A Story Of Artists

Language

Introduction

The first phase – Shaman and decorator

The handy-man artist

Reasons for art

Animal artists

Creator of reality

Art as magic

The first conceptual artist

The invention of writing

How to design a script

The second phase - Manual labourer and worker

Dogsbodies

Who did those Egyptian artists think they were?

Early transgressions

The classical classical artist

Myths, legends, and divinities

Double standards

The invention of art

Plato and the platoon of execution

I married a statue

Copyists of the Roman Empire

Down with contemporary artists

A matter of style

Mechanical artists

The plague of iconoclasm

Instruments of God

Monasteries and signatures

Guilds and workshops

Capital and tyrants

The first modern artist

The third phase - The intellectual genius

Technical revolution

The numbers of art and the art of numbers

Artists who paint themselves

Secular art makes a comeback

The decline of the corporations

Artisans on the counteroffensive

Rebirth

Genius, scientist, and entrepreneur - three emblematic figures

Independent artists, collectors, dealers, and critics

Free to join the liberal arts

Rich and poor

New anecdotes and topoi

Mad melancholic misfits

Criminal and murderer

Conformity and nonconformity

Alchemist

The rise of academies

Originality and genius

Mannerism as insult

More art on fire

Iconoclasm unlimited

Acts of destruction and accidental damage

The reaction of the Church

The idea of the idea

Respectable entrepreneurs

Artists – doomed, damned and disgraceful

Art speaks with a French accent

The birth of the beaux arts and exhibitions

Artists - famed and famished

The unbearable lightness of the Rococo

The success of the Salon

The scourge of critics

A disaster called aesthetics

Meanwhile, in England ...

An abnormal romantic superhero

Genius and madness

Serial artists

Stupefying art

The three (dis)graces: psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis

The birth of the ideal consumer

Artist becomes an adjective

Trapped again by the written word

Rejecting the present and the influences of the past

A disaster heralded in the 15th century

The fourth phase – Experimenter and theorist

Artists out of focus

Art and technology: a complicated relationship

Industrious art

Art and science go their different ways

The fashion for taking pot-shots at artists

The Realism of Marxism

Romantic English criticism

Artists and models

Artists on trial

Impressionism - an expanding market

The myth of Vincent van Gogh and the defeat of art criticism

The beautiful, the ugly and the useless

Professional Sunday afternoon artists

A new powerful class comes of age

The paradox of the avant-garde

The Apotheosis of Forgery

The Pains of early Modernism

Art as child's play

A glut of avant-garde movements

New dealers and stinger critics

Modernism Italian-style

Clockwork art

From word to image

From Russia with censorship

ARS - Art, Religion and Science

Trade and profession

More degenerate art

Heil artist!

The day after: handover

The CIA that came in from the cold

From doomed to damned

The other half of art

Conceptual Art Reloaded

Pop art comes to the rescue

The chaos of theory

Amateurish doodling

Prelude to the fifth phase

The fifth phase - Obsolescent, experiential, and extravagant

Postmodernism and contemporary art

Post-annihilation shifts

Freedom from the confines of the galleries

The Toyland years

The politics of scandal

A world of censors

Curators – a bitter pill to swallow

Well-integrated Apocalyptics

A choir of soloists

Perfect artisticide

The mother of creatives is always with child – The world will always be full of creatives

A post-mortem world

Artists on the big screen

Scorned by the small screen

The democratic tyranny of mediocracy

A bureaucratic career

Contemporary artists reviled

The Iceberg Theory

Branding and atmosphere

From damned to banned: artists caught in the net

Trade fairs today

Popular, mass, high and branded - the many ways of being an artist

Art and the law

The Fame market

The Market, System, and Art World

Stereotypes 3.0

Towards the sixth phase?

THE STORY OF ARTISTS – From the Palaeolithic to this morning

Introduction

The history of art has now been analysed from every point of view. There is no aspect of art that has not been dealt with in at least one of the incalculable number of books that have been dedicated to the subject. Whereas much has been written about art, relatively speaking, the figure artist has been the subject of just a few distilled pieces, mainly of a biographical nature - there is no history of the artist that examines how this figure lived and was viewed during various eras, and how the figure of the artist changed from earliest beginnings to today. This book is an attempt to make good this lacuna.

We are inclined to think of artists as topoi with immutable characteristics handed down to us intact, as they were at the dawn of time. Or rather, as they were until just over a century ago, and were transformed – and corrupted – in recent decades.

As we shall see, the truth is rather different; by closely observing how the figure of the artist evolved from one century to the next, one can identify unexpected events and surprising similarities, and even give the lie to several commonplaces.

In examining this figure, I have preferred to use a non-evaluative method, and I should perhaps explain my reasons for this decision.

Any subject can be dealt with by either an evaluative or a non-evaluative approach. The latter defines the topic in terms of scope; for example, art is sculpture, painting, music, etc. without making judgements or distinctions of value and quality. This method is pragmatic, based on terminology, and does not aim to distinguish between what is or is not a work of art. An evaluative approach, on the other hand, would be motivated by this very distinction: art is epitomised, as suggested by Tolstoy, by the best, the most important and most successful product in every artistic field.

This definition makes the distinction somewhat vague because one still needs to define best, important, and successful. Everyone can have their own views on these concepts and consider important a work of art that others see as irrelevant. After all, art has always been what is defined as such. In addition, if not all paintings are art, but only the best is, painting cannot itself be considered an art, but rather an activity that can include the realisation of works of art. Using the evaluative approach makes it meaningless to refer to mediocre works of art: if they are mediocre, they are not works of art; if we acknowledge they are works of art, then they are not mediocre. The same is true for the term artist. In accordance with the evaluative approach, there is no such thing as a terrible artist because if we use the term artist, we acknowledge the artist’s value, and if we define an artist as terrible, we deny them the status of artist.

This is why, of the two approaches, the evaluative is always the first that causes greater problems and paradoxes. Unfortunately, it is also the most widely used approach because of the need we humans often harbour to make the speediest possible judgements.

When speaking of artists, it is often easy to be confused by a few terms that over the centuries have become loaded with meanings to the extent that they no longer have any. As the art historian, Thomas Munro, stated, the confusion starts with the basic terms art and arts. He argued that, generally, one is unaware of the true extent of the ambiguity of the terms. Firstly, the word art is applied to specific types of abilities and techniques, and to the product of these abilities – works of art. Often, it is applied extensively to all kinds of useful competencies in areas such as medicine and agriculture. Sometimes, it is limited to skills in particular fields, like painting, or other skills that result in producing aesthetic pleasure, itself an expression that is vague and controversial. The term art is sometimes used in an approving way, indicating the high aesthetic qualities of the artefact; on other occasions, it is used with neutrality and applied in a variety of circumstances to any piece of work however it is made.

One could continue to debate the matter to such an extent that nobody would any longer clearly understand what the word art means. Something similar occurs with the word artist, which can be used without any difference in meaning for various activities, as proof of excellence, or even a sarcastic counterpoint.

This is why I have chosen a non-evaluative approach - to limit misunderstandings, I shall also establish a convention: to define, throughout the book, the sense in which I use the words art and artist.

Apart from in a few specific passages, when I refer to art, I refer to the visual arts – sculpture, painting, but also cinema, photography, video art, installations, etc., and not literature, poetry, music, dance, or any other form of expression that in a wider sense can be considered art. This is not because I do not consider them art, but to avoid confusion. Until recently, the term artist referred mostly to painters and sculptors, but things have changed, and today an artist is not only a painter, a musician, or a writer but also a fashion designer, a comedian, or a TV presenter. I am not against this, but as I aim to tell the already long and complex story of the artist, which begins with the earliest artists and sculptors of the Palaeolithic Period and progresses to the latest performers and installation artists, I do not wish to risk getting into a tangle.

For the record, I wish to clarify that I use the term artist for what it is – a noun. The term artist is not a qualifying adjective, it does not assign value; it is merely a noun, like the word table. Artists are people who devote themselves to art, even if they do so badly, just as a table remains a table even if it is ugly, broken, or badly made. It is the adjective that defines whether the table is beautiful or ugly, or if the artist is clever, or unexceptional. Reactions to this view are often fierce, the principal objection being that someone who creates art badly cannot be considered an artist because art means excellence. Although I understand the reasons for this reaction, I believe it is based on erroneous assumptions. If we do not want to consider that people who devote themselves to art are artists because what they produce is unexceptional, we should at least demonstrate objectively and irrefutably that what they produce is truly unexceptional. It is here that what I call the theory of quality begins to crumble. Whether or not one agrees with relativism, it is impossible to deny that views of artists and their works are often divergent, even worlds apart, and affect not just the Sunday afternoon painter, or the Monday critic, but also famous artists, the ones written about in art history books whose works fetch exorbitant prices, and famous, authoritative art experts. As we shall see, styles and art movements are often baptised with insults thought up by hostile critics, and conversely, errors (or rather, reversals) of judgement - abound.

One could try to resolve the problem by refuting the authority of this or that expert because of their incompetence, but we would return to square one: who decides which expert is right, which one wrong, seeing that their views can be equally contradictory?

We could defer to the market value of the works, but we are well aware that, apart from being as unstable as the views of critics, or even more so – because it is susceptible to speculation, and to unscrupulous manipulation of sales to increase or reduce the price of the works, the art market creates values that have nothing to do with quality.

It is impossible, therefore, to resolve whether a person is an artist or not from the quality of their work because it is impossible to have a unanimous and objective view. Does this perhaps mean that the word artist can never be used? If we argue in terms of quality, the answer is probably yes, there is every danger that the word should never be used. It happens today when, if we describe someone as an artist – or worse, someone describes himself or herself as an artist – people raise their eyebrows all at once, and make fun of them, gesturing sarcastic inverted commas: he thinks he is an artist!

The word artist is so charged with meanings and values that artists can no longer be worthy of them. Whatever artists do and however they do it, there will always be a slice of humanity that not only will not like their work but will also cast doubt on whether they are indeed artists. The alternative is not to consider that everyone is an artist because if this were true there would be no need to use the word, all are artists is equivalent to none are artists, so the term is once again negated. I believe the solution lies is in the word devote; artists are the people who devote themselves to an art form. To devote oneself to art does not mean trying it out once in a lifetime, doing it on Sundays or when there is nothing else to do. To devote is a challenging verb, implying discernment. Synonyms of to devote oneself include to dedicate oneself, to consecrate oneself, to give oneself and to offer oneself. Those who devote themselves to art do so as though the object of their devotion were a loved one. Just as a person who skips from one partner to another cannot be described as in love, so one who nibbles away at one experience after another with no enthusiasm, alternating them with a series of other equally superficial tasks cannot be called an artist. It would be impossible to deny that people who devote themselves to art, perhaps working several hours every day, and even when not working think about it constantly, year after year, are not artists merely because in the debateable opinion of one or more people what they produce is not of good quality. Clearly, there are some grey areas; the journey from pastime to commitment is like the journey from night into day; there is no specific moment when one can say, Now it is daytime, a second ago, it was the night. The journey is a gradual, ambiguous one, which even artists themselves struggle to perceive until one day they realise that what started as a mere interest has become a constant commitment to which they devote their exertions, time, and thoughts. The opposite can also happen. Initial enthusiasm becomes the weary repetition of motions performed increasingly rarely like the young lads who get a buzz when they start to play the guitar and, after a few months, put it in a cupboard and forget about it.

Art is not demonstrable. If it were, after millennia of artworks being produced by millions of artists, we would today have a theory of art that is acceptable to all. We would know what art is and what art is not before even seeing a work of art or, rather, before making it because we would know chapter and verse of what to do to produce it. However, the reverse happens. We have hundreds of futile theories. Over the course of the centuries, thousands of experts have written as many conflicting diktats, and today we still have ranks of luminaries holding opposing views. Examples of this are countless. Eugène Véron, Lev Tolstoy and Yrjö Hirn maintained that art is the expression and communication of emotions; Carl Lange and Karl Groos that it is a game; for Benedetto Croce, Bernard Bosanquet and Henri Bergson that it is intuition and technique; Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Dewitt H. Parker believed it is the will to power and the fulfilment of desire; for George Santayana and Henry R. Marshall art is about pleasure; for Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Edward Carpenter it was form that mattered; Ramon Fernandez and Jacques Maritain considered that it was intellect; José Ortega Y Gasset and Edward Bullough that it was psychological detachment; Vernon Lee and Theodor Lipps empathy; for Ethel Puffer, Hugo Münsterberg, Charles K. Odgen, Ivor A. Richards and James Wood, art was isolation and equilibrium; Oswald Spengler and Lewis Mumford maintained it was cultural influence; William Morris, John Dewey and Alfred N. Whitehead perceived art as an instrument, a means to an end. Some even thought they could identify with sufficient precision various, shared universal mechanisms that they founded a science of art, a notion that was embraced by many, including Hippolyte Taine, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Gottfried Semper, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Alois Riegl, Konrad Fiedler, Max Dessoir and Max Bense. It is remarkable that, despite these problems and the burden of their interference, artists have nonetheless managed to make art and even a few masterpieces.

I have never understood why art should settle for part of its scope when it could embrace it all, and why artists should cower in a corner rather than explore the whole to which it belongs. This does not mean being averse to debates on art, which could be constructive, just averse to reducing art to ideological formulas, which can be destructive. In truth, we have failed to agree on one single feature - just one, not one hundred – that is common to all works of art that could shed some light on this mystery. Not even in the case of individual works of art have we been able to identify a common feature, so what for an art historian is a work of art becomes amateurish tat for a critic or vice versa. To be more concise, no one in the world can prove with certainty that any statements on art are true or even that art truly exists.

It is possible that art is not a given, but rather a hypothesis; this is also why, taking inspiration from Ernst Gombrich (1901-2001), who famously stated, There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists, I have decided to concern myself with artists. If the reality of art is debatable, the existence of artists is certain: they exist, have existed, and, probably, will continue to exist: without them, there would be nothing of what over the millennia has been referred to as art.

Throughout this book, then, we will follow the impervious journey of artists, from the Upper Palaeolithic Period to this morning, in their various guises: illusionists, priests, legends, entrepreneurs, inventors, lunatics, revolutionaries, scientists, patrons, and many things besides. We will see them experiment with techniques and ideas, always intent on discovering new ways of making art, overcoming the limits determined by society and by themselves. We will witness conflicts between artists, and between artists and society, their victories and defeats, their complex and conflictual relationships with literature, philosophy, techniques, politics, religion, and critics, tainted by the serious defect of having the manual skill that for at least 5,000 years discouraged artists, who were seen as fools clever with their hands. We will follow the highs and lows that reduced artists from shamans to manual workers, raised them to the status of genius, and transformed them from damned to doomed artists. We will examine the commonplaces that surround them, and we will discover the influences and interventions that have made them what they are today. We will also see how and why the figure of the artist has, in the collective imagination, become an obnoxious figure. From a certain point in time, in fact, artists themselves began to attack and demolish the figure of the artist, while many have even distanced themselves from the term artist.

Today, many artists prefer to define themselves as painters or sculptors, for example, as though this resolves the problem, or frees them from certain responsibilities; alternatively, they rediscover the term artisan which they then exploit. Describing themselves as artisans is not an act of humility; it is, rather, a way of giving themselves added value, to distinguish themselves from artists, who according to them, are now unable to do anything. Unfortunately, it is often those who are technically less skilled, who know little and do it badly, who describe themselves as artisans. One wonders what true artisans make of it if indeed they have survived the financial and political snares of recent years.

Despite the knocks they have experienced and the low opinion society has of them, the numbers of artists are growing – never in the history of humanity have there been so many. If those who consider art an expression of unease, a disease, then it is an aggressive, contagious disease, Ars like SARS – a sort of pandemic gripping the planet. Will it be able to hold all the works of art that we can produce? No one can tell, and in any event, the question is irrelevant in the context of this book. We will try to understand how we came this far and why, after a certain point in time, artists became so numerous.

I have divided the history of the artist into five phases, five great eras that bear witness to the radical changes in the figure of the artist. Each of these eras ends in circumstances that give way to a new one. The first era embraces the Palaeolithic Period, from the dawn of what would later be known as art to the invention of writing, a watershed between two significant moments in this story. The second extends to the late Middle Ages, with artists like Giotto di Bondone (c.1267-1337), and the introduction of the first optical instruments that foreshadow the Renaissance and sow the seeds for a revolution in the figure of the artist. The third era ends when optical instruments develop to the extent of becoming autonomous – the birth of photography, which causes another upheaval for artists. The fourth era ends in the 1960s, a time of remarkable change even in the art world, with brutal attacks on the figure of the artist. The fifth and final era leads to the times in which we live, or at least until a few years ago, as towards the middle of the year 2000 one can perhaps identify the gestational stage of a sixth era.

I have no wish to be defensive – this is a book written from the perspective of artists, and more specifically, it is written by one, as I count myself one of them – but my apparent presumptuousness should be excused. This does not mean that I have altered the facts to protect the artists; on the contrary, I have often been pitiless; shedding light on dark corners has been difficult, even painful, and has forced me to rethink many of my attitudes and convictions. From all this experience, I have, however, developed insights that someone who has not spent their life in the actual exercise of art would find difficult to achieve. In this sense, then, I can offer a point of view that differs from those of the institutions, provided by experts in the stories of art they tell, and by the specialists who never get their hands dirty.

Often, while writing this book, I have been overcome by anger for what I consider injustice, and by aching feelings of compassion for lives never really understood, never truly accepted, lives committed to a thankless task that places them somewhere non-specific between the dizzying heights of their own passion, and the petty meanness of the world in which they struggle to survive.

The first phase – Shaman and decorator

From 45,000 to 5,000 years ago

The handy-man artist

Is art an exclusively human activity? Who was the forefather of all artists? A human being, Neanderthal man, a primate, or other? What we know is that there was an outbreak of art during the Palaeolithic era between 2,5 million and 10,000 years ago during the Pleistocene geological epoch.

The earliest Homo sapiens appeared around 200,000 years ago, and during this long period, the species spread out from Africa and began to engage in artistic activities.

It is interesting to observe that the first species of Homo sapiens was called Homo habilis because he was able to produce stone tools; he was the first to make his own tools, and to use his hands to create something that previously did not exist. The process that led to the evolution of our intelligence began when we started to use our hands to make and create. It is shameful that for millennia and, as we shall see, to this day, manual skills should have been under-rated and scorned, and thought of as the preserve of lesser mortals and the less intelligent.

The anthropologist John E. Pfeiffer is convinced that the development of manual potential preceded thought. On the other hand, the ethnologist Mary Marzke was convinced that our hands use three basic forms of grip, and only when the human animal succeeded in mastering all three was he able to initiate a true cultural evolution. For the sociologist, Richard Sennet, the importance of a firm grip and manual dexterity in cultural abilities and comprehending reality is still reflected in everyday expressions. We say, To have a good grasp on the topic, or To grasp a problem in the sense of fully understanding it. These figurative expressions reflect the evolutionary dialogue that developed between hand and brain.

The archaeologist Steven Mithen stresses how even the birth of writing is indebted to enhanced manual dexterity. He argues that bipedalism is important because hands remain free for other tasks, enabling the manual dexterity necessary for writing to develop. All too often, we forget that, after all, writing is also a manual skill whether done with a pen or a keyboard. Luca Cavalli Sforza and Telmo Pievani are unambiguous: culture originates from the hand.

From an anatomical perspective, Homo sapiens was already modern 100,000 years ago, whilst in the complete sense of the term, he can be considered modern from about 45,000 years ago.

What palaeo-anthropologists have defined as The great leap forward occurred between 45,000 and 34,000 years ago in the Upper Palaeolithic Period when Homo sapiens acquired an articulate language and relational and symbolic abilities; he was able to elaborate abstract concepts, was self-aware, and questioned himself; this is when what would later be called art came into being.

For over two million years, hominoids had only produced artefacts from stone, whereas with Homo sapiens, in what from an archaeological perspective is a short period of time, paintings, burial sites, ornaments, the use of new materials such as clay and bone, and much else besides, began to flourish. It is impossible to say with any certainty what caused this sudden outburst of creativity. Many believe it has to do with the advent of a well-developed form of language, yet most innovations introduced by Homo sapiens suggest it was the development of manual dexterity confirmed by the paintings, burial sites, and ornaments they produced. Even the new materials used would make more sense from the perspective of evolved manual dexterity, as does the construction of larger settlements.

There is no certain evidence of this, but attempts have been made to demonstrate that Homo habilis used language – a theory justified by the presence in the hominid brain of traces of the so-called Broca area, and of the lateralisation associated with language. However, later studies have shown that the Broca area is a part of the brain that is related not only to language but also to elaborate movements of the hands.

According to some, Homo sapiens was preceded by Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis. In the case of Neanderthals, one can speak of art because they carefully chose the stone they carved. Perhaps Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was not entirely wrong when he stated that art was a matter of selection. Some works have raised doubts and may have been produced by Neanderthal man, as in the case of the paintings at Altamira and other areas in Northern Spain, which recent studies have dated at least 10,000 years further back in time. It is difficult to dispel any doubts because Homo sapiens may have arrived in Europe – where the first caves were painted – earlier than is supposed, and the caves were probably inhabited by both species. It is thus difficult to identify which species did what.

In fact, in Italy, both Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man shared the same spaces at the same time. Their genomes are 99.84% the same, but again, we share a great part of our genetic code with mice, mushrooms and even bananas. As Charles Darwin observed in 1837, we are all linked through a single network. This coexistence had further confirmation in 2012 when a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA was found in a Homo sapiens of non-African origins, suggesting that hybridisation between the two groups took place in the Middle East.

In a relatively brief period and for reasons that are still unclear but perhaps are linked with the presence of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals finally became extinct about 25,000 years ago.

However, today, art is still considered an activity typical of human beings – perhaps it should be described as an activity that presupposes an intellectual capacity at least equal to that of human beings – therefore artists are human. Some people maintain that other animals can be artists – elephants and various primates for example. Others, conversely, believe that it is unlikely that animals can go beyond the boundaries of play, which cannot be structured into an art form also because of the absence of symbolism, intent, and more sophisticated dexterity. Many experiments in this area have been undertaken, and later we will study them in detail because by comparing similarities and differences with human experiences, they provide interesting insights.

Reasons for art

When the first cave was found in Altamira in 1880, few experts accepted the idea that art could have begun thousands of years before. In due course, and for a long time afterwards, art produced during the Upper Palaeolithic Period was considered ordinary, inferior, and requiring little effort to produce. Later it was acknowledged that the reverse was true and that the works were often elaborate, requiring talent and technical preparation. Today, it is acknowledged that primitive art is anything but primitive.

Preparing colours was a part of art practice, a basic component, and remained so until the Renaissance. That artists of the Palaeolithic Period were not amateurs is demonstrated by their ability to make paints. They did not limit themselves to using straight earth or coal for instance; they were able to reduce their chosen pigment, hematite for example, to extremely fine powder, and applied it mixed with a binding substance such as vegetable oil – a distant relative of oil paints.

They devised the ingenious idea of spray painting, as if with an airgun, using a tube to blow pigment on to a surface. Techniques and recipes evolved, changed, and improved over time, a sign of knowledge and expertise being handed down, being put to the test, experimented with, and enhanced.

What drove these early artists can be placed into three categories: magic and religion, aesthetics, and usefulness combined with communication. Although it is likely that magic and religion was the most important motivation, it is not easy to decide which category had more impact.

According to Thomas Munro, human beings are predisposed to experimentation, learning, and the transmission of cultural achievements. They produced and appreciated what later evolved into art. From a biological perspective, this predisposition is, perhaps, an anomaly or a hypertrophy that developed naturally, well beyond the needs for physical survival; but by being in possession of it, Man was often driven to use it constructively.

Indeed, art could be the first human activity to be released from the need for the immediate satisfaction of vital requirements. Some anthropologists doubt that it ever had a utilitarian function linked with survival; others think of art as a partial factor in natural selection, one of the methods of survival used by human beings when art was thought of as magic that could recreate reality and, therefore, directly, or indirectly guarantee survival. Religious and civic art, for example, are known to have served this function, re-enforcing group solidarity, inspiring trust and enthusiasm, all of which have helped groups of human beings to survive while others are wiped out. Being perceived as having the power of magic gave the chiefs of tribes prestige and authority, bonding the group and its social organisation.

The biologist Geoffrey Miller considers that creativity and talent were gendered choices because they were excellent forms of display for attracting women, and therefore enabled the artist to have good opportunities for reproduction. The psychologist Susan Blackmore reasons that gendered selection would have favoured artistic representation because it would guarantee the efficient distribution of memes - artists are the first to follow trends or give rise to them and are excellent imitators, able to disseminate ideas at will.

The doubt remains whether women were attracted by artistic ability per se, or whether the value of those abilities in certain contexts made the artist a man of importance and power, and therefore desirable.

The psychologist Otto Rank (1884-1939) took the view that art and religion were medical remedies. Religion, according to him, was psychotherapy for the masses invented by the people to defeat illness, just as art, along with philosophy, is a similar cure invented by an individual just for himself and a few companions in misfortune. Treatment of the neurotic is applied individually, case by case; he is the classical egoist, the founder of religions, the reverse of the individual; the artist is caught in between, and this conditions the way he is regarded.

In The Mind in the Cave, David Lewis-William states that art was chiefly a means by which Homo sapiens differentiated himself from Neanderthal man, unable, according to Lewis-William, to remember images and therefore reproduce them. His theory is rather bold, but it is likely that, within the membership group, being able to produce art was a way of distinguishing oneself, and to rise above the others.

Others hold the view that the drive to visual representation is innate, so much so that they agree with the psychologist John M. Kennedy who argues that design was uncovered rather than discovered.

The ethologist, Desmond Morris, maintains that one of the main reasons Man developed art is that he had to contend with a skill to which he was not suited – hunting. Unlike the professional killers in the world of carnivores, man, if he wanted truly to be a successful hunter, had to cooperate and plan. As soon as he acquired a true language, suitable for describing objects as well as feelings, the door to the pictorial representation of these objects was thrown wide open. At this stage, prehistoric art enters the scene, for either or both of the following reasons. One is utilitarian – the description and instruction of hunting. Almost all prehistoric art represents hunted species or true hunting scenes. The second is religious. It has been widely upheld that there was a belief that, by a process of sympathetic magic, the representation of symbolic animals helped to control animals in flesh and bones, a theory supported by a great quantity of comparative ethnological data.

This statement and others reveal a cultural prejudice that is bent on defining language as the basis of all communication compared with which any other system of symbols is merely an appendage, an add-on, a by-product. We cannot exclude the possibility that art came before articulated, spoken language, as art itself is an articulated language. There is no need to invent the word ox in order to draw it. Teaching and describing is more accurate with words, so it is possible that taking recourse to images was necessary because no spoken language had been developed. In fact, images themselves helped to clarify language and various terms to describe things and actions represented as though art were a sort of spelling book not just for learning but also for ascribing a name to things.

Animal artists

For a long time, it was thought that primitive art, the art of crazies and children, had a common basis, that they were similar, a form of pure art belonging to the realms of free, uninhibited inspiration.

Over the last two centuries, even artists have wanted to believe this, and some persist in believing it today when all evidence leads to the opposite view. They have very little in common, and all three, in different ways, are far from being free expressions of pure, unadulterated inspiration, or pure art, whatever that means.

Bearing all this in mind, there are some people who have sought answers by studying the art of other animals – chimpanzees, for example. The first to take an interest in primate artists was the psychologist Winthrop Niles Kellogg, (1898-1972) who in 1931 adopted a chimpanzee and studied its habits. From his study, it emerged that a chimpanzee can doodle if shown how and that after learning how continues to doodle spontaneously and that, contrary to those of a child, its doodles are not imitative.

Other studies followed. The paintings of two chimpanzees, Beth and Tom, executed with their fingers, for example, met with some success, bringing funds to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore from the many sales of their works. In 1954, the works of Beth and Tom were examined by child psychologists who were unaware of who had painted them. The results were interesting. One of Tom’s paintings was attributed to an aggressive boy of seven or eight years of age, with paranoid tendencies. The works of Beth were attributed to a little girl of ten, who was either schizoid or paranoid. The psychologists were unable to distinguish the paintings done by humans and non-humans, but they were able to identify their sexes.

In 1953, Desmond Morris began to study the artistic proclivities of a chimpanzee called Congo. Congo’s paintings and those of Beth were exhibited at an exhibition in London in 1957, irritating a considerable part of the public and press because the artistic output of these animals was reminiscent of the abstract art produced by human beings. As a consequence of the resulting clamour, many offers to buy the paintings were made and accepted; just a few days later, in order not to compromise the study, there was a change of heart. However, those few days were enough to sell almost all of Congo’s twenty-four paintings.

Another collection of works was put together for an exhibition in the USA. Between 1957 and 1958, Congo led an intense artistic life, producing entire series of paintings and drawings. Congo’s condition was not much different from what some art dealers, gallery owners and auction houses imagine must be normal for any artist: to produce ceaselessly, like a chicken churning out eggs before ending up with its feathers plucked.

Other details, however, emerged from a series of experiments with gorillas. An experiment on Sophie demonstrated that her artistic activity erupted when she was alone, sad, and away from Stefi, a gorilla who periodically lived with her. Sophie - a gorilla who was a painter because she was lonely, sad, or lovesick; as suggested by psychologists like Otto Rank, it seems gorillas are like human beings, finding in art refuge and relief from the sorrows of life.

These primates had a personal style - not all of them were gifted, many showed no interest, while others, once they started, could not stop. Like the chimpanzee Bella, who could concentrate on a drawing for long periods of time. Bella was mild-mannered, she never reacted when her tutor interrupted her activities, not even if her food was withdrawn, and yet, when she was interrupted by her guardian while drawing, Bella reacted by biting her. She appeared to have a high degree of concentration, and nothing seemed to distract her, not even an offering of food or sweets; perhaps she was also experimenting with a form of flow. Congo and other chimpanzees also showed angry reactions to interruptions to their creative activity during other experiments, which was even more significant if one considers that, contrary to what happens with other actions, animals did not receive any food as a reward: for them, it was autotelic, a pleasant, satisfying reward in itself.

A fixed point in the study of monkeys is that they tend to perform variations on a well-defined, constantly repeated theme - like many artists who, all their lives handle just one subject, or, after exhausting all interesting variations of it, move on to another.

Morris observed another important fact: Congo’s creative impulses weakened by degrees as other more physical and social impulses prevailed as he developed. This could suggest, for example, that in order to continue to devote oneself to art, one needs to remain to some extent childlike, something that evolution has privileged in our own species for whom play and exploration continue into adulthood; that the more one is engaged with life, physically and in interpersonal relationships, the less will be one’s interest in artistic creativity; and that interpersonal difficulties may, however, favour the passion for art as a substitute, stopgap activity that mitigates the lack of a proper, satisfying social life. This is almost reminiscent of the extreme dualism of Romanticism: either live art or make it.

Morris also emphasises that all this happens only if animals are looked after, one way or another, and are kept in liberty. This means that only young monkeys can have the tendency to behave this way. They can scratch signs on the earth and on trees but, with the advent of adulthood, faced with the immediate problems of survival, these abilities are put aside and forgotten.

The monkey called Alpha, when she ran out of paper, tried to draw on dead leaves, and turned down food when spotting someone with pencil and paper, which she tried to gain for herself. What is more, she did this alone, turning her back on those observing her, and pushing away other animals locked up with her. Therefore, she did not devote herself to art to have as recompense the attention of the other animals or the experimenters: art made her antisocial and forgetful of vital functions such as eating. Some have objected that their pleasure lay merely in the physical activity linked with drawing. However, this is an unlikely objection because the monkeys refused to draw using simple wooden sticks that left no sign. For them, it was important to see the signs left by the pencil or paint. The pleasure they derived was also visual and was a self-rewarding activity, the main stimulus being the activity itself, not the external reward like food, not an affective reward, such as the attention of the others, nor even the physical release produced by movement.

During these experiments, there was to be just one experimenter as several people tended to distract the chimpanzees, and sidetrack them, confirming Leonardo da Vinci who exhorted artists to work in solitude, If you are alone, you are yours.

Experimenting was part of the artistic activity. In one case, Congo achieved the effect of watercolour by urinating on his painting. He later used water to achieve the same effect, while at the same time trying out other items instead of brushes. The one producing the most original effects became his favourite. Later, he managed to hold a brush like a human being, as did other chimpanzees. Amongst other things, it was also observed that he tended to stay within the blank page, to underscore a central figure, and to balance a shape that appeared to be uncentred.

What Morris observes in relation to attempts to prevail over the self-reward system by corrupting the monkey with food to drive it to greater commitment to drawing, is interesting. The result was enlightening. The monkey soon learned to associate drawing with receiving a reward, but as soon as this state of affairs became constant, he became increasingly less interested in what he was drawing. Whatever doodle he drew, he immediately extended his hand for his reward. His painstaking attention to drawing, rhythm, balance, and composition was lost, and the worst form of commercial art came into being.

It is easy to make comparisons with human artists, mollycoddled by the market, who risk dragging their art into slovenliness merely for financial gain. It is a reminder of how important the reactions of others can be, and of how frail is the balance between rejection and acceptance that the artist needs to learn to handle. It also suggests something Picasso said during the last years of his life, If I spit, my spit will be framed and sold as a work of art.

Yet further studies have been carried out on other animals. The biologist and ethologist Bernard Rensch (1900-1990) observed that primates prefer regular, rhythmic forms and that their tastes in colour change over time, like fashionable trends. Even birds appear to be attracted by regular shapes, whereas fish prefer irregular ones.

Some studies have been carried out in more recent times like the one on Cholla, a horse, who painted on paper holding the brush in his mouth. In this case, too, there were similarities with human painting. Cholla even won prizes when he was surreptitiously made to participate in an art competition.

Elephants, too, have been observed standing at their easels in groups painting earnestly, paintbrush in their trunks. According to ethologist Danilo Mainardi (1933-2017), their grip on the paintbrush is like that of a human. Furthermore, the elephants applied themselves to figurative and not abstract art and depicted elephants with several clearly identifiable features. They are the only non-human animals able to produce figurative art.

These are all useful and significant findings that should, however, be treated with caution rather than used forcefully for making comparisons with human behaviour. Studies of this kind may also conceal weaknesses, the first being the relationship between the animals and the experimenters, a rather sore point. Often an affectionate relationship develops between the two, or the experimenters burden their studies with high expectations, which - either consciously or not - can affect their outcomes, exactly as can happen with a parent who at all costs wants to see signs of genius in their child’s drawings.

Creator of reality

Ideas and theories about prehistoric art are often considered to be fanciful. However, as many of the aptitudes of Palaeolithic man can still be found in primitive populations living in remote parts of the world in the present day, it is clearly true only to a certain extent. Palaeolithic man survived in small, separate groups, surviving parasitically as hunter-gatherers. Religions and divinities were still to come, and everything revolved around survival and, therefore, food; art itself, in a way that can be defined as magic, was perceived as a method of procuring it. We can call it art or magic – the meaning we now give these two words is far removed from their origins when concepts such as art and artist did not yet exist. The magic of Palaeolithic art was not of a religious nature. It was devoid of references to an after-world or to the supernatural. The making of images was a technical, practical matter akin to planting seeds in soil to produce a fruitful tree. Painting or sculpting was like sowing the present to harvest the future. The portrayal of captured prey was the anticipation, the representation of what would happen in the future. The image of prey was prey itself.

In this light, perhaps the sculpted goddesses that have generated thousands of theories can be seen as objects to induce fertility, herald a wanted child, anticipate a successful outcome of a pregnancy, or even guarantee sexual quarry. Art was anything but a futile exercise; rather than expression or imitation, art came into being as an extension of reality.

Art also had the function of protective magic: images created by artists were akin to the caves and shelters offering protection from wind, rain, and other danger.

Palaeolithic artists would not have asked as Klingsor does in Hermann Hesse’s novella, Klingsor’s Last Summer, why he should practice magic if he can make art. Art and magic were the same thing and just like reality: making art was performing magic, creating reality.

It was long considered that Palaeolithic art was generally practised by all, but this theory now appears to be incorrect. During the Upper Palaeolithic period, art was already an activity for specialists. Indeed, perhaps artists were the first specialists to emerge from human societies. The historian Ernst Kris (1900-1957) acknowledges that painter and sorcerer were the same person, and that, in any case, there were both creators and observers. Art, therefore, existed as an institution. Artists were already professionals and spent much of their time learning and perfecting their craft. Some finds suggest that there were proper training schools, whether reserved for the children of shamans or open to others is unknown. Arnold Hauser (1892-1978) concludes, therefore, that the artist-magician appears to have been the first representative of specialisation and of the division of labour.

It is likely that the oldest profession in the world is not prostitution, but art. In an age that was haphazard and anarchic like the Palaeolithic Period, artists were the first to distinguish themselves from the masses, possessing what today we would call talent, but which at the time appeared to be the gift of magic. They were the forerunners of the figure of the priest - in a certain sense, art came before religion, the religion of reality and nature – and exactly like priests, they avoided common labour, and dedicated themselves to activities that today we consider futile and unfruitful.

A theory maintains that art can be practised only when other existential conditions are sufficiently sound to make it possible, which is to say when all primary functions have been assured and survival guaranteed. As we have seen, this theory is also corroborated by experiments with animals. Without at least resolving the need for food, there would be no place in society for artists. This theory is perhaps justified for art in history, but it maybe not be for art in prehistory. At a time when survival was a more complicated affair than it is today, it still would have been possible to dedicate oneself to a useless activity like art, stealing time, energy, and resources from other more vital tasks. This would occur because art, as a form of magic that creates reality, was considered not just useful but vital, but also because knowing the facts of life was limited to small groups concerned only with themselves.

Today, however, our tribe is world-wide, globalised; we are aware of hunger, wars, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other calamities occurring in the smallest corners of the planet. This continuous bombardment of tragic news makes us, on the one hand, apathetic and indifferent; on the other, it carves within us a bottomless pit of guilt for the privileges we enjoy, and for what we fail to do to provide solutions to these dramas. Art is one of the factors that make us feel guilty. How can one think of devoting time and resources to a futile activity such as art, when we know that our neighbours, using those resources, could survive, or at least live in a more dignified way? On the other hand, is it right to allow oneself to be fettered by these thoughts, risking doing nothing that is not about mere survival? These are questions that were impossible to ask during the Palaeolithic Period, but today it is impossible not to ask them.

Art as magic

Images made by Palaeolithic artists were, therefore, far more than symbols; they were veritable actions, anticipating reality and constructing it. Their works had a specific purpose linked with group survival; they were not merely expressions, messages, or decorations to amuse the beholder. As a rule, in fact, cave paintings did not usually make a fine show and were not decoratively ordered on walls and ceilings. Rather, they were jumbled together, often overlapping each other, and more importantly, they were not easily seen. They were mostly to be found at the far end of caves that were difficult to access. It is difficult to think that a man would enter those labyrinthine places for the simple purpose of decorating them or even to see an image painted there by an artist.

By depicting prey, artists captured it, becoming hunters via images, and their art and reality became one; and precisely because they tended to create reality, they imitated it. Artists were magicians who created reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) declared, I am my world; Palaeolithic man created his.

The notion that art is an extension of reality – or vice versa – has never quite disappeared, and has come down to us, albeit camouflaged in various ways. We just have to think how difficult it would be for some of us to destroy or damage the photograph or portrait of someone we love, as though by doing so we could bring them harm, or conversely, how we rip up the image of someone who has hurt us, as though by doing so we are repaying them for hurting us. There are still frauds today who use photos and fetishes for ritual magic founded on this prehistoric notion.

Yet again, when tyrants are deposed, statues representing them are destroyed, and their portraits violated with the uncomfortable notion that what happens to the effigies will happen to the despots; the same is true of burning a flag, which is nothing less than the symbolic representation of a nation. An obvious example of this mental mechanism occurred during the French Revolution. Notre Dame Cathedral was home to many statues portraying kings of the Old Testament, whose heads bore crowns. This was enough to unleash the fury of the revolutionaries who considered them symbols of the French kings, and beheaded them, just as they had the French royal family in the flesh. In due course, the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) restored the damaged sculptures.

To depict or photograph a person is still today, in some tribes, associated with stealing their soul, if not their very person. Gombrich tells of an incident in which a European artist depicted a herd belonging to an indigenous people who asked, anxiously, how would they survive if he took away their beasts?

If one bears in mind the magic value attributed to images, it is easier to understand the iconoclasms and censures that have occurred since antiquity and continue to this very day. As Ernst Kris argued, the prohibition of artistic activity, permanent within Jewish and Muslim culture, and temporary or partial in Christianity is based on a belief in the magical efficacy of images. In accordance with a widely held view, images confer on an object the power they represent. In art folklore, the creator of images is very like a sorcerer and a magician.

Georges-Henri Luquet (1876-1965) argued that mimesis and original production were the foundations of art. We could define it as the dualism of creation and re-creation: creation, which is the innovation of reality, and recreation, which is the imitation of a reality that already exists, are the two principles on which art came into being. These principles gradually took shape, in previous ages, in the works of the first artists as they perfected this method of construction and reconstruction of reality, which became magic and art: creation and re-creation.

Our fascination with imitation could be written in our very genes, as science seems to confirm. To understand how effective mimesis is, it is enough to see how even today – with thousands of years of art behind us, surrounded as we are by photographic images, static or moving, that retrace reality in every detail - most people are still stunned and enraptured by a hyper-realistic painting, believing it to be a wonder. A painting of a basket full of cherries fascinates us more than the real cherries would.

We admire artists who paint objects that appear to be real, just as we admire an actor who compels us to believe that what he does and says is true, just as we vote for politicians who with their way with words and theatricality succeed in convincing us that their promises are not just electoral nonsense. The probable and the credible have more power than what is true, real, and tangible. In truth, we human beings do not like the truth, but what appears to be true.

As we shall see, our obsession with the faithful reproduction of reality will dominate the entire third phase of the history of the artist, who for four centuries would engage with it almost exclusively.

How were those prehistoric artists viewed in the groups to which they belonged? What did others think of them? It is impossible to answer with certainty, but their talents turned them into shamans, and it is likely that being thought able to influence reality, they had considerable power, and were held in high esteem. Maybe, too, they were afforded a certain degree of protection for the specific purpose of preserving figures vital for the survival of the group. Perhaps the artist was even the group leader or held the group together with magic. He most certainly did not count for nothing.

The first conceptual artist

The Palaeolithic Period leads to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic Periods, which between them cover a time between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, part of the Holocene geological epoch, the era in which we now live.

Things began to change with an increasingly marked shift towards symbol and concept. Neolithic artists no longer created reality, but the substance and idea of it – they created symbols rather than imitations. The art they produced was abstract and, in a certain sense, conceptual.

This radical change was due to an equally radical shift in the way human beings lived. From hunter-gatherer parasites, they became the architects of their own livelihood. They started to produce food and administrated it; they cultivated and bred animals; they intervened with nature and modified it. It was no accident that Egyptian porcelain, the first ever artificial material, was invented 6,000 years ago.

It seems that agriculture itself was born because of art or was at least favoured by it. Magical places, full of paintings and sculptures and created far away from inhabited areas, caused a drive to find a way of feeding the many people who visited them and sometimes faced long, uncomfortable journeys; cultivating close to these places, known for the magic they contained, plants that could produce food was the solution to the problem.

Whereas previously, artistic and magic activity created the future, that same activity now became real outside the confines of art. Humankind became the instigator of actions that altered and created nature, and the reality of the future - what was previously magic started to become ritual. All these changes signalled the beginning of the end of the first phase of the story of the artist.

Formerly nomadic, Man settled, and started to form social divisions differentiating between the privileged and the outcast; labour became increasingly more differentiated, trades and crafts came into being, and communities became centralised. Farmers, whose harvests depended on the benevolence of the weather, gradually imagined that the cause of natural manifestations such as lightning, rain, and hailstones were spirits, a higher intelligence, giving rise to belief in the supernatural, animism, and the cult of the dead; the first religious rituals were now instituted.