Stories in Paint by Luc Travers and Windows on Humanity: A History of How Art Reflects Our Ideas about Our Lives and World by Sandra Shaw
By Timothy Sandefur
Stories in Paint by Luc Travers (Self-published, 2021), $75, 119 pp.
Windows on Humanity: A History of How Art Reflects Our Ideas about Our Lives and World by Sandra Shaw (Self-Published, 2021), $47.97, 489 pp.
Ray Bradbury once remarked that, sometime in the 1960s, all the art sneaked off the canvases and jumped onto the movie screens. That, he said, explained why such painters as Kandinsky and Mark Rothko hung blank squares on the walls of art museums. Worse, the absence of art explained why nobody went to museums expecting to be uplifted. After all, “You do not visit an elevator shaft with no elevator in it, do you?”1
Of course, art is not only intended to elevate. But it does express values, and therefore, it says a lot about people, both as individuals and as societies. The people who made and preserved the Artemision Bronze, for example, obviously had a different outlook on life than those who created and preserved Giotto di Bondone’s Ognissanti Madonna or Tracey Emin’s Turner Prize-winning Unmade Bed. And the values expressed by a painting such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream surely differ in important ways from those expressed in William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Birth of Venus.
Yet contemporary moral and cultural relativism, not to mention the other anti-Western ideologies that now hold hostage some of our major institutions, have obscured the important and rewarding experience of appreciating art and its role in our lives. Indeed, much of the established art community now prioritizes racial politics over aesthetics to such a degree that the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and others have begun selling pieces by famous white male artists in order to buy works by female or black artists that are of no greater aesthetic value. SFMOMA, for example, recently sold Rothko’s Untitled (1960), which depicts three vertical color rectangles, in order to buy Frank Bowling’s Elder Sun Benjamin (2018), which depicts three horizontal color rectangles.
Meanwhile, postmodern aesthetic theories view art not as an artist’s expression of values, whether rational or irrational, but as a “narrative” that articulates some statement about social “power”—resulting in propagandistic, often banal creations that are incomprehensible to the average person unfamiliar with postmodern jargon and theories. . . . How would one explain to a schoolchild why Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019)—a banana duct-taped to a wall—was regarded as a serious artwork by critics with Artnet News and the New York Times? One scholar, addressing the question of how to teach newcomers about postmodern art, concludes that students must first be given “a grounding in art theory, art history, and knowledge about the cultural and art historical contexts of a work” before they can even begin to understand it.2
The dominance of such ideas among today’s intellectuals has left rational art lovers—seeking a logical aesthetics and an experience of art that is rewarding instead of burdensome or mystifying—largely to their own devices. Now, two of them—Sandra Shaw and Luc Travers—have taken it upon themselves to publish books that explore art in both its personal and social dimensions, in ways that are spiritually satisfying and intellectually enlightening. Together, these generously illustrated volumes offer readers an opportunity to examine what, and, perhaps more important, how art conveys meaning. The fact that these books had to be self-published, however, says much about contemporary culture.
Travers’s primary focus in Stories in Paint is art’s capacity to evoke feelings and inspire thoughts. He aims to introduce readers who may feel confused or intimidated by paintings to a method for appreciating them for what they convey, instead of regarding them as lofty works of cultural significance. He offers fifty works, chosen from major art museums, with each painting accompanied by a list of discussion topics (such as “What is the object that [the person in the painting] is holding up to the sunlight?” or “Imagine if she were to speak to us; what would she be saying right now?”) along with brief text intended to inspire one’s interaction with the piece (18, 30). Travers withholds titles, dates, and artist’s names, listing these only in the credits section, so as not to distract the viewer from questions designed to lead him through the painting on its own merits. This helps the reader evaluate each painting’s impact and effectiveness.
For example, on the page depicting Gerrit Dou’s Astronomer by Candlelight—which portrays a scholar working late into the night to chart the stars—Travers points out such details as a tiny statue on the astronomer’s workbench and the writing on his celestial globe. Yet the point is not to discuss obscure aspects of Dou’s technique or any hidden meanings; it’s to ensure that readers miss no details and are prepared to appreciate the work fully. “What kind of work do you love enough to want to do it in the middle of the night?” Travers asks the viewer. He continues,
I’m reminded of a television show called Dirty Jobs where the host, Mike Rowe, would visit people in all kinds of unusual jobs human beings do, from shearing sheep to processing garbage. . . . And the people, with their atypical jobs, love what they do. Perhaps you have that aspect in your work. (106)
Prompts such as these can work both for children encountering art for the first time, or for adults hoping for a more meaningful experience with aesthetics—a “how-to book,” Travers calls it, for anyone “learning to ‘read’ an art-work” (8). The reader comes to appreciate the painting on its own terms, rather than merely for its historical significance.
Travers, who conducts educational tours at the Cameron Art Museum in North Carolina, also runs Touching the Art, a business that offers trips through the collections at museums across the United States. The fifty pieces he selected for Stories in Paint are those that moved his audiences the most. As a result, they cover a rather narrow range: Travers includes only works in American collections, almost entirely from 19th-century Europe and America (plus one 1664 Vermeer and Joseph Rodefer DeCamp’s 1909 The Blue Cup). Yet the quality of the images is superb, and Travers’s discussion sections are supplemented by QR codes that link to online audio clips of him discussing the painting in greater depth—enabling readers to get a multilevel experience. And if Travers’s selection leaves readers wishing his book were longer, then he has accomplished his goal of sparking the desire for more. One hopes he will add future volumes exploring great art of the 20th and 21st centuries, too.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from Travers’s brief introduction is Sandra Shaw’s Windows on Humanity, a substantial, erudite, impressively researched study of the philosophical implications of art from the caveman era to the fall of Rome. At nearly five hundred pages, it’s intended as only the first of a three-volume set, which will be truly comprehensive when completed. It, too, includes discussion questions that would make it suitable for classroom use, but it’s an extraordinary book for autodidacts wishing to deepen their understanding of ancient art as well.
Shaw—herself an accomplished sculptor—argues that art reveals the metaphysical views of artists and, consequently, that it offers a perspective on the role ideas play in history. The art that is celebrated and preserved “displays in visual terms the outlook that predominated in a given culture,” she writes, “showg which ideas people took seriously and embraced culture-wide” (17). The rigid formulas of Egyptian art, for example—with sculptures locked in a pose known as frontality, a forward-facing posture designed to show them observing religious rituals—indicate the stranglehold that the priestly class of that society held over images and ideas. The realism and grace of Classical Greek sculpture, by contrast, reveals that “the Greeks held that fulfillment and glory are naturally possible to human beings in this life and in this world” (316).
Centuries later, the Romans—“excited by military might and mystified by man’s intellect”—produced strikingly beautiful and realistic portraits but confined themselves largely to imitating the Greeks’ artistic innovations (374). Later, when Rome collapsed into religious obscurity during the Christian era, artists reverted “to an earlier, more primitive role of symbolizing religious beliefs” (419). By the Middle Ages, painters and sculptors who, in previous eras, strove to offer “for contemplation visions of what people understood was the best possible kind of human being,” had turned to focusing instead on “a creed of personal renunciation” benefiting “a god in a supernatural dimension” (436). Shaw illustrates every step of her argument with a profusion of photos, including everything from primitive clay sculptures and Roman marbles to funerary paintings and Greek vases.
Of course, any broad characterization of an entire culture over the course of centuries leaves room for exceptions, and Shaw might have devoted more time to addressing these. For instance, although she acknowledges in one paragraph that “mysticism . . . persisted in Greek culture” even during its Golden Age, a reader might come away from her references to the Greeks’ “devotion to reason” persuaded that theirs was a society essentially committed to rational modernity (312, 251). In truth, although Greek scientific, philosophical, and cultural achievements are indeed breathtaking, their culture never liberated itself from traditional religious beliefs—beliefs that ultimately led to Socrates’s execution, and, if scholars such as Bettany Hughes and E. R. Dodds are to be believed, to the ultimate collapse of Greek civilization.
And these forces coexisted for a long time. “The ubiquity of religious belief,” writes Hughes in describing Socrates’s era (ca. 470–399 BC), “skewed much of the free-thinking of the day.”3 Traditional religion was not just a feature of rural or lower-class life, either; even in Aristotle’s lifetime (384–322 BC), the high art of Greek civilization centered around the gods, and Euripides—whose play The Trojan Women Shaw quotes as exemplifying a cultural pessimism that gradually doomed Greece—lived a generation before that.
On the other hand, incidents that, viewed from our perspective two millennia later, look like evidence of the Greeks’ descent into mysticism might not be. Thus, Shaw cites the execution of the sculptor Phidias as an example of reactionary Greek religion, but Phidias was executed for political reasons (albeit rationalized as punishment for impiety)—assuming he was executed at all, which is unclear from the record. And that was almost a century before the birth of Epicurus, the Greeks’ greatest secularist.
In short, the precise ways in which Greek intellectuals handled the conflict of reason and mysticism, and the chronology of their turn away from reason, are sometimes hard to disentangle, if for no other reason than that the religious concepts we are most familiar with—such as monotheism or salvation—have no analogue in their practice. None of this contradicts Shaw’s overall argument, of course; they’re simply details. But a book that seeks to chart the philosophical evolution of a society, and to do so in such depth, would have been strengthened by devoting more time to such nuances.
Among the high points of Windows on Humanity are the appendixes, titled “What Is Art?” and “Why Is There Art?” In these essays—which would serve as superb follow-up readings for newcomers who finish Travers’s book—Shaw examines the reasons artists do what they do: to teach, propagandize, tell stories, express emotions—and, beneath it all, to understand and articulate views about life’s fundamental nature. “All of our scientific and historic texts,” she writes, “cannot provide what one work of art can readily show: a universally meaningful vision of what life could be” (454). Such a universally meaningful vision is vastly more significant, both personally and historically, than anything postmodernist notions of “narratives” and “power” can handle.
The profound emotional relationship between people and the artworks they love—and love is not too strong a word for it—testifies to art’s extraordinary psychological significance. And because human beings also strive to make themselves and their societies conform to their visions, art is also a superb indicator of a culture’s philosophical atmosphere. By bringing these ideas to bear on the art of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and early Christianity, Shaw has created a tour de force of artistic scholarship that leaves readers eager to see what she will do in succeeding volumes.
Nobody entering an art museum should have to arrive armed with a “grounding in art theory, art history, and knowledge about the cultural and art historical contexts” before being able to comprehend and evaluate the pieces inside. But such information can and should help enrich the experience—an experience that properly starts with such simple questions as: What is this artwork saying—and what do I feel about it? By giving us doorways into a wider world of art and ideas—and doing so without the backing of any major publishing houses—Travers and Shaw have not only done us all a great service but have testified to the enormous value of art in all our lives.