have been oblivious to what evil is as the serpent tells us that only God know good from evil. But how does knowing what evil is cause it to happen in the world?

The ‘problem’ of evil isn’t summarized by saying it is the need to understand and combat evil. That is far too short sighted. The notions of understanding evil and engaging in humanitarian to limit or combat evil is a noble cause but still sidesteps the main issue presented here: why does evil exist at all? The Internet web page www.britanica.com defines the problem of evil as “a theological problem that arises for any philosophical or religious view the following three propositions: (1) God is almighty, (2) God is perfectly good, and (3) evil exists. If evil exists, it seems either that God wants to obliterate evil and is not able to—and thus his almightiness is denied—or that God is able to obliterate evil but does not want to—and thus his goodness is denied” (“problem of evil”). We could serve to solve this problem by merely subtracting any one of the three preceding propositions. This is quite problematic as all three of these propositions are heavily discussed and defended in the Bible and in Christian Theology. The book of Genesis already stated that God knows good from evil. God’s might is represented in the Creation, the Flood, and the Exodus of Moses. Finally, God’s goodness is refined in the New Testament through the words of his son, the prophet Jesus Christ. Thus, the problem of evil relies more heavily on interpretation than on simply denying any of the simple truths held by Christian tenet.

So then why does evil exist? B.C. Johnson argues in his article “God and the Problem of Evil” that evil exists in order to create a sense of moral urgency on the part of humanity ( Burr and Goldinger 159). Moral urgency is the desire to do things or make things right. Johnson claims that God cannot interfere in evils such as natural disasters without damaging the need for moral urgency (159). “…God is seen as one who tolerates disasters…in order to create moral urgency. It follows that God approved these disasters as a means to encourage the creation of moral urgency. Furthermore, if there were no such disasters occurring, God would have to see to it that they occur” (qtd. in Burr and Goldinger 159). By this argument, Johnson indicates that evil is needed in order to make humanity understand and work for good.

The argument does not simply end there. Johnson continues to defend the need for evil three other ways:

1) Evil is needed in to produce virtues in humans like courage and sympathy.

2) Evil is needed to deflate man’s ego so he does not laud his good fortune.

3) Evil is needed as a contrast to good so we can know what good truly is (Burr and Goldinger 160-61).

These ideas point to an inclination that evil is necessary in order teach or inspire. These do not necessarily sit well with everyone. Those who put there faith and devotion in the worship of an all loving and all powerful God are hard pressed to believe that God would willingly allow or encourage such behavior. Let us consider another possibility.

St. Augustine contends that the world is the creation of a good God for good purposes (Burr and Goldinger 165). Augustine further contends that there are varying degrees of goodness. By this definition, all beings have some degree of good to them. Augustine allows for the presence of evil by discussing how good may be distorted or spoiled by such. He believes that evil then is parasitic to good and is not necessarily the creation of God but is still very much real (Burr and Goldinger 165). Evil is then some disorder of nature and is not the work of God.

John Hick in his article “The problem of Evil” makes mention that evil may be inextricably linked to humanity’s free will. Hick writes, “To be a person is to be a finite center of freedom, a …self-directing agent responsible for one’s own decisions. This involves being free to wrongly as well as rightly. The idea of a person…always to act rightly is self-contradictory” (qtd. in Burr and Goldinger 165). Thus, all people are capable of sin, and therefore evil, because of free will and the right to self-determination. Hick also contends that, “to say that God should not have created beings who might sin amounts to saying that he(sic) should not have created people” (165).

A final argument for the existence of evil comes from the idea that good and evil cannot exist without one another. This idea is popular with some theorists and philosophers but not so with many theists. The main idea is that evil and good are contradictory terms by nature but must exist to create balance and symmetry in the universe. This basically claims impossible to imagine good without evil, “because of the tight logical relation between the two concepts (“Philosophical Problem”). Many major religions believe in a utopia, but many of these same religions have a polar opposite for utopia. In Christianity, Hell sits vastly apart from Heaven in it’s location, description, and inhabitants. Thus we create balance between good and evil. The fact is that even though many try to dismiss evil, the theory of balanced good to evil makes it necessary for us to consider its existence, though we try to imagine the evil as being some other place like Hell (“Philosophical Problem”). The problem addressed here isn’t that good and evil exist, but how it seems distributed. Can we believe that the evils subjected to children across the globe have a corresponding good that goes with it? In light of the tragic events in our own history this past 100 years, can we find a good strong enough to balance the Holocaust, Titanic disaster, Columbine, or the fall of the Trade Center Towers? The answer is not yet clear as no one may is able to calculate amounts of evil with amounts of good. This does not dismiss the validity of this argument for the existence of evil, however.
There are other theodicies which attempt to explain the role of evil. Some claim that evil is a means for punishing sin or as a means to remind us of God’s power (“Philosophical Problem”). Others claim that evil exists because of the fall of Adam to Original Sin, more or less making evils both moral and natural justified. Older theories from the Gothic and Romanesque ages claim that evils make us appreciate the afterlife, that all shall be made up to us in heaven. Finally, there are those who might say that evil is present to test our faith in God. Regardless of what you or I believe realistically, philosophically, or theistically, evil exists. It’s riddles, role, and explanation has been the point of contention for countless theorists since the Golden Age of Greece and likely before that.

To understand ‘evil’ and it’s place in the Christian religion, one must first define and analyze the notion of ‘evil’ and the arguments for why or how it can exist. Its roots trace back deep into religion and lingual history. Its face is ever changing and takes elements of the beautiful, sensual, grotesque, and hellish. No one answer has been able to truly explain its role in any convincing or infallible manner. Many of the theories discussed here agree that God created the fact of freedom and that humanity creates acts of freedom. The ability of any of us to exercise free will allows us choices based on possible repercussions. Augustine believed that we will act on good, the extent that evil has poisoned or distorted our choice makes the act fair or foul. Johnson argued that evil was needed to create moral urgency and Hick stated that we are free to choose ill as freely as we could choose to do well. Whatever it is we believe in, the true answer may never be known to us and we may be better off for it. History has dictated that to know is to control. The notion that any of us may be able to eventually know what evil is and why it is here is frightening when you consider how finite beings might choose to use it.

WORKS CITED

American Heritage Dictionary. 3^rd Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1997.

Hick, John. “The Problem of Evil”. Philosophy and Contemporary Issues. 8^th Edition.

John R. Burr and Martin Goldinger, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 2000. 164-69.

Johnson, B.C. “God and the Problem of Evil”. Philosophy and Contemporary Issues.

8th Edition. John R. Burr and Martin Goldinger. Prenticr Hall, New Jersey, 2000. 158-163.

New Student Bible, The: New International Version. Zondervan Publishing Company,

Michigan. 1996.

“Philosophical Problem of Evil, The”. October 13^th, 2001. http://www.albany.edu/~rs5651/evil.htm

HUX 505: Paternalism and Self-Medication

2007-11-08T09:38:00.001-05:00

Rights nor Choices

The Ethics of Paternalism and Self-Medication

Eric S. Williams

HUX 505

Defining the Humanities: Philosophy

Dr. Eiichi Shimomisse

February 22, 2001

Drug use in America has cast a shadowy specter of fear into the hearts, minds, and souls of its citizenry. Many Americans honestly believe that drug use, or abuse if you will, is a self-destructive act that harms both the user and their friends, family, and community. It is this track of thought that invariably leads many of us to consider that some sort of direct interaction on the part of either the state or religion must be enforced onto the will of the drug user. By this direct intervention or coercion, the state and religious institutions in America seek to coax users of illicit narcotics away from their self-destructive behavior. This idea of intervention is often referred to in the philosophical world as “Paternalism”.

The term ‘paternalism’ is defined as: “The view that restrictions on individual liberty are legitimate when they are justified by appealing to the values and the welfare of the person being restricted” (Burr and Goldinger 545). This particular belief is rather controversial; it is essentially outright coercion justified by the promise of a benevolent end. That is, paternalism seeks to control the behavior or rights of individuals to preserve the greater good at the expense of personal rights. This coercion is justified in many cases against the user of illicit drugs due to the language or symptoms placed with it. Drug users are often referred to as ‘sick’, their behavior the result of their ‘disease’. This underlying belief that users are ill helps to justify the use of paternalistic intervention in the form of therapy and criminal policy designed to somehow cure them. The arguments for this direct governmental or religious intervention into the lives of private citizens is not without detractors. There are those, such as Dr. Thomas Szasz, who believe that drug use, or self-medication as he calls it, should be available without restriction. His arguments are as equally poignant for a free market of drugs as his state represented opposition works vehemently against it. This paper will seek to understand the essential arguments in support of paternalism in regards to its role against the use of illicit drugs, and report on the arguments opposing said paternalism as presented by Dr. Thomas Szasz and others.

Recreational drug use is seen by many as a victimless crime. On the same token, it seen as a horrifying and self-destructive addiction with victims affected beyond the drug user. There are thousands of Americans that use recreational drugs on a daily basis. This use, however, has been criminalized by a seemingly benevolent state. ‘Paternalism protects people from themselves, as if their safety were more important than their liberty”(Suber). Thusly, as many consider drug use to be a disease, it is logical then that a benevolent state would claim that their intervention in the lives of private citizens to cure them of their drug habits is, in truth, working for the best interest of said user. This glaringly contrasts with the harm principle proposed by John Stuart Mill, who said in his work On Liberty:

“…the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant”. (qtd. in Zwolinski)

Is this a logical assumption then? Many oppose this point of view based on a number of differing arguments. Everyone can agree that many people engage in what we consider self-destructive behavior, and that this behavior duly affects those around the offender. In short, a man or woman who drinks to excess and then drives is not only endangering themselves, but the life and liberty of others around them. It’s in this case that we could contend the state has a genuine right to interject into the lives of the common citizen to protect them from the iniquities of the selfish or irrational who may due us injury physically, psychologically, and financially. Isaiah Berlin embellishes this premise by arguing that the state:

“…is in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness, performance of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfillment), must be identical with his freedom—the free choice of his ‘true,’ albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self”. (qtd. in Zwolinski)

What one must come to accept is that the state often believes that it acts in the best interest of those whom it governs. So too does it feel it is acting in the citizens’ best interest when it prohibits the use, sale, or consumption of recreational drugs. Many claim it is hypocritical of the state to allow the sale of tobacco or alcohol, yet ban potentially ‘safer’ drugs. These critics point to the facts that, “…the total number of deaths caused by misuse of alcohol greatly exceeds the number caused by misuse of drugs, and around 0.9 percent of smokers die each year of smoking-related diseases, compared to only 0.0002 per cent of Ecstasy users”(“Dependence and Addiction”). Paternalists disagree with this notion, saying that if tobacco and alcohol were to be introduced into the market today, they would never be approved for sale or consumption due to their damaging nature (“Dependence and Addiction”). Indeed, alcohol and tobacco have enjoyed a long, prosperous life in the United States; they have become engendered into the very fabric of our society, becoming more or less socially acceptable sins.

Has this always been true of just alcohol and tobacco? No. According to Dr. Thomas Szasz, a free market of drugs was enjoyed by the United States from 1776 till 1914 (Szasz, “The War on Drugs”). Szasz opposes any state-sanctioned restrictions in the case of drug use. Yet paternalists assert that certain restrictions or controls must be placed on illicit drugs to protect people from doing harm to themselves. The Christian Medical Fellowship is quoted as saying:

“Telling people not to take drugs is often seen as authoritarian. However, the Christian view is that it is damaging to become a slave to anything, and addiction to drugs is a form of slavery. Intriguingly, it is today’s demand for freedom of choice that can lead to addiction….We are intended to depend on Him [God] and relate to Him…in contrast to the restrictions imposed by addiction to drugs, dependence on God is the route to real freedom. (“Dependence and Addiction”)

Mark Kleinman presents a slightly more secular point of view. In his book, The New Paternalism: Supervisory Approaches to Poverty, Kleinman asserts that paternalism must be introduced in society to quell use and addiction to illicit drugs. He defends intrusion of paternalistic practices by the state on the individual for a variety of reasons listed herein:

n The assumption that healthy adults are capable of acting rationally in their own interests matches reality only imperfectly

n The 3 million or so persons who are both heavy users of expensive drugs and involved in the criminal justice system account for large proportions of criminal offenses and consumption of expensive drugs.

n Continued use of expensive drugs among offenders is linked with continued high rates of criminal activity.

n Illicit street markets cause enormous social damage.

n The probation and parole systems are the key to managing the population of drug using offenders. Abstinence from drug use ought to be made a condition of continued liberty, and that condition ought to be enforced with frequent drug tests and predictable sanctions. (Kleinman 184)

Kleinman’s arguments for paternalistic coercion in the realm of drug addiction go beyond these facts. Kleinman also contends that, “the assumption that healthy adults are always or almost always the capable stewards of their own well being” is also flawed (Kleinman 187). This assumption, Kleinman believes, leaves no role for authoritative restrictions designed to govern such behavior as it may be seen as dangerous or destructive (187). Further, Kleinman goes on to contend that rational minds may “demand(s) calculation, (and that) someone who gets that calculation wrong may act in ways not conducive to his goals” (188). It assumed by most paternalists that the rational human seeks to live a long and healthy life, and that acting retrograde to that end is both counterproductive and unnatural. Criminals, as Kleinman calls them, use drugs to degrade his own judgement. We assume, then, that all people wish to do right by the law and that no individual seeks to injure themselves or others on purpose. But someone acting in public either intoxicated on liquors or drugs can potentially injure themselves through irrational actions, or others through poor judgement (as in the case of driving drunk or falling off a ledge while high).

Thomas Szasz argues against the basic premises of paternalism, claiming that, “In an open society, it is none of the government’s business what idea a man puts into his mind; likewise it should be none of the government’s business what drug he puts into his body”(qtd. in Burr and Goldinger 366). Szasz defends this premise by saying that, “drug addiction or drug abuse cannot be defined without specifying the proper and improper use of pharmacologically active agents”, and further goes on to add, “…these judgements have nothing whatever to do with medicine, pharmacology, or psychiatry. They are moral judgements” (365). Essentially then, what Szasz is defending here isn’t the unilateral use of drugs, it is the misconceptions surrounding it’s labeling.

Drugs are often labeled as ‘dangerous’ to the user in a variety of ways. It is claimed by paternalist Gerald Dworkin that drug users are unable to understand the consequences of their own actions, particularly “decisions which involve taking drugs that are physically or psychologically addictive and those which are destructive to one’s own mental and physical capacities” (qtd. in Burr and Goldinger 383). Following this train of thought, a drug user may not be in total control of their faculties when contemplating self-destructive behavior such as suicide. Dworkin says “decisions, such as that to commit suicide, …are usually made at a point where the individual is not thinking clearly and calmly about the nature of his decision” (383). By this judgement, a paternalist may assume that drugs may somehow be responsible for suicide, as it was the drug that robbed the user of the rational mind…keeping them from knowing better.

Szasz refutes this claim while still accepting some modicum of paternalistic truth. Szasz agrees that indeed some drugs are dangerous, such that heroin is more deadly than aspirin, etc. Yet he also claims it is ludicrous to blame drugs for suicide or accidental deaths. Szasz claims that self-destructive behavior “may be regarded as sinful and penalized by means of informal sanctions. But it should not be regarded as a crime or (mental) disease …it is absurd to deprive an adult of a drug (or of anything else) because he might use it to kill himself. To do so is to treat everyone the way institutional psychiatrists treat the so-called suicidal mental patient” (qtd. in Burr and Goldinger 366).

At the heart of Szasz’ queries is the underlying anger of addicts being labeled as ‘sick’ or ‘diseased’. Szasz dictates that people take drugs for two very different reasons. One is to allow the user to conform and function in society; the other is an outright refusal to prescribe to social conformity (qtd. in Burr and Goldinger 367). Szasz claims the stigma of fear placed on drug users is the result of societal inability to understand that users are not “’addicts’…unfit or unwilling to work and be ‘normal,” and that the general public is more comfortable “to believe that they [addicts] act as they do because certain drugs…make them ‘sick’” (367). Indeed the Christian Medical Fellowship clearly writes, “addiction leads to illness, accidents, unemployment, family breakdown, child neglect and violence” (“Dependence and Addiction”). Kleinman takes it a step further, claiming that even drug dealers are irrational in that they themselves do not fully understand the repercussions of their actions, that dealing is “less than rational behavior” (194).

Szasz replies that an easy way to end the social and psychological problems associated with drugs is to allow a free trade market for drugs. Szasz claims that a free trade market would be “more economical for those of us who work, even if we had to support legions of addicts [via taxation], than is our present program of trying to ‘cure’ them” (qtd. in Burr and Goldinger 369). The paternalistic fear that free market trade would result in scores of addicts is also scrutinized by Szasz, who says that laziness and industriousness are more engendered in our cultural patterns. This is why, Szasz points out, the Japanese haven’t been on a sexual free for all since the introduction of free trade abortion (368).

Should drugs then be available to everyone without limitations? Paternalists claim that their essential function is to protect children who are “generally held not to possess the full range of liberties open to adults and…state intervention seems sometimes warranted” (Zwolinski). Szasz agrees with this, stating that some measure of maturity, or at least age, is needed in order to become fully possessed of the right to self-meidcate (Burr and Goldinger 370). That notwithstanding, what about accountability for injury inflicted onto others while under the influence? Is Szasz permitting the free use and indulgence of drugs at any time and place? No. Szasz believes that drugs should be treated more or less in the same fashion as alcohol. Governmental controls on drugs would allow for more responsibility to be placed on the parent to educate and control their children in regards to drug use as minors (370). Furthermore, as we “prohibit by law the sexual seduction of children by adults…”pharmacological seduction” of children by adults should be similarly punishable” (371). Finally, self-medication should be carried out in private or designated locations in public. “Public intoxication, not only with alcohol but with any drug, should be an offense punishable by criminal law. Furthermore, acts that may injure others—such as driving a car—should, when carried out in a drug intoxicated state, be punished strictly and severely” (370).

Szasz, in the end, finds himself in agreement with some paternalistic practices as they relate to children and limited accountability. That is where the similarities close. Szasz feels that self-medication should be a right enjoyed by all and protected by the Constitution much the same way in which we regard freedom of speech and religion (Burr and Goldinger 369). The arguments for paternalistic insurrection or coercion by the state have been well documented in this text. Furthermore, the arguments against paternalism, as presented by Thomas Szasz and his contemporaries, have similarly been presented. Is one side right or wrong? No. The simple fact is that issues of paternalism and drug-legitimization/decriminalization, are far too complex to be truly analyzed in anything less than a fully rendered tome. Self-medication and the role of the state in the general welfare and protection of its’ citizens is a testy subject with opinions offered from the religious perspective, political perspective, and psychological perspective. Szasz himself sees his argument for the decriminalization of illicit drugs as not so much a question of paternalism so much as a question of labeling. “By recognizing the problem of drug abuse for what it is—a moral and political question rather than a medical or therapeutic one—we can choose to maximize the sphere of action of the state at the expense of the individual, or of the individual at the expense of the state” (374). Only through this understanding may some compromise be reached and drug policy in the United States finally change from ‘curing’ the sickness to correcting the ‘labels’.

Works Cited

Burr, John R. and Milton Goldinger. Philosophy and Contemporary Issues. 8^th ed.

Prentice-Hall Inc. 2000.

“Dependence and Addiction.” CMF Files No. 8. Christian Medical Fellowship, 1997.

15 February 2001 http://www.cmf.org.uk/ethics/brief/addict.htm.

Kleinman, Mark A. R. “Coerced Abstinence: A Neopaternalist Drug Policy Intitaive.”

The New Paternalism: Supervisory Approaches to Poverty. Ed. William Mead. 1997. 182-195. 19 February 2001 .

Suber, Peter. “Paternalism.” Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia. 2nd Edition Ed.

Chistopher B. Gray. Garland Publishing Co. 1999. 19 February 2001

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/paternal.htm.

Szasz, Dr. Thomas. “The War on Drugs is Lost.” November Coalition.

15 February 2001 http://www.november.org/Szasz.html.

Zwolinski, Matt. “The Perils of Paternalism: A Reply to Goodin.” 19 February 2001

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~mattz/paternal.html.

HUX 505: Six Degrees of Separation

2007-11-08T09:37:00.001-05:00

Six Degrees of Seperation

A Brief Look at the Principle Arguments in Modern Philosophy

Eric S. Williams

Hux 505

January 31^st, 2001

Philosophy is a discipline as old as humanity itself. It would be foolish of us not to believe that primitive peoples did not wonder at their own existence and the world they inhabited. Philosophy has been the foundation for learning in many cases, urging the student of philosophy out of their own self constructed allegorical cave of ignorance and timidly accepting the true light of the outer world…a light of understanding but also frustration. From the early works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle we take the established premise of deeper learning: the right and responsibility to question established judgement. The later masters such as Spinoza, Descartes, and Kant further lead us to questioning the consequences of technology, state, and religion on complacent humanity. The modern student of philosophy is the beneficiary of some 3000 years of accumulated knowledge. Many of the same questions raised throughout history must still be addressed today by the budding student. There are a number of issues/problems that have dogged both master and pupil: the conflict between freedom and determinism, the role of God and religion, society and its moral foundations, the social questions surrounding society and state, the relationship between one’s mind and body, and the ethical issues surrounding technology and science. To be a successful disciple of philosophy, any student must be able to identify and explain the predominant principals governing these six issues.

In order for one to begin to understand the notion of free will, we must first examine its counterpart: determinism. In his text, Philosophy and Contemporary Issues, John Burr defines determinism as “the theory asserting universal causation and total predictability…”(Burr and Goldinger 30). Determinists believe that there are natural laws that dictate the pattern of the universe which govern outcomes, therefore it makes sense that the eventual decisions made by humans are also governed (Nagel 51-52). Further, it is believed by the determinist that every action, and henceforth every reaction, is already mapped out in our psyche. We have no free will, no ability to act on our own accord. This theory may further denote the premise of a god who is directing all our actions and interactions. This is a pretty bleak idea when most truly believe they are free to do as they wish. Determinism removes accountability from us all. That is, humans are not truly in control of their choices and actions today, tomorrow, and so on. Thus, it must be contended that every action, whether saintly or sinful, is out of our hands. As a result, monstrous acts against humanity like The Holocaust can’t truly be blamed on any one individual or group as they were working in accordance with their determined destiny.

While there are proponents of determinism out there, one can not exclude their opposition. Those who oppose the notion of determinism may be classified as libertarians. Libertarianism defends the idea of free will by attacking the principal of determinism based on its inherent concept. Libertarians contend that “if all actions are the results of causes, then no actions are ones for which anyone can be held morally responsible” (Burr and Goldinger 30). What libertarians believe in then is that some level of responsibility must be maintained in order for morally righteous or morally reprehensible actions to be held accountable to and by those who perpetrate such actions. The basic premise of this philosophy is that if everything we do or say is predictable due to a variety of causes, then no true freedom can exist (30). One chooses for themselves.

Hard determinism is a product of classical determinism that freely embraces the notion that no one is morally responsible for their actions. For them, moral or ethical responsibility can’t truly exist because “all human actions are ruled by heredity and environment; and since we are not responsible for either of these, all blame is unjust” (Burr and Goldinger 30). By this idea, a hard determinist would be inclined to agree that how or where one grows up is in no way related to the human being they will ultimately become, the actions they will participate in, and the future generated for them.

On the other hand, the underlying belief of the soft determinist is one where “people can be morally responsible even though their behavior is determined” (31). The soft determinist believes that there is a relationship of sorts between libertarianism and determinism. They believe that behavior can be categorized in two ways: behavior which is free and unfettered by destiny, and behavior which is compulsory and therefore out of our control. Free will for the soft determinist is the idea of being able to do what you want, when you want without outside influences or prompting. Compulsory behavior might then be relegated to behavior one is pressured or coerced into. One property that Burr doesn’t press in his work is how compulsory behavior as a product of obsession weighs in on this action. Do actions committed by serial killers who act out of a compulsion to kill still characterize themselves as free actions? Many times there is no coercion or direct pressure from another placed on this killer forcing them to do their dirty work. While many of those in the field of psychology today argue that serial behavior may be the product of a bad childhood, is it logical to assume then that the soft determinist can consider past events a catalyst on present or future events? Are these compulsions seen in a serial killer today the results of coercion or pressure forced onto them years ago?

The second issue in philosophy revolves around the concept of God. Many philosophers and indeed students of philosophy have wrestled with the questions of God’s existence. Western philosophy has struggled to prove or disprove the existence of God, specifically the God of the western world. This God of the western world is seen as “an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe” (117). God is also characterized as being sympathetic to the plight of mankind, yet there are those who vehemently argue against the idea of God from a variety of viewpoints. Many arguments against God come from two ideas: proof of His existence and how/why God lets tragic actions happen. There are four basic arguments that are offered to these critics.

The Argument from Scripture is the simplest of all and a good place for any philosopher to start. This argument concludes God must indeed exist because we have writings concerning Him and His life (or at the very least actions He is responsible for). Furthermore, “these writings are assumed to have been inspired by God and therefore reliable” (117) Granted this seems suspect and this argument is easy to dissect and rail against. The easiest complaint contends that so much of the original Biblical text has been lost in the translations from era to era that the writings can not possibly be proven to be at all accurate. Therefore, argument from scripture is easily dismissed by critics.

The Argument from design maintains that the harmonious balance of the world and universe is so “intricately put together” that it must have been put together by a logical and rational presence (117). It is further argued that life in even its simplest form is too complex to be a random aberration. Proponents of this belief contend that the universe is just a little too orderly and balanced to be chalked up to random chance.

Argument from agreement states its case on the simple idea that because so many men and women believe in God that He must exist (Burr and Goldinger 117). This argument’s only true defense is spotty at best and relies on the notion of a simple “If/Then” statement. Basically put, if one believes in God, then God exists. The problem with this idea is that the whole of humanity has been so catastrophically wrong in the past over thousands of beliefs. Thus, because so many people believed the world was flat, it must be so, and so on.

Those who favor Argument from religious experience claim that God exists because they have experienced Him or His work directly (Burr and Goldinger 118). Many of these claims are based on some divine intervention or revelation, or that they were the recipients of or were witness to a miracle. As we all know, that which we conclude as truth is not always so. It is easy to dismiss this argument from the standpoint that no tangible proof is offered up other than the claims of one mind. Hallucinations and delusions are all too common throughout history. If one were to believe that God exists strictly because He spoke to or through them, then one must also accept the idea that the Oracle at Delphi in classical Greece was also brutally truthful in that Apollo spoke to the Greeks through another human being. Furthermore it must be contested that, “religious experiences provide no less evidence of objective reality than ordinary sensory experiences…” (118).

Morality and its function in society has also been a point of contention. The burning questions have always been one of what makes right or wrong. The branch of philosophy that deals with this is ethics. Ethics wrestles with the ideas of what makes any act a morally acceptable one. Burr contends that, “…moral standards…are merely products of the society in which one lives” (Burr and Goldinger 200). What this leads us to believe is that what makes one act morally reprehensible in our society may make that same act acceptable in another. This idea is known as relativism.

Relativism falls into two distinct categories: sociological and ethical. Sociological relativism maintains the fact that the guiding principles between societies are different (Burr and Goldinger 200). This holds true in regards to social and religious customs, as well as professional and educational customs. The difficult issue to quantify is whether notions of right and wrong are the same or different between these societies. Proponents of ethical relativism address this notion. Ethical relativism maintains that, “there are different but equally correct ultimate principles” (201). This belief therefore contends that two very different cultures or societies may inevitably wind up implementing similar practices (i.e. euthanasia) that serve the greater good, even if one of those cultures finds the practice barbaric. Ultimately, it is the survival of the species that must be addressed.

What constitutes the ‘ultimate principle’? While there may not be a single ultimate principle, philosophers have been able to identify three major views of what it is. Egoism contends that, “self-interest is the only proper standard of conduct” (Burr and Goldinger 201). For the egoist, there exists no greater cause then self aggrandizement and no need to place the wants or needs of others above their own. Utilitarianism is the belief that, “right acts are acts producing the greatest happiness” (201). For the utilitarian, the end result of whatever it is they do is the most important element to consider. Thus, the utilitarian might consider himself more or less important than the welfare of others or society as a whole, and vice versa. Finally, formalism states that, “rightness or wrongness of actions is not determined by the consequences produced by the actions” (202). The essential element of the formalist point of view is not considering the ramifications of one’s action on themselves or others. The principle of how to behave properly in a variety of circumstances then is the tenet driving formalism, not the end-result or reward.

The merits or flaws of various governmental archetypes and how they compare with others sparks a fourth issue addressed by philosophers: the relation between State and Society. For many it is the basic comparing and contrasting of, say, democracy versus oligarchy. But the argument touches on other aspects as well, including the legitimacy of the state’s power and whether a status quo can be fairly maintained. Burr writes that a “legitimate government maintains that its physical authority ultimately rests on moral authority” and that governments “justify their existence and policies by appealing to a political philosophy”(Burr and Goldinger 292-93).

What is the philosophy behind democracy? Typically, one tends to believe it is equality among all men and women and that no voice gets left unheard. Is this true and accurate? No. Simply speaking not everyone’s voice is answered or even heard by a democratic government. The will of the majority ultimately negates the will of the minority in most cases. But, that will of the majority is not always good or infallible. As Burr points out, history has taught us that the majority believed the earth to be flat and slavery to be justified at one time (295). Thus the will of the majority, while not always correct, can suppress a morally righteous minority. The minority, however, has not always submitted. In a much more recent application, the election of George W. Bush as the President was the physical manifestation of the will of the minority. Bush did not defeat his opponent Al Gore via popular election. If that were the case, Gore would have won. But the fact that the American ‘democracy’ implements a supposedly fair and equitable electoral system shows not only the glaring fallibility of majority rule, but also how the will of the minority can be exercised.

Further, we must examine the differences between ethical and political democracy. Political democracy is designed to serve the will of ethical democracy, that being the idea of freedom (Burr and Goldinger 296). Yet while political democracy strives to insure the premise of freedom for everyone, it does not ultimately follow the precepts of ethical democracy. Political democracy is nothing more than a vehicle to formulate and implement the inherent freedom that all get to enjoy. Ethical democracy is much more involved in the life of the individual, striving to set forth notions of social, political, racial, sexual, educational, and economic equality or democracy (296).

The fifth issue confronting philosophers regards whether a mind exists and how it might relate to the body. There have been countless arguments for and against the existence of a mind and how, if at all, it relates to the body. This debate is referred to as the ‘mind-body problem’ (Burr and Goldinger 398, Nagel 27).

One belief against the existence of a mind is held by materialists. Materialists argue that the world, universe, and body are made up of physical matter only (Burr 398). As a result, the notion of a ‘mind’ does not exist for them, as mental states are nothing more than a state of the brain (Nagel 31). Further, Burr states that materialists also deny the existence of an immortal soul, as it too is not a physical object (398). On the other hand, dualists claim humans have both a mind and a body (Burr and Goldinger 398). Dualists believe that the existence of memory, images, and sensations clearly point to the existence of a mind as they can’t be physically presented. Therefore, as a memory is a non-physical entity, so too can a mind exist as another non-physical entity.

Dualists, while all believing in a mind, differ on how it relates with the body. The interactionist, “maintain that body and mind can causally affect each other”, while the epiphenomenonist argues that “physical events can cause mental events, but that occurrences in the mind are not able to cause… physical events” (Burr and Goldinger 399). What this boils down to is that the interactionist might think of performing an action and the body carries out that action. At the same time, physical sensations like cutting a finger will cause mental sensations of pain. The epiphenomenonist will contend that while cutting a finger will indeed cause pain, the notion of being hungry causes the mind to consider eating, not the mind ordering the body to satiate its hunger.

Perhaps the idealist holds the most radical view of the mind. The idealist will, affirm the existence of minds…but deny the existence of any material objects existing apart from minds” (Burr and Goldinger 399). Idealists maintain that there is no physical world, our minds only allow us to perceive one. For the idealist, the mind, and indeed the minds of everyone, exist in a disembodied state, formulating a sort of fantasy world where we interact with figments of our imaginations or constructs of other minds like ours. This makes for a very frightening perspective and doesn’t adequately explain our perceptions of the world. If we are merely living in a world constructed by our mind, how do we perceive other physical manifestations like heat, cold, hard, or soft?

Finally, what all philosophers are striving to achieve is knowledge; no one would deny the benefits of knowledge on humanity today, especially in regards to the great scientific advancements perpetrated by knowledge. Burr tells us that, “philosophers study and discuss what they technically call epistemology: the investigation of the origin, nature, methods, and limitations of knowledge” (Burr and Goldinger 478). What many philosophers try to track is the nature of knowledge, how we really ‘know’ anything, and how knowledge relates to science.

The two views of knowledge and its role in science are held by Rationalists and Empiricists. Rationalism believes that knowledge is based solely on reason and is not at all affected by one’s experiences (Burr and Goldinger 478). Empiricism claims the opposite, that all our knowledge is inextricably linked to our sensory perception of the world around us (478). Of course both of these ideas can be wholly truthful. There may never be a way to ultimately determine which idea is accurate. The plain fact is that the beneficiary of knowledge, whether empirical or rational, has been the realm of science. Knowledge is a means to an end for all people, what that ‘end’ results in is the important matter.

The use and power of knowledge in science has sparked debate and controversy, no more evident than between creationist and scientists. The creationist believes in some divine force being responsible for the genesis of the world, people, and the sum of all our knowledge. To them, it is the work of a God-Figure who has allowed all this to happen. The scientist, who holds onto an evolutionary belief, contend that the end result of our scientific inquiry and knowledge is the rational progression of life and time. Indeed, the evolutionist sits in direct opposition in most circumstances with their creationist counterparts. Both sides have loyal followers but neither has been able to sufficiently produce enough evidence to clearly defeat the other.

Finally, there is an ethical question surrounding science and knowledge. While science has clearly benefited humanity a thousandfold, so too has it brought destruction equally terrible. The question is begged as to whether such inventions as the atomic bomb, clearly the climax of someone’s scientific pursuit of knowledge, has helped or hindered humanity. It is due to ideas such as this that , “…critics and powerful enemies of science abound in contemporary life and, some fear, steadily mount in numbers and influence” (Burr and Goldinger 480).

To be a successful disciple of philosophy, any student must be able to identify and explain the predominant principals governing the six issues previously discussed. If, in fact, the “main concern of philosophy is to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking of them”, the student of philosophy can do no better than to start here (Nagel 5). The problem is getting said students to understand that there is more to it than the preconceived notions they hold to be true. Many people do not wish to be brought up from the darkness of the caves their intellect has lived in all their lives. For them, ignorance truly is bliss and easier to cope with than rampant and agonizing questions over the existence of God and the notion none of them may truly choose their own destiny. For many, not knowing the glaring truths of the lives they lead is more comfortable than realizing they may have been living a closed and isolated life intellectually. Nagel opens his book What Does It All Mean with the blanket statement, “If you think about it, the inside of your own mind is the only thing you can be sure of” (8). It is hard to believe that Nagel truly accepts this in light of all the issues addressed above. Yet, perhaps the statement isn’t meant to be truthful, just represent the truth we all believe before philosophy utterly tears it asunder by creating for us doubt. Indeed, the knowledge is there for the taking, and power over one’s own life may result from it…the true issue is whether one is truly ready to accept it.

Works Cited

Burr, John R. and Milton Goldinger. Philosophy and Contemporary Issues. 8^th Ed.

New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000.

Nagel, Thomas. What Does It All Mean: A Very Short Introduction To Philosophy.

Oxford University Press, 1987

HUX 504: Captivating Love

2007-11-07T22:55:00.000-05:00

Captivating Love

A Brief Look at two Artistic Renderings

Of Love and Lovers

Eric Williams

HUX 504-41

Professor White

April 10, 2002

The Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the finest art galleries in the nation. Boasting thousands of paintings and sculptures, the museum provides both the art lover and the casual visitor a glimpse into the minds and memories of days gone by, civilizations forgotten, and the telling and retelling of myth and legend. The museum contains an excellent selection of Baroque, Rococo, and Neo-Classical art. It is also free to the public, one of the only museums in the nation that remains so.

To meet the demands of this project, I visited the Cleveland Museum of Art on three separate occasions. On these visits, I was introduced to their impressive research library, which helped me in collecting background information for the paintings I have chosen to compare and contrast. For this purpose, Jacques Louis David’s Cupid and Psyche and Jean Lecompte du Nouy’s A Eunuch’s Dream will be presented and analyzed. Through a brief look at the artists and an analysis of both of these paintings, notions of mood and tone will be discussed as will a brief look at some speculation on the psychology captured within the image. Furthermore, this point will be reinforced by understanding how the figures are presented and what the symbols and artistic styles employed by both artists add to the overall representation.

Jacques Louis David (1744-1825) was a preeminent French Neo-Classicist. He was a distant relative of artist Francois Boucher, a painter heavily steeped in the frivolous style of the French Rococo. It is believed that Boucher may have tutored a young David until he traveled to Rome to study art (La Croix and Tansey 849). While in Rome, David abandoned the grand manner of the Rococo and enthusiastically embraced the Classical style of the Romans and the Greeks. Many of his works extolled the values of stoicism, patriotism, and masculinity (Ibid.).

When Napoleon lost power in France so too did David. Now an exile, he traveled to Rome in hopes that he would be able to live and work in the land that had tempered his love for the Classical style. Unfortunately, the Pope was linked politically with the new ruling class in France and rejected David’s bid for asylum in Rome (CMA Bulletin 29). Determined, David then left for Brussels to live out his life and where he would execute his innovative Cupid and Psyche (Ibid.).

Cupid and Psyche, executed in 1871, was the first major painting by David after his exile and is seen by some as his attempt to resume his position of leadership in the art community (de’Argencourt 194). The work presents the mythological story of the relationship between two lovers. Psyche’s beauty rivaled that of the goddess Venus who, being a jealous goddess, directed Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with the most despicable man imaginable. According to the myth, Cupid was so struck by her mortal beauty that he fell in love with her and secreted her off to his palace where he would love her every night but leave every morning before she awoke. Further, Psyche was not allowed to look upon the face of her lover, hence his coming to her in the cover of night and departing at dawn’s light. The work is representational of this tale. It captures one precise moment that familiarizes the viewer with the characters of this tale, and reinforces two main points: Psyche’s captivity at the hands of Cupid, and his departure in the early morning which provides for us a reprisal of the story’s main point --- Cupid’s need to leave at first light.

The work itself is physically prepossessing: 241cm wide and 184 cm high. A great bed that contains the prone bodies of both Cupid and Psyche dominates the foreground. The image of the lovers is life-sized and shockingly realistic. One might note the intricate details to the fingernails and knuckles of Cupid specifically. The bed is covered in rich, colorful linens of white, burnt orange, and red. The value of each color is high except for where the shadows cast themselves across the threshold of the bed at the top and on the left. There is an open window on the right which shows two mountain peaks in the distance. Between them we can note the breaking of dawn as illuminated shades of yellow, red, blue, and orange mingle together creating a sunrise effect. The terrestrial details witnessed through the window such as the scattered trees and classical Greek temple are still enmeshed in the rapidly receding darkness of Night. The window is roughly half the height of the painting and about one-third of its total length. The trees and ground are dominated by lush green colors signifying a warm summer’s night.

The bed itself is quite large and finished in gold and deep blue. David has signed his name on the sweeping post as the foot of the bed and has both dated the painting and indicated where he was when he painted it “Bruxelles”. The bed is contemporary for the times, as are the silken linens of the drapes and the forest green carpeting the bed seems to rest on.

The action within the painting is delicate and refined. Psyche’s body conforms to the elements of classical beauty that was adhered to by the Greeks: wide hips, small bust line, pale, supple flesh that is both sensuous and curvaceous. She sleeps nestled in the bosom of Cupid’s wing. Her body is prone and turned toward the viewer as she lies on her right hip; her left hand and arm sweeps up and over her head which is turned slightly away from the viewer. Her right arm lies draped across the left thigh of Cupid. Psyche is completely nude and her body is dominated by pale color tones except for the rouge of her cheeks and the golden-brown color of her hair. Her form represents classical features, classical ideals, and classical grace.

Cupid, on the other hand, is a sharp contrast to Psyche. He is seen here trying to sneak away from his lover at dawn. His left hand is grasping Psyche’s right arm, which lies across his thigh. His right arm is pressed firmly to the side of the bed and he is bearing his weight on that arm as he is slowly pushing his body up and out of the bed. While rising, he is trying to move Psyche’s arm off his body to ease his escape. Unfortunately, Cupid has several dilemmas he must deal with. First, we note that his left wing is pinned under Psyche’s sleeping body. The chances he has of extracting it without waking her seem minimal as so mush of her body covers so much of his wing. This is compounded by the fact that while Cupid’s right foot has stepped out of the bed and onto the floor, his left foot has become tangled in the bed-sheets, complicating his escape. He flashes us a quick smile looks directly at us, acknowledging our presence to his problem. His muscles and sinews are flexing throughout his upper torso and left leg indicating his gentle struggle for freedom. His flesh is intensely colored, is darker than Psyche’s, and his dark, curly hair helps to further separate his darker, more muscular form from that of Psyche.

This contrast in colors helps to segregate the forms in the work. The line is clearly defined, hearkening back to the styles present in the high Renaissance. Further, the richness of David’s colors in this specific piece has drawn comparisons between himself and the many works of Titian, who had a tendency to use color as a natural means of separating forms (CMA Bulletin 34). Furthermore, the use of oil paints helped to create a richer color upon the canvas as well as allowing David to blend colors easily with little trouble. The surface of the work is very smooth and the brush strokes of David are virtually invisible. The colors used help to establish a warm atmosphere, especially in regards to the red, burnt-orange, and gold silks of the drapery and linens. The corners of the painting are locked in receding darkness and the ambient light, perhaps provided by the rising sun or perhaps by oil lamps not present in the scene, seem to illuminate Psyche’s flesh. Further, the brilliant white of the bed sheets adds a cozy and clean feeling to the image. The near white of Psyche’s flesh marks her as more of an idealized figure, one that might be a statue of marble in some ways; the realistic flesh tones of Cupid make him much more human to us, presenting him as a clumsy, adolescent boy more than as a god. The flesh and blood of Cupid makes him an individual, not an abstract (de’Argencourt 196). The lighting in the room and outside seems very natural, not staged or theatrical – there is no drama here. The colors of the sunrise and the seeming illumination of Psyche’s body creates a comfortable image. Furthermore, the sparse use of shadow here, notably the right front leg of the bed, the descending foot of Cupid, and the shadow cast by his upraised left knee, helps to reinforce the naturalism and realism of the piece.

The composition of the work is plainly three-dimensional and lacks classical balance. The figures nearly occupy like space with Psyche being slightly behind Cupid. They both recline from left to right and their bodies make up the bulk of the image. The work utilizes open forms indicated by the spreading of the legs and arms of Cupid from his body as well as the open window on the back right. Our eyes are free to sweep the canvas and we have a tendency to start at Cupid’s face since he is making eye contact with us. From there, we might swing our gaze down along the severe, angular lines of Cupid’s body evident in the muscles of his abdomen and arms, or down the long, sweeping curves of the sleeping Psyche. The majority of the lines presented here are horizontal, evidenced by the prone body of Psyche, the semi-prone body of Cupid, the clear folds separating two mattresses on the bed, the empire style bed itself, and the receding background of the earth folding back onto itself into the horizon. These are contrasted by the diagonal lines of Cupid’s upper body, his bow that rests against the bed and the sweeping folds of the drapery. The figures create three-dimensional space by overlapping one another. The perspective is linear with our immediate line of sight is level with the heads and faces of Psyche and Cupid.

There are a number of symbols presented here. The bow and the quiver of arrows, located on the left of the image under Cupid’s leg and the linen under his torso respectively, symbolize his identity in Greek mythology. Psyche is represented by the emblematic butterfly located at the bottom center of the bed’s velvet base (Interpretations 25). There is a gray moth that appears at the top center of the work that has been misinterpreted as a butterfly for many years. The moth is, in fact, a male European Cabbage Fly. This was determined after an invertebrate zoologist copied and studied the image very closely and determined it’s true form by the way it was depicted and the time it is flying (de’Argencourt 198). The male European Cabbage Fly only flies at night and its departure towards the open window symbolizes the moment of separation for the lovers (Ibid.).

Finally, it must be noted that the colors and lines used to create both of the dominant figures are quite different. Cupid is darker, more rugged, more realistic, more angular, and more animated. Psyche is much more pale, smooth, round, idealized, soft, and subdued. They are quite literally the antithesis of one another. The work introduces a more forceful naturalism that was a departure from his much more idealized paintings at the height of his fame. The expression of Cupid is seen as a “desire to explore more complex and elusive states of personal psychology” (de’Argencourt 197). This desire has led some critics to cite this painting as one of male domination and imprisonment of a woman; a veritable psychosexual portrait of the inner mind (Ibid.). Furthermore, critics have been harsh on David because he seemingly “abandoned the typically sentimental representation of Cupid to reveal the brutal sexual nature of the god’s complex personality, at once comic, cynical, self satisfied, disturbed, cruel, and sinister” (Ibid. 197).

Jean Lecompte du Nouy (1842-1923) was a French painter who often employed “a widespread vogue for making bizarre and exotic paintings of oriental subjects, often based on literary sources” (de’Argencourt 385). His first major public success was due to an inspired painting based on the works of novelist Theophile Gautier (Ibid.). The Eunuch’s Dream was executed in 1874, two years after the critical success of the Gautier work. Like the Gautier painting, The Eunuch’s Dream is also based on a narrative source, Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes.

This novel compiles 161 fictive letters written by two Persian noblemen visiting Paris and by their wives and servants in Ispahan (Esfahan in present-day Iran). The book, which Montesquieu published anonymously, enabled the philosopher to voice his ideas about various aspects of contemporary French society, but it also dealt extensively with the harem. Fascinated by this mysterious residence of concubines, Lecompte du Nouy depicted it many times. (de’Argencourt 385)

The story presented here by du Nouy is the tale of a white eunuch named Cosrou and his love for the harem girl Zelide. According to Monstesquieu’s text, Cosrou loved Zelide so vehemently that he asked for her hand in marriage despite his inadequacies. The wife of the noblemen to whom Zelide belonged to saw nothing wrong with the union and even joked about it (de’Argencourt 385). Du Nouy’s painting, like David’s, is representational of this tale. The painting allows the viewer to understand the point of the painting by simply identifying the various figures presented and what they represent in relation to the work’s title.

By comparison, du Nouy’s composition is much smaller than David’s Cupid and Psyche. The painting is 39 cm by 65 cm but contains as much detail as David’s much larger work. It is a three-dimensional painting that lacks classical balance. The figure of Cosrou dominates the right, lower half of the work. He lies prone, his feet lie nearer to us than his head. He reclines peacefully on brilliantly colored rugs and pillows. His sword stands behind him against a wall, his turban rests over a portion of the scabbard. Cosrou’s left hand is lying out and away from his body, his fingers are spread very wide and we may note the rings he wears upon his fingers. His right hand lazily grasps a chibouk, a thin smoking pipe for tobacco or hallucinogens. The pipe is several feet long and there are billowing plumes of light blue smoke that wafts up from the pipe’s base. Next to the pipe sits an ashtray. Cosrou is reclining on a rooftop; the sky is a rich, deep blue speckled by a handful of stars. It is a clear night; the city of Cairo is evident beyond the foreground roof, which Cosrou dreams on. The rooftop that Cosrou sleeps is the Cairo Citadel, and the great mosque which is illuminated in the bright moonlight is the mosque of the Sultan Hasan (de’Argencourt 386). Cosrou’s discarded slippers lie near his feet and the steps he ascended to reach this roof are evident before his prone form. The roof is sparsely decorated with a simple yet colorful table that features a cup, some fruit, and a modest gold pitcher.

Cosrou is not alone on his rooftop. Arising from the smoke of his pipe appears the exotic form of Zelide. Her figure is made of a very light blue color and lacks a lot of physical details such as tone and musculature. Her body is very curvaceous, faint bracelets can be made out on her wrists and she carries a veil in both hands which sweeps about her body and behind her head. The veil too is made out of smoke. Zelide dominates is pictured in the middle of the work, just left of center. Zelide is more or less erect.. Adjacent to her right elbow sits a little cherubic figure in a shaving bowl. The pudgy little cherub (called a putto in the Asian world) half sits/half reclines in the shaving bowl and he holds before itself a great knife that is as big as the putto itself (de’Argencourt 385). The putto is also made of the same billowing smoke as Zelide, and a portion of her veil stretches under and beyond the shaving bowl. The only corporal entity that keeps Cosrou company is a black crane, perched on one foot on the rooftop behind Cosrou.

The rooftop Cosrou lies upon is comprised of various shades of white with flashes of blue. The rugs and the pillow he reclines on are multi-colored, though blue, red, and gold can be seen easily. The table beside Cosrou features repeating blue and white patterns in a vertical fashion. The skyline and terrain of Cairo is dominated by a darker to lighter shades of blue. The area by which Zelide and her putto emanate seems to be of a lighter blue, perhaps indicating that the moon left of the composition. Streaks of yellow can be seen behind Zelide’s head, representational of her long, fair hair. Like David, Lecompte du Nouy has also signed his name to his work, just right of the handprint on the Citadel wall.

Differences between this and the Cupid and Psyche piece are easily seen. Physically, the work is much smaller. Secondly, the figures of the lovers do not occupy like space as they do in David’s piece. Cosrou is dressed very smartly in bright white trousers, a cream colored sash, and a dark red coat. The only way he sees or can be near the woman of his dreams is to smoke what is likely to be a hallucinogen. His eyes are lifeless, his face inanimate. Cosrou is also comprised of more horizontal lines and the use of foreshortening (as one might see in Andrea Mantegna’s The Dead Christ) create a different perspective for how the viewer sees Cosrou. He never looks at us, nor does Zelide or the putto. We are, in effect, voyeurs to Cosrou’s dream. Like Psyche, Zelide too is nude and is a mirror of Classical beauty in that she has accentuated hips and a small bust line. However, Zelide is made up of long, sweeping diagonal lines that help to initiate a semblance of action, motion, and subtle tension. She is rising as the smoke rises from the pipe; du Nouy uses very gentle curvilinear lines to represent the outline of her body and to give her the properties of billowing animation like the smoke she is born out of. Furthermore, Zelide lacks the details given to Psyche. We can only make out a rudimentary sense of her body’s physical features, including her lips and nose, the texture of her hair, black eyes and navel. While Psyche is very pale with accents to her cheeks and hair, Zelide is nearly the same hue of blue throughout her form with only the streaks of yellow to break up the monochromatic form. The long horizontals of the skyline as well as the square, squat buildings which comprise the Cairo cityscape helps to reinforce the horizontal form.

This painting also has taken some very obvious artistic liberties. While du Nouy based this composition on the works of Montesquieu, the painting is not completely accurate to the text. The location has been moved from Iran to Cairo and Cosrou’s facial features are very plainly Mongolian as opposed to the ‘white’ features attributed to him in the text.

Lecompte du Nouy painted this work in oils applied to a wood panel. His form is well defined and the lines separating his figures are a bit more diffused than those of David. The edges of his figures and buildings are a bit rougher, heightening the sense of darkness and our inability to see as clearly as we might in daylight. Colors help to divide forms as well as line. The blue atmosphere of the image creates a cool, serene effect. While this is different from the bright, warm colors used by David, du Nouy’s work is no less refined, relaxed, and subtle. Shadows are evident in the foreground before Cosrou, and playing off the sides of the building. We can guess the moon to be very bright considering how dark the shadow is which covers part of the illuminated citadel. The painting style is not as crisp as the Classical master David, though that hardly makes the work less impressive. Lecompte du Nouy made the application of the pain slightly rougher on the buildings surfaces to help reinforce the idea of it being rough-hewn stone. These are not polished buildings, and the grainy surface coupled with various areas where the stone has chipped or cracked elevates the level of realism of the building and the image as a whole.

Striking differences may be marked in psychological and symbolic evaluation. Zelide is a temptress; it is she that captures the heart and soul of Cosrou. She lifts her veil to accentuate her feminine beauty only attainable to Cosrou in his dreams. While Cupid may have been the image of a dominant captor and Psyche his slave, here Cosrou is slave to Zelide due to his physical inadequacy. Thus, woman dominates man. It can be argued that this is a nightmare for Cosrou “visualized by Zelide’s little companion, who symbolizes the source of his misery. The Oriental putto does not hold a bow and arrow as attributes of love but instead holds a knife dripping with blood and sits in a barber’s bowl, references to the tools of Cosrou’s castration” (de’Argencourt 385). The handprint on the wall is a traditional Islamic talisman for averting misfortune, but what is more unfortunate than being denied that which you dream for? Even as we bear witness to the work, the diagonal motion of Zelide seems to imply she is slipping away from him. Finally, the crane itself lends more of a terrible aspect to the work. Symbolically, a flying crane is a precursor to a rise in status in Asian folklore (“Symbolism”). This crane, firmly grounded, seems to almost mock Cosrou and show that he is forever doomed to be the victim of unrequited love, never rising above his lowly status as a palace servant and never knowing love’s true touch.

Themes of love play often on the lips and hearts of artists and poets. Each has there own interpretation of what love offers its benefactors. It can seem to be a blessing and a curse at the same time. David’s Cupid and Psyche and Jean Lecompte du Nouy’s A Eunuch’s Dream paint a vivid picture both literally and figuratively of loves complex nature. Both offered different psychological profiles of who the dominant partner might be, who loves and who is loved, and how the symbols evident in either piece can help to supplement one’s understanding of the themes presented in the work. Through a study of these two works, one comes to appreciate not only the painter and his apparent image, but also the subtle undertones locked away in a color here, a shadow here, and a symbol there. Whether or not the observer of these works is an avid art lover or the casual visitor to a museum, the masterful skills of David and du Nouy create bold images that serves to engage them in a world of vibrant expressionism, but does not overwhelm with a subject too foreign to understand.

Works Cited

CMA Bulletin. Volume 67. Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 1980

de’Argencourt, Louise. European Paintings in the 19^th Century. Volume I. Cleveland Museum of Art,

Cleveland, 1999.

Interpretations: Sixty-five Works from The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 1991.

La Croix, Horst and Richard G. Tansey. Art Through the Ages.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, New York, 1991.

“Symbolism on Chinese porcelain”. April 1, 2002.

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