September 17, 1999
ART REVIEW
Egyptian Art: The Mysterious Lure of an Old Friend
Related Article
Egyptian Art: An Open Book Full of Secrets (Sept. 12, 1999)
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Join a Discussion on Artists and Exhibitions
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
EW YORK -- A
FEW years ago there was a traveling
exhibition, "Egyptomania," which
showed how Greeks and Romans, then
Italians, French, Russians and Americans borrowed, copied and stole from
ancient Egypt, or what they believed was ancient
Egypt because after a while the copies and adaptations got mixed up with originals and became part
of the evolving culture.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Hemiunu, the prince in charge of building the Great Pyramid.
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Obelisks, pyramids and all the other Egyptian-derived forms, which for centuries, even before the
great excavations
of the 19th century,
permeated Western
art and architecture (the Egyptian
Hall in London, the
original Tombs in
lower Manhattan,
the old suspension
bridge over the
Neva in St. Petersburg, the Pyramid
at the Louvre in
Paris and on and
on) proved that the
Egyptians succeeded, to a degree probably even they didn't anticipate, in leaving a legacy
to outlast themselves.
A major show of Old Kingdom art, now at the
Metropolitan, easily gets the early vote for blockbuster of the fall season. Organized at the museum
by Dorothea Arnold and handsomely installed, it's
one of those spectacles, like the Byzantine, Chinese
and Mexican surveys that the Met has done in
recent years, that is not just about art but about a
whole civilization. It examines the first great epoch
in Egypt, the 500 years from 2650 to 2150 B.C., which
is really the high point of all ancient Egyptian
culture, when the pyramids were built and the
canon of Egyptian art was established. As well as
any show, it demonstrates why Egyptian art still
holds an incredible fascination in the West.
Considering the number and popularity of exhibitions about New Kingdom pharaohs like Tutankhamen and Amenhotep III, it's a little surprising that
this is actually the first big survey devoted to Old
Kingdom art, but evidently there hasn't been an
excuse to do a show until lately, and museums
generally need some excuse for moving around
some of the oldest sculptures in history. The excuse here is that experts,
who for a long time didn't pay much
attention to the Old Kingdom because it seemed like a settled subject, have been fiddling with the
chronology of some of the objects on
view. Those of us who aren't Egyptologists will simply be grateful for the
chance to peruse work that, aside
from being astonishingly beautiful,
has continued to seem over thousands of years mysteriously impenetrable and familiar at the same time.
No doubt this is a reason for
Egypt's fascination: its paradoxical
status in our imagination. We think
of Egypt as both complex (hieroglyphs, religion) and, in a formal
sense, rudimentary (the pyramids).
Children, for instance, are always
drawn, as if genetically programmed, to the Egyptian section of
a museum because Egyptian art
seems immediately understandable
to them. To a child learning to read,
hieroglyphs are colorful, eye-catching pictures, unlike letters of the
alphabet, and Egyptian statues, with
their predictable, straightforward
attitude toward the viewer, look like
people pared down to basic forms,
which is how a child is inclined to
draw.
Adults admire the same art for
opposite reasons: it seems abstract
and sophisticated in the sense that
we know it depends on a remote
philosophy of nature, religion, authority, class, beauty and death.
Adults always say how Egyptian art
looks modern, by which we really
mean that modern art has evolved
complicated forms of abstraction,
symbolism and linear representation, many of which ultimately descend from the Egyptians.
The art is abstract and illusionistic
simultaneously. A landmark of the
Old Kingdom from the Fourth Dynasty (2575-2465 B.C.) is the famous
seated statue of Hemiunu, the prince
and vizier in charge of building the
Great Pyramid. It's one of the first
things that occupies your attention in
the show. Hemiunu is kind of a pyramid himself, a triangular mass of
limestone, life size, straight-backed,
feet firmly planted side by side,
hands resting on his lap, one palm
down, the other closed, with a look on
his face of divine indifference.
And he's fat -- his large breasts
two grapefruits, his huge arms slack
over a frame that, to judge by his
head, seems barely sufficient for his
size, his undulating belly sagging under the weight of his flesh. (You see
this best straight on.) A different
portrait of him, a small profile in
relief, also in the show, makes him
look more youthful, less forbidding
but still fine-featured and strong-jawed, so that between the two versions we feel we have some idea of
what he actually may have looked
like.
This was the essence of Egyptian
portraiture: to find a way, within
strict parameters, to convey particularity -- to combine, in a sense, what
one knows with what one sees. Accurate observation was necessary to
fulfill the immortalizing function of
Egyptian art -- to be a true embodiment of the person in stone through
eternity -- but observation always
had to be modified by convention.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Intimate detail: The back of a sculpture of
Iai-ib and Khuaut, husband and wife.
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You could say that this remark
applies to all art, which it does, but
with Egyptian art the limits of convention were unusually specific. The
standard Egyptian relief portrait, as
it came to be established during the
Old Kingdom, required each part of
the body to be presented in strict
proportion, with its essential aspect
to the viewer (shoulders forward,
head turned, legs sideways and striding). An icon of Egyptian art, anatomically impossible, it's also a
strangely lifelike arrangement.
The artist who carved the relief of
Hesi-re, the Third Dynasty (2649-2575 B.C.) scribe, found a way to
obey this formula without being formulaic and to make us see someone
in particular: a tall, slender young
man, serious, with alert eyes, high
cheekbones, hooked nose, narrow
mouth, faint mustache and sinewy
arms.
We have no idea who the artist
was, but while artists didn't carve
their own names into these sculptures, we can tell the good workshops
from the less good ones: the workshop, say, that sculptured the triad of
the Fourth Dynasty king, Menkaure
with two goddesses, as opposed to the
one that made the little statues of
Inti-Shedu, an artisan -- although
they both convey a humane understanding. Some of the most memorable works aren't the biggest or the
fanciest, in fact; they're sculptures
like the one of Iai-ib and Khuaut,
husband and wife, side by side.
She is a little behind him, shorter
and standing so close to him that her
right breast presses against his arm.
You can make out her body beneath
her sheath dress -- the belly, thighs,
hip bones and back. It's the back that
makes the sculpture special: her
arm reaches around him, her hand
on his shoulder, an intimate detail
that comes as a particular surprise
because it's invisible from the front.
We err to think of Egyptian art as
monotonous, even monotonous in a
stately, incantatory way (a common
remark). More accurate is to say
that it's an art of subtle variation,
especially impressive for operating
within such a strict code.
The Old Kingdom peaked artistically during the Fourth and Fifth
Dynasties (together 2575-2323 B.C.).
From the Sixth Dynasty are the famous statue of Queen Ankh-nes-meryre II with her son, Pepi II, fully
grown in miniature form, sitting on
her lap (every mother's dream), and
various standing wood figures of seal
bearers, slim, muscular, vacant-faced, a little toylike but elegant in
silhouette. Still, the essential forms
of Egyptian art were in place earlier,
when they more clearly expressed
the central Egyptian paradigms of
permanence and immobility.
Egyptian art, after all, was ultimately about death, or more to the
point, it was about eternal life after
death, about achieving a suspended
state of grace (another source of
Egypt's eternal fascination for us).
What remains of Old Kingdom Egypt
are tombs, or objects from tombs,
which represented and recreated the
lives of the people buried. As the
textbooks always remind us, Egyptians made stone sculptures not for
the sake of art as we think of it today
but as a duplicate of the living world
to be occupied by the dead, or to be
precise about it, by their ka, the life
force. Sculptures of the pharaohs
were permanent bodies made of
stone to replace the flesh ones they
left behind.
"The Egyptians say that their
houses are only temporary lodgings
and their graves are their real
houses," is how Diodorus Siculus, the
ancient Greek historian, famously
put it (although he might have added
that this sufficed nicely for kings,
queens and high officials with big
graves, while for the masses of
Egyptians, home for eternity was a
shallow pit).
It's a final, intriguing paradox that
an art about death should teem with
so much life. As Ms. Arnold, the
curator, writes, "The essence of Old
Kingdom art is joy in life," which is
exactly right. The show is full of
paintings, relief scenes and small
sculptures of contented laborers,
fishermen, musicians and cooks.
Men and women are always made to
look beautiful, even when they're fat
or old or dwarfs; Egyptians depicted
everyone with a respect for the diversity of humanity.
They embraced the ordinary in the
afterlife, something that separates
their view of life from our notions of
death, which are fixated on heaven,
hell and oblivion. Time after time in
the exhibition, in the way that one
experiences small epiphanies by being alert to what happens all the time
on the street, our attention is drawn
to little details from the everyday
world: the sexy torso of Lady Hetep-heres, a statue from the Fourth Dynasty; two orioles fighting, from a
Fifth Dynasty limestone panel; sailors on a ship, from a relief of the late
Fourth Dynasty or early Fifth Dynasty. The artist who carved that
scene demonstrates the Egyptians'
mastery of abstract line drawing, the
image being a complicated crisscross of ropes, oars, legs and masts;
even the water under the boat is
made into a kind of braid, jewel-like.
And this is what the best Old Kingdom art is about: conveying the basic elegance and pleasure of everyday
forms in a form that is, itself, elegant. One relief in the show has a
herd of cattle crossing a canal. The
herd is lined up in a strict row except
for a cow in front whose head rears
to lick her calf riding on the back of a
herdsman. It's a herdsman's trick
for coaxing cows through water: the
mother will follow the calf and the
herd will follow her.
The calf here turns around and
touches its tongue to its mother's
tongue. An ordinary image becomes
something else. The panel was
carved for the tomb of a high Sixth
Dynasty official named Ni-ankh-nesut and is a funerary monument to
sweet life.
