Timeless and moving lessons of great art
IN 1963, I left home for the first time to travel all the way to Paris, where all I wanted to do was visit art galleries.
Yes, the shops were exciting, but I knew that art could help me understand the world.
Fifty years later, I haven’t changed — which is either a cause for celebration or worry, depending on how much you value the need for progress!
So here I am, still having marvellous encounters with great art, which go on teaching me about the human spirit — and that includes (for better, for worse) most of the things that appear on these pages, week after week.
Love, power, restlessness, fear, envy, aspiration, dreams... all such emotions are timeless.
No wonder my latest illumination came within the great portals of the British Museum in London, where I caught up with the exhibition Ice Age Art (on until May 26 if you happen to be over there).
It was intensely moving to gaze at small works of art created as long ago as 40,000 years and feel such an intense rush of affection and respect for our ancestors.
Because all human life was there. In unbelievably tough conditions they sat around fires in their caves, telling stories, painting animals and people on the walls, playing flutelike instruments and carving chunks of stone or the tusks of mammoths to represent what mattered most to them in that long-ago world.
Why would you do that — putting in so much effort to carve a man with the head of a lion, or a sweetly elegant horse, or a pretty girl with waving hair, or a bird in flight?
Why would you scratch away to make beads or to decorate a baton which just helped throw spears? Above all, why create so many little, plump, pregnant women?
Because making art shouts to the darkest sky that there is more to humankind than simply staying alive, than simply surviving.
The objects in this enthralling exhibition connect the men and women who made them to you and I. They possessed little, but had a sense of purpose and an imagination which could transform the everyday. And we do, too.