Beyond Simplicity: Th historyofthe Modems $73 Beyond Simplicity: The Late Prehistory of the Moderns Maria Stavrinaki |, Caylus: The Simplicity of Chance ‘Well before evolutionism naturalized human history in the second half of the-nine- ‘Tenth century by implementing the methods and the conclusions of biology and geology in the study of the symbolic activities of men, the notion of »simplicitys had already served to the analysis of culture and its history. For Johann Joachim Win- ckelmana, writing in 1755, the noble simplicity and the quiet grandeure of Greek art were the qualities of a perfection never since attained, and even less surpassed. ‘Three years earlier, the Comte Caylus had attributed to Egyptian art the qualities of »simplicitys and »grandeur,a not beeause of Its perfection (which he, like Winckel. mann, reserved for Greece) but because it corresponded to the sbeginnings of art in general! How did he conceive this »beginnings? Caylus wrote of the Egyptians: »Inven- teurs, ils ont fait ce qui leur convenait ct ne Paraissaient avoir admis rien d’inutile.« This force of invention - direct, infallible and unconcerned about any external sup- plement — asserted itself in the very process of the Egyptian architectural construc- tion and in the forms that derived from it: *Leurs pierres,« claimed Caylug, »ne dussent leur force qu'a elles-mémes, et qu’a la justesse de leur coupe; c'est pourguol ils n'ont jamais introduit aucun métal pour la liaison de leur batisse.«? Simplicity thus had a logical compactness, it signified at once originality, autarky, and obviousness, for la figure simple est la premiére idée, les attributs sont enfants par les allégories qui ne naissent qu‘aprés-coup.«* Because every reinforced detail and every surplus that was added safterwardse (aprés-coup) led astray - and this would be soon the case of Etruscan art -, Caylus considered simplicity both the attribute of a past prim- itive nature and the very contemporary mark of the good aristocratic taste, For Winckelmann, »noble simplicity« would become the climax of art because it corresponded to the autochthonous style of a people - the Greeks - that no other people had imitated in its very autechthony in order to become »iniritables itself However, for Caylus, this original simplicity did not establish a superior people, either morally or physically, but a people which, for a number of reasons, was at the 1 Anne-Clande-Philippe de Caylus, Recueil d'antiguités Agypliennes, étrasques, grecques, Fomaines et gauloises, [vol.1,] Paris 1752 (http://bibliotheque-numerique.inha.fricollec Hon/3667-recueil-d-antiguites-egyptiennes-etr/'. 2 Anne-Claude-Philippe de Caylas, Recueil dfantiguités éeyptiensies, dtrusques, grecques et m= maines, 7 vol, Paris 1782-1767, vol. 1, Paris 1752, 4. (slnvemors, they nade what wus right for them and they appeared to not have accepted anything useless.c) 3 Caylas, Recued? d’antiquités (Ann, 2), 5. 4 Anne-Claude-Philippe de Caylus, » Mémoire sur la Diane d’Ephse et sur son Temple,« in: Histoire de Vacadémie royale des Anscriptions et belles lettres 30 (1764), 428-441, here: 438, 5 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Réfleviorss stir i‘imitarion des ceuvres grecques en peinture et ént sculpture, transl, Marianne Charritre, Nimes 1991, 34,574 Maria Stavrinaki beginning of art history: And even if for Caylus simplicity was the quasi automatic attribute of a »first idea« and not of an aprés-coup of Reason already poured in the meanders of allegory, he did not, an its basis, feel authorized to deduce a law capa ble of explaining the antiquities of his collection. In a letter authored in 1763, he even asserted that »il n'y pas de thase générale sur les monuments, et |...) un coup de pied donné au hasard est capable de démentir les propositions de tous les anti- quaires, présents, pases et futures.<* This apologia for »chances ~ some discoverers iiek against the monument = was confirmed throughout the numerous volumes: of his study. Conducted in a descriptive manner, the study recognized in artifacts the mixture of the »taste of nations« and the crossing of loans, but also the crossing of the orders of time. For it was not rare, Caylus said - and the Gallic monuments testified to this - that the beginning and the end ofa style be very much alike - even indistinguishable” Il, Evolutionism: »The simplest, the lowest, the slowest “The vkicke of chance was given a century later. It took the form of an unsuspected dilation of natural and human history: in the course of the nineteenth century, the excavated and reconstituted past proved to be deeper and less distinct in its ramifi- cations. However, ignoring Caylus's warning ~ and as if they needed to ward aff the effects of chance -, +future antiquartans+ would conceive a *thesis« so «generals that itpretended to explain human history in all its facets and manifestations throughout ages. To the extent that this history was understood as a part of natural totality, the evolutionism which was elaborated in natural sciences was automatically transposed in the field of culture, The British General Pitt Rivers, who started to collect ethno- logical and prehistoric artifacts during the 1850s, thus declared: ‘The principles of variation and natural selection have established a bond of union between the physical and cultural sciences which can never be broken. History is ‘but another term for evolution. [...] Our position with regard to culture has always ‘heen one which has forced on our comprehension the reality of progress, whilst with respect to the slow progress of exterrial nature, it has been concealed from us, owing to the brief span of human existence and our imperfect recards of the past." Between the years when the Comte Caylus and Winckelmann authored their books and those when General Pitt Rivers wrote this passage, the parameters of history had exploded. Never had the time sspan of human existences seemed 50 tiny in comparison to the history of nature, itself very imperfectly conserved in the & Anne-Clande-Philippe de Caylus, Lettres de Comite de Cayhet au Pore Paciiaucl, no. LXXT, Novernbet 20, 1743, inz Charles Nisard (ed,), Correspondance inddite diy Conte de Caylus ‘avec le P. Paciaucli, theatim (1757-1763) suivie de celles de FAbbé Barthélemy et def Mari- ‘tte avée le méme, Paris 1877, vol. 1, 377-382, here: 380. 7 On the confusion of the staste of nations,« see Caylus, Recueil anriquités (Ann. 2), wol. 2 Paris 1756, 0.2, 323-324. And on the confusion of the arders of tine, Cayhss, Recueil ofin- tiquités (Ann. 2), voL 5, Paris 1762, 325. 8 Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, »On the Evolution of Culture (1875). Evolution: of Culture anal Cher Essays, ed. |. L. Myres, Oxford 1906, 20-44, bere: im: hd, TheBeyond Simplicity: The Late Prehistory ofthe Moderns 575 “HOGRED O'LNEMACT cHintas oo scvorrins mu ane autre figure gevvee simplamentan truit, et gus Ton pourrait ac- cxpiet eemnmé Bd formu In lanbonuelle de poison. ‘Le norceae capétal de notre collection d'cbjets sralplés da Lange- rit- Beis eit on pelgnard ou sorte ditpte délachée wot d'une pidce da merraind'us baby de renae, La lonqueor de cet arme ne meus per risty, Figures d'animaux gravées et seulp- ‘tees et autres produits d'art etd'industrie aux temps primordiaux de la période humaine, Paris, Revue archéologique, 1864. samt pas daze sou iravall; Mui oe archives of Earth, as Darwin had stressed it in The Origin of Species in 1859, Follow- ing the demonstrations of the British geologist Charles Lyell in the 1830s, the very Jongue durée of terrestrial history had now to be counted in millions of years.’ Still, the dilation of time was not solely a consequence of this revelation, but also of the downess with which, according to Lyell, geological processes had given and were continuing to give 1 earth's crust its appearance. The earth now seemed to be the slow and ever-changing product of insignificant, almost imperceptible processes, and not of successive catastrophes suppesed to have been imprinted on the uneven forms that one could contemplate all at once from the mountaintops." Some years 9 See Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrom. Time's Cycle: Myth anud Metaphor in the Discovery of Gealogicall Time, Cambridge, MA. 1987. 10. Georges Cuvier, Discours sur tes Révolutions de la surface die Globe, Paris 1812.576 Maria Stavrinaki later, around 1860, human existence would be also pushed back to the depths of time: after the discovery of fossil-man by Boucher de Perthes and the research of Darwin on the descent of man, the frontiers between species seemed much more confused than Linnaeus had thought when he put mam as the first representative of his taxonomy of primates." At last, five years later, in 1865, the first documents of a Paleolithic mobiliary art (art mnobilier), of an astonishing subdety, were to be found by Edouard Lartet and Henry Christy in the ame strata where the bones of extinct animals also lay (Fig. 1), The Egyptians of the Comte Caylus had moved amazingly closer to the present, ‘This was the tension at work on the new data of history: on one side, the human species was pulled towards animality and, on the other side, art, one of the main activities on which the exceptional status of this species was founded, had proved to have an accomplished manifestation in a remote and materially indigent past, But this dislocation of established equivalences between nature, technology and art, this disjunction between varlous classifications and between various scales, was re- pressed and finally suffocated by a temporally continuous, logically coherent and politically domineering narrative. This was evolutionism, the main thesis of which was that history went from the simple to the complex and from homogeneity te heterogeneity. [n this frame, Pitt Rivers did not omit to refer to the writings of the omnisclent Herbert Spencer, who was in turn influenced by the collections of the General." If every organism - and an artifact was an organism, in the same way as plants and animals" - tended to adjust «inner tendencies to persistent exterior pressures,« that is, to adapt to [ts milieu, the first forms of this adaptation were sim- ple and those which did not succeed in surviving as such in their milieu have been gradually transformed in increasingly complex and differentiated forms.'* Pitt Rivers built up typological series of arms, potteries, etc., which were supposed to begin with the beginning, that is, with the »simplest« form. But what did this original form look like? Where was it to be found? Strictly speaking, the simplest form was undiscoverable: immersed in natural minerality, out of which it was hardly extracted, the simplest form was impossible to distinguish from mere stones and fragments that no hand had ever endowed with any kind of intentionality. For Pitt Rivers the evolutionist, continuity between man and nature was total. Failing to find the simplest form, he imagined it. He speculated about a »creatures equivalent to a superior animal, capable of seizing a stone in order to smash some nuts, but inca- pable of cutting this stone in order to give it the most appropriate form to its alm. Endlessly repeating the same gesture for the most miscellareous tasks, the «creatures would have seen the stone break; it would have noticed its fragments and, in the very long run, picked them up and used them; lighter and finer than their nucleus, these fragments proved to he also much more convenient, Thanks to uncountable LL Jacques Boucher de Perthes, Antiquités celtiques ct antédibrvierines. Mémoire sur Pindustrie (primitive, Paris 1847; see Claudine Cohen/Jean-Jacques Hoblin, Boucher de Perthes (1788~ 186i). Les origines romantiques de ia préhistoire, Paris 1989. 12 For example, see Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, «Principles of Classification (1874),« ine 1d, The Evolution of Cidnure (Ann. 8), 119, here: & 13° Pitt Riwers, Cm the Evolutions (Ann 8), 29, 14 For example, see Herbert Spencer, First Principies, Landam 1862,Beyond Simplicity: The Late Prehistory ofthe Moderns SIT repetitions, »creaturese would have started to associate forms to aims, becoming thereby something «which we may now begin to call men.«'° Later, the creature that Pitt Rivers allowed himself tw call othe primaeval man« would have observed that natural forms already responded to this or that need: these were the readymuade of prehistory. This or that stick could become an arch. Still, in this case too, the first artifacts were supplied by nature did not resist time. If it was imagination that stood in for absent origin, it was ethnological observation that could fill the second gap of ‘ime: nature as supplier of the readymade.'* ‘The notion of «survivals provided invaluable help to the discipline of prehistory, From Edward Tylor on, the evolutionism of British ethnology gave literal form to the comment of the ideologue foseph-Marie de Gérando, who already in 1799 had ‘written in reference to the first ethnological missions: »Le voyageur philosophe qui navigue vers les extrémités de la terre, traverse en effet la suite des ages, il voyage dans le passé; chaque pas qu’ll fait est un siécle qu'il franchit.«!’ The discovery of prehistory and the implacable lngic of the evolutionist scale imposed the attribution. of the first «steps of civilization to concrete people. The extinct Tasmanians were as undiscoverable as origin itself: for this reason, one speculated that they belonged more than anyone else to the Stone Age. The Aborigines of Australia, because of the extreme indigence of their material conditions and the supposed simplicity of their artifacts, consequently became the first fossil-men of prehistory, Finally, when it was about rock painting, the Bushmen, whose paintings had puzzled more than one, be- came the fossils of prehistoric painters. At any event, »survivals was the ovality that was supposed to remedy the dead word and the mute fossil, it was the life that was supposed to undo death, the fullness that was expected to fill out the gap, the logical supplement that was meant to repress the metaphysical aporia inherent in prehisto- ry! This is why Pitt Rivers could look to the Australians in order to sustain his hy- pothesis that simple forms were provided by nature itself. Contesting, just like Tylor, the idea according to which the artifacts of the first of primitives were the rests of a degenerated form, he wrote: «Instead of showing evidence of having been derived from higher and more complex forms,« their implements »will, in proportion to the low state of their civilization, show evidence of being derived from natural forms, such as might have been emplayed by man before he had learnt the art of modifying them to his uses.«" The specter of degencration was conjured by an evolutionist narrative which stretched out, as a net, aver the globe. 15. Pitt Rivers, »Principles« (Ann. 12), 9 16 Weare mot able to analyze in this text the intrinsic relationship between prehistory and the logic of the readymade, 17 Joteph-Marie de Gérando, »Considérations sur les diverses méthodes & suivre dans l'ob- servation des peuples sauvages (1799).« im: Jeans Copans/Jean Jamin (eds.), Aww origines de Fantheopologie fraripalse, Les mémotres ae la Société des Observiteurs.ce "Homme er tian VIE, Paris 1994, 103-155, here: 107. ©8 On the relation between orality and prehistory, see my exsay »(herieben in Afrika, Wied- ereuferstehung fiir Europa. Leo Frobenius’ Sicht der Vorgeschichte.« in: Karl-Heinz Kohl Richard Kuba/Hééne Ivanoff et al. (eds), Kunst oer Vorzeit. Texte zu den Felshildern der Sarimieng Frobeniws, Frankfurt 2016, 23-42. 19. Pitt Rivers, «Principles (Ann. 12), 11.578 Maria Stavrinaki ‘The same logic of nature as purveyor of forms over the still passive and incredibly slow intelligence of prehistoric man was activated to explain the engraved artifacts cof prehistory and, later, rock paintings, Rather than seeing the collapse of any kind of discourse of progress in art (in the manner of Lartet and Christy, who claimed, with the help of Phidias and Praxiteles, that »neither progress nor perfection in the arts appear in accordance with chronological gradations«") the more univocal evo- lutionists like Pitt Rivers and his disciple Henry Balfour, author of the important ‘book The Evolution of Decorative Art (1893), found in this naturalistic art the very proof of prehistoric simplicity. Commenting on the realism of this art, Pitt Rivers wrote: {see nothing surprising in this, when we consider the power that is Geveloped in many: children of eight of nine years old of making drawings of animals and other objects, ‘which, when allowance is made for the feeble hand of childhood, are often as truthful as those of the cawe-perlod men, at a time when their minds have acquired but litte power of reasoning or generalizing, or even of taking care of themselves;all which goes ‘toprove that this power of imitation. which is avery different thing from ideal arg, is one of the most early developed faculties of the mind af man? ‘This explanation of prehistoric »realism« as the simplest expression of men who still ignored metaphysics and who were anchored in mere present, was also defended by the materialist evolutionism of a Gabriel de Mortillet in France and, later, by the majority of prehistorians obliged to acknowledge at last the authenticity of rock painting Closely related to this simplicity was the idea according to which the engraved and painted figures on the walls of the caves were strictly isolated, forming by no means a relational unity, a composition, a structure: they were, as it was quite often said in the German-speaking world, the equivalents of the menosyllables of the primitives.” But prehistoric realism also shook the assumption according to which art sirmply evolved from abstraction and schematization to naturalism - this was the thesis, above all, of Gottfried Semper, who had defined ornament as the saprés-coupe of technique. Thus, Henry Balfour, the curator of Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, pro- posed a systematic reading of prehistoric art, defining what he called the sadaptives 20, Edouard Lartet/Henry Christy, Refiquiae Aguitaricne: being contributions to the archoviogy and paleontology of Perigord and the adjotning provinces af southern france, 1865-78, ed, ‘Thomas Rupert, Londan/Edinknrgh 1875, 21 Pitt Rivers, +Cn the Evolutions (Ann. 8), 40, 32. There is 2 huge bibliography on this question. For a good synthesis, see Nathalie Richard, Liinvention de ta prébistoire. Une antizalogie, Paris 1992: Marc Gaoenen. Pour tne histoire de a prékistoire. Le paléolithique, Grenoble 1994, 305-356. 23 This was the Interpretation, for instance. of Moritz Hoernes. Urgeschichre der bildenden Kunst in Europa von den Anfiiagen bis wh 500 vor Christi, Wien 1925. This interpretation is founded om ethnologic and Volkerpsychalogie discourse. For Wundt, the firsts language was monosyllabic. 24 Gontfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectomic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave/Michsel Robinson, Los Angeles 2004.Beyond Simplicity: The Late Prehistoryofthe Madems S79 stage as the first in the evolution of art, when »man simply accepted and adapted effects which were accidentally suggested to him.«** This stage was followed by the one of voluntary imitation of natural forms. Finally, the third stage was the one of variation, first unconscious, then conscious. Abstraction, more or less radical, thus occurred ag a progress by comparison to naturalism. British modernism would remain for a good deal of time under the influence of this evolutionary interpretation of the origin of art. From Roger Fry to Herbert Read and from Henry Moore to Barbara Hepworth, we can trace step-by-step the logic which, while admiring the astonishing Paleolithic paintings, depreciated them in comparison to Neolithic abstraction, In his 1910 article »Bushman Paintings,» Fry wrote about Bushmen and the Paleolithic populations of Europe that their »peculiar power of visualization belong to what we call the lowest of savages,» because the very perfection of vision and presumably ofthe other senses with which the Bush- men and Palaeolithic man were endowed fitted them so perfectly to their surroundings that there was no necessity to develop the mechanical arts beyond the elementary in- struments of the chase, We must suppose that Neolithic man [J was less perfectly adapted te his surroundings. but that his sensual defects were more than compensated for by increased intellectual power. [] With Neolithic man drawing came to express man's thought about things rather than his sensations of them, or rather, when he tried to reproduce his sensations, his habits of thought intervened, and dictated to his hand orderly, lucid, but entirely non-naturalistic forms. In other words, what Neolithic man would have lost in sensual and immediate »adap- tations to his/her milieu, he/she earnt it back in the form of symbolic and conceptual distance. This vision, mixing the Schillerian theory of the naive and the sentimental with Worringer’s theary on abstraction and empathy, would persist several decades later in the book of Herbert Read Icom and Idea, a book founded on the principle of the symbolic and cognitive evolution of art. Responding to the wvital needs« of man, Paleolithic art was a means of ssurvival«: this was the reason, asserted Read, that nthe most vividly naturalistic drawings are those found in the depths of caves.« In regard to Neolithic art, #it represented a great advance in civilization,« by testifying to the transition from nomadism and hunting to sedentarism and agriculture, but also to a «wider development of aesthetic sensibility, a further conquest of plastic awareness, a. unification and classification of sensuous experience.«™ Paleolithic men could not surpass the stage of the ésolated, individual image, whereas Neolithic men moved on the »creation of complex geometrical patterns,« where sgeometry triumphed over vitality. 25 Henry Balfour, The Evolution of Decorative Art: An Essay upon its Origin and Development is Mlustrated by the Art of Modern Races of Barkin, New York 1893, 21. 26 Roger Fry *Bushman Paintings» inc The Burlington Magazine for Cormoisseurs 16/84 (March 1910), 334~338, here: 337. 27 Herbert Read, dear and Idea: The Furtction of Art dn the Development of Human Conscdows- ress, Cambridge, MA. 1955, 28. 28 Read (Ann. 27}, 35465a0 Maria Stavrinaki ‘The Neolithic: distant from nature, but still without affectation; abstract, but still primitive; subtle, but still compact. One can understand the interest that sculptors such as Hepworth and Moore reserved to Neolithic art, either in its indigenous meg- alithic, of in its Cycladie versant, This interest is in the lineage of British evolution- ism. In 1941, Moore wrote of the »primitive arts that he discovered through his reg- ular visite to the British Museum. Among the representatives of this primitive art, he counted the tiny 20.000-year-old sculptures, such «a lovely tender carving of a girl's head, no bigger than one’s thumbnail, and beside it female figures of very human but not copyist realism with a full richness of form, in great contrast with the more symbolic two-dimensional and inventive designs of Neolithic art.<” According to Moore, every primitive art has a powerful, vital, spontaneous simplicity: »[Primitive art] makes a straightforward statement, its primary concern is with the elemental, and its simplicity comes from direct and strong feeling [...] The most striking quality ‘common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by people with a direct and immediate response to life.«® Still, Paleolithic art had rather a grace, a naiveté that the Neolithic transformed into a conceptual invention. Surely there was: 8 considerable difference between the evolutionism of an artist using the various versants of »primitive arte to nourish and define his art, and the one of theoreticians conceiving entire systems, likely to explain the totality of human artifacts. In a way, Moore's simplicity still bore the marks of a Rousseau, opposing simplicity and the sincerity of nature to the »perfidious veil" of civility, or of a Thoreau, who explained in his Walden the notion of simplicity a3 othe gross necessaries of life,« «the essential laws of man's existence.»™ By contrast, for Pitt Rivers, simplicity went hand in hand with animality, the automatism of instincts, the conservatism of gestures, a slowness, at last, that was hardly detached from immobility. Simplicity was the crude moment of a typological »sequence,« summing up in a few objects the evolution of human history. The temporal sequence was materialized in the display of the museum as a concentric rotunda, whose heart was occupied by the simple forms of Paleolithic art. Each series started with the mest rudimentary form, but the changes from ane form to another were discreet, almost imperceptible, And yet, the eccurnulation and the stocking of these gaps that we can call, inspired by Duchamp vinframinces,« were as much efficient as the dissemblance between their beginning and their end was absolute.” The discrete difference between contiguous forms and the absolute dissemblance of their extremes, led Pitt Rivers to compare history's figure to a game of dominoes: Progress is like a game of dominoes — like fits on to like. In neither case can we tell beforehead what will be the ultimate figure produced by the adhesions; all we 29° Henry Moose, »Primitive Art (1941)0in: Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, ed. Al- lan Wilkinson, Berkeley 2002, 102-106, here: 104, 30 Moore (Ann. 29), 104. 34 Iean-Ineques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences ef les arts [1750], ed, Jacques Berchtold, Paris 2008, 32 Henry David Thoreau, Wilden, or Life in the Woods (1854), Walden Pond 2004, 12. 33. Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, «Typological Museums, as exemplified by the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxdord. and his provincial museum at Farnham, Dorset,« in: Journal af the Society of Arts 40 (December 18, 1891), 115=122Beyond Simplicity: The Late Prehistory ofthe modems S82 Snow is that the fundamental rule of the game is sequence «"* This is very far from the skicks of Caylus, Surely, none knew in advance the final form cof history, but the ‘sontingencies of Its progress were at least curbed and its reversals conjured. On the one hand, the depths of the past provided the tangible evidence of the »sequences of history, and by the same token the inverted image of future progress: the greater the past, the ampler the evidence of its evolution, the greater and more glorious the fature seemed. On the other hand, the depths of the past conveyed an imperative snd urgent political message. They disclaimed any idea of history as scatastrophe,a sTupture,« sjump,« and, to put it directly, srevolutions: Thelaw that Nature makes no jumps, can be taught by the history of mechanical contrive ances, if such way as at least to make men cautious how they listen to scatter-brained sevolutionary suggestions, The knowledge of thefacts ofevolution, andef the processes ‘of gradual development. is the one great knowledge that we have to Inculeate, whether i natural history or in the arts and institutiens of mankind,” While the evolutionary series were summing up in a brief lap of time the whole ‘cultural history of the species, their tangibility and their obviousness were supposed ‘to strike the perception and the imagination of workers with an effectiveness that no word, ne text could ever match. Nature makes no jumps, no more than history does, il, Regression/Another Survival: Second Prehistory From the side of ethnologists, this progressive narrative found two of its first op. Ponents in the French Marcel Mauss, who, slowly marking his distance from Emile Durkheim, declared in 1909 that sles formes les plus rudimentaires ne sont & au- sun degré plus simples que les formes les plus développées.« and in Franz Boas, the German ethnologist who lived and worked in the United States.” In his book The Mind of Primitive Mam (1911), Boas reversed the reasoning of a supposed primitive simplicity: What excessively sirnplitied reality was the causal and utilitarian ration- alism of the Moderns and not «primitive man,« whose wocld was the dense fabric vof associations and connections of the most hetcrogeneous phenomena” Moreover, Boas criticized the sequential logic of Spencer, as the sabsalutist modela of survival fom Tylor on. He also. contested the validity of Freudian assertions, according to which primitive man was equivalent to the modern neurotic and, finally, he pointed 34 Pit Rivers, »Principlese (Ann. 12), 19, 35 Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, «Primitive Warfare | (1867), in: Ld The Evolution of (Culture (Atus. 8), 45-88, here: 45. 36 Pitt Rivers, eTypological Museums (Anm 33), 117, 37 On the notions af »sirnplicity« and ecomplexitys in the thought of Durkheim and of Mauss, see Victor Karady. «Durkheim ef les débuts de 'ethnolagie universitaire.« in: Artes dela 9. cherche en sciences sociales 74 (September 1948), 23-32. The quotation of Manse is extracted from his text «La priéves (1909), 38 Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, New York 1911582 Maria Stavrinaki ‘out thatin art, the beginning and the end may produce similar forms.” The historical narrative of Boas was bereft of direction, of any kind of regularity, of rhythmic co- herence. It acknowledged instead the countless »accidental causes that were acting in every human society. In short, an air of historical agnosticism - reminding of ‘Caylus - came from his text. At the same time, other thinkers who were also working on material culture were investing the notion of «regression« in order to refute univocal and unidirectional evolutionism. But regression does not necessarily give up the comfort of the cer- tainties of evolutionism. In a way, the norm changes, but time is still subject toa reassuring regularity. The very concept that had served linear evolutionism in order ‘by filling out the gaps of its narrative, namely «survival, was transformed into the cutting-edge of the rewriting of art history by Waldemar Deonna- and beyond. For itis true that we tend to forget too easily today the evolutionist lineage of this notion, to which we letan anachronistic and strictly subversive meaning.” Even if ssurvival« started to be used against the logic of progress, it was not bereft of evolutionist at- tributes. Deonna, who is - together with Warburg, but ina different way — the major representative of this thought in archaeology and art history, was interested in what we might call the sinternals face of survival, that is, not its dimension of »race,« but fits dimension of »class.« We should not forget this: from Tylor and Frazer to the theo- reticians of folklore as Andrew Lang in England and Arnold Van Gennep in France, the accent was put on the fact that survival was not to be found only in the far-off lands where universal time has stopped at one of its first stages, but in the middle of the countries of progress, whese country and insular populations did not have the same experience of time as those whe were making history This internal sur- vival functioned as a delay, resurfacing without warning in proverbs, superstitions and other automatic gestures, whose meaning or motivation no one remembers any more, This survival was the shelter of irrationality in a world that had become func- ‘tional to the point of disenchantment. Ta the classic evolutionist narrative, tracing the line from simplicity to infinite complexity, Deanna was opposing another kind of coherence: that of rhythm and eternal return."? Inspired by Vico, he was often theorizing in his numerous writings the corsi and recarsi of histary, starting from the Paleolithic, whose beginning he considered to be forever lost, to futurism and cubism. Contemporary art was the sign 39 Boas (Ann. 38), 170, 40. We can find a significant example of this tendency in Georges Didi-Huberman, acooeding to whom Tylor himself is an sanachzonics thinker. See Georges Didi-Huberman, «The Surviv- ing Image: aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropolagy.s in: Oxsind Art fournal 25/1 (2002), 55-69. 41 See, for instance, Arthur Mitchell, The Past isin the Present: What is Civilization? New York: 1881. 42 sQQue devient alors Vancienne thénrie du progres, inspinée des vieilles téléologies, suivant laquelle le développement de 'humanité tendrait toujours & un but supérieur? Elle est aujo- urd'bui bien morte. L'érolution ne signifie pas marche ininterrompue en avant, mais flux, reflux, reculs méme: she progrés est une oscillatiom« (Waldemar Deonna, Liarchéalogie, ses dois, ses snethords, vol.t: Les fois de Fort, Paris 1912, 531).Beyond Simplicity: The Late Prehistory ofthe Moderns 5&3 ‘of the end of a cycle and the beginning of another. Rather than looking for minute differences testifying to the continuity of history, he was interested in the unexpected resemblances; thase between distant periods. These resemblances testified as much against the naiveté of uninterrupted evolutionism as they healed the anxiety of hiatus and the other abysses of time. It was a vision that combined catastrophism and evo- lution, irrational and coherence, contingency and certitude. In this vision, simplicity, indetermination or schematization were implying the contingency of an evidence: that the beginning will be replayed by the end, and vice versa. For instance, Deonna wrote: »En présence de modes d'activité simples en apparence, il faut toujours se demander s'il s’agit bien d'une simplicité originelle ou #il n’y a pas de vestiges d'une complexité passée, En fiut-ll des exemplest«** These examples were not only to be found in the art made in Europe, but also in psychology, that of Théodule Ribot for instance, which theorized the regression from new to ancient, from complex to sim- ple, from voluntary to automatic, but also that of Le Bon, who famously eompared the automatic psychology of modern masses to that of the primitives. ‘While Deonna was arguing in favor of the ambivalence between the end and the beginning, the painter Giorgio de Chirico was enunciating this unexpected analogy between prehistory and his own belated painting, Indeed, he was the first painter be- longing to the large modernist constellation to make explicit recourse to prehistory, Yet it would be in vain tolook for any explicit quotation of the latter in his paintings, and for good reason: prehistory was for him the equivalent of a method, of a tech- nique of de-familiarization (estrangement/ostranertie). This required that prehistory should not be quoted as such, but that it should be insitwated through the selection and disposal ef forms which were a priori completely dissimilar to it. Attentive to the formalist procedures of cubism, which he discovered in Paris in 1912, de Chirico put them at the service of the metaphysical quest of symbolism that he was practicing up to this date. Rather than thernatic or iconographic, in metaphysical painting prehis- tory was becoming conceptual and formal. What kind of prehistory are we talking about here? Above all, the prehistory of the very longue durée which became the scene onto-which man burst. It was this critical ‘moment, the quasi-theatrical entry of man on the mute scene of natural history, that de Chirico first retained. The Tertiary period, which still ignored everything of the human species, was mentioned by the artist as a childhood memory: his reading of the popular books written by Louls Figuler and illustrated by Edouard Riou had provided him the first representations of prehistory (Fig. 2). Based on the already established analogy between prehistory and childhood, de Chirico recalled a strange and rather terrifying era: »[ remember the strange and profound impression made upon me as a child by a plate in an old book that bore the title the World before the Flood.« The plate represented a landscape of the Tertiary Period. Man was not yet 45 See for instance, Waldemar Deonna, »Futuristes d'autrefois et d'aujourd’huls in; Revie dethnopraphie ef de sociologie 3 (1912}.297-301, 44. Deonna, i archéalagie (Ann. 42) 45. Gn the law of regression« according to Théodule Ribot, see for instance his book L"hérédité psychologique, Paris 1894; Gustave Le Bon, yeh oliggie dey foules, Paris 1895.Stavrinaki 584 Mari Fig, 2: Eduard Riou, ideal landscape in Lauls Figuler's book, ta terre avant le déluge (The Earth before the Fload), Paris, 1863. present.«“* Prehistory entered de Chirico’ life in the form of a repetition. By observ ing the images of an unknown Tertiary world, the child was repeating the Urszene of the entry of man in the world. This »childhood memory« = to transpose here the famous title of Freud on Leonardo da Vinci - had to be reactivated later, in the adult's paintings: without resorting to the images of the tertiary world as such, de Chirico wanted to transpose »the feeling of prehistory” in the historical late and even ec- lectic forms, gaing from antiquity to modernity: »Le jour va naitre. C’est I"heure de Vénigme, Cest "heure aussi de la préhistoire, Une des sensations les plus étranges et Jes plus profondes que mous ait laissé la prehistoire est la sensation du présage: [|] Le premier homme devait voit des présages partout. Il devait frissonner 4 chaque pas qu'il faisait.« To become like the first man, but aprés-coup, after the fact (Fig. 3). To trans- form the automatic familiarity into a decelerated, indeed an impeded familiarity capable of giving the chills. To make sure that a mute second natures begins to deliver omens. From a temporal point of view, this required the transformation of the present into a terra incognita, an infinitely distant era. Yet such a conservation implied the conservation of signs of the present. So, not a tabula rasa, not a virgin immaculate prehistory, butan accumulation, a heap of things that, obsolete and even forgotten as they were, could be reconfigured. The process set by de Chirico was very close to formalist de-familiarization as this was conceived and analyzed during the game years in Russia, What other era, what other notion than prehistory was mone propitious of becoming all at once the metaphor, the means, and the aim of de-famll- jarization? What era was less known than prehistory? After all, one of its rare ceri tudes was that it corresponded to the beginning of the knowability of the world By human subjectivity. Similarly, in his famous essay of 1917 «Art as Technique,« Viewer Shklovsky wrote that the aim of art was to make of something known something pe 46 Ghorgio de Chirico, Cn Metaphysical Art (excerpt), 1919\« in: Mary Ann Caws (ed.), festa: A Canary of laos, Lincokn 2000, 282—286, here: 242-283, 47. See the text of de Chirico, eDeuxitme Partie. Le sentiment de Ia préhistoine.« in: Fagioto (ed.), Giorgio de Chérica, Il meccanismo diel pensfera. Critica, palemica, 1911-1943, Turin 1985, 20-24. 48 De Chirico, «Deuxiéme Parties (Amn. 47), 22. 49. [tis oot possible to develop here the theme of second natures in de Chirica,Simplicity: The Late Prehistory ofthe medems © SBS Fig. 3: Giorgio de Chirico, Evangelical St Life }, 1916, oil painting, 80.5 = 71.4 tm, Osaka City Museum oF Modern Art ceived, by increasing sthe difficulty and the duration of perception.” Transforming mute things into omens was de Chirico's metaphysical alm. This implied a slowing down of perception and the long-term contemplation of the work of art. On this point, too, the long duration of prehistory and the slow assimilation of the world by man provided an appropriate analagy. The automatism of the end, which was an automatism of the instant and of Reason, was converted in and through de Chirico’s paintings to the (unconscious) automatism of the slowness of the beginnings. ‘De Chirico said of modern art that it suggested »plus que jamais d'encadrer et de minéraliser totalement l'univers. [...] La terre elle-méme, dure et ferme, que news sentons sous la semelle de mos bottes, est aujourd'hui surclassée par la dimension métaphysique des constructions de Phomme.«"! Posthistorical prehistory: the strata of earth did not consist only of fossils and of natural minerals any more, but also of human constructions - works of art of the past, standardized products of modern in- dustry ~whese unmotivated and alienated character was equivalent to fossilization. de Chirico’s method aimed at making obvious the fossilized character of history. Having recognized in the cubist scaffolding a process of the mineralization of the object - including the human bedy -, he shifted this process from the more or less neutral objects of cubism to the body of history. A second prehistory thus mobilized the entirety of history, which was felt as coming to an end and needing to be recon- figured once again in the form of incoherent temporal assemblages. 88 Victor Shkdorsky. l'art comme procédé, Paris 208. $1 Giorgio de Chirico, «Art métaphysique et sciences occultess in: Ar? Nova 3/3 (January 1918).586 © Maria Stavrinaki ‘What kind of devices did metaphysical painting use? The rigged perspective was distorting Lagos; the game of scales was adequate to childhood memories; the ob- jects, submitted to a complex system of interlocking and framing, were either his- torical or ephemeral: Every profound work of art contains two solitudes. One could be called plastic solitude, and Is that contemplative beatitude offered to us by Genius in construction and formal combination [_], The second solitude is that of signs, a metaphysical solitude. [..] There are paintings by Boecklin, Lorrain and Poussin which are inhabited by human figures, but which in spite of this, bear a close relationship with the landscape of the Tertiary. ‘Absence of humanity In man? ‘Consequently, if the first men had to become human by assimilating thelr natural muilicu, then conversely, modern man had to dehumanize himeelf. [f the first men had te learn everything, the last man had to unlearn everything: to begin with himself. Against the insolent idea according to which man was the «mesures of in the universe, de Chirico asserted that »le but de la peinture de l'avenir serax de ssupprimer l'homme comme paint de repére,« de «voir tout, méme|"homme en tant que choses He thus defined his paintings as »an anti-anthropic remedy,« that isasa healing, by the means of man’s confrontation to the pitiless scale of prehistory, of the harm that he caused to himself. This dehumanization, associated with the work om, scales, would be one of the fopod of prehistoric modernity: Robert Smithson provider here the mast powerful example. ‘Lastly, if de Chirico did net explore rock painting in his works, this was not fer having not paid attention to it. He was very familiar with the schema of and complexity through his rather shrill readings in archaeology and And he certainly chose the path of Deonna rather than of Pitt Rivers: In the #] déchames de ses bisons, de ses reniies [_..] gravés sur les parois,« he recognized art de l'impression.« The »troglodyte serait un artiste impressionniste,« he adopting the idea of a simple Paleolithic art. But if impressionism was legitis for the first artists, this was no longer the case with the Impressionists of the modernity. They remained indifferent to the prehistoric identity of their own era: certains égards.« de Chirico wrote, extréme complexité de notre psyché ressemble & l'ultra simplicité de la leur, des artistes paléolithiques. [_.] Le troglodyte ne sait pas dessiner. Son espeit ét destrates de ténébres ¢'interrogations inquiétantes est obsédée parla peur. Le peintre métaphysique, bul, salt trap de chases. Sur son crane, dans son coeur, trop: praintes, de réminiscences, de souvenirsetdeprophéties ont laisse leur marques sur des disques de cire malle.® 52 De Chirico, »On Metaphysical Arts (Ann. 45}. 33 Giorgio de Chirico, »Nous les métaphysiciens.« iim: Cronache ai attualihd'Chroniquen fualiné [Bulletin of the Casa de Arte Bragaglia] (February 15, 1919).Beyond Simplicity: The Late Prehistory of the Moderns S87 In accordance with the persistent ideology of a primitive man supposed to be the passive medium where impressions and fears, in brief, where the pure present was engraved, de Chirico also considered that Paleolithic artists merely reproduced what they saw, The metaphysical painter was the wax where stratified history had left its uncountable imprints. This might explain the sharp construction, the compactness and the overall mineralization of de Chirico’s paintings. IV. Alteration Among the tools that evolutionism delivered to its enenties, we can also count the notion of ealteration.« We have already observed its theorization im Balfour's de- fense of the anteriority of naturalism: abstraction would be then its distant corrupted evolution, Balfour was indebted to the work of the archaeologist Sir John Evans on the «Coins of Ancient Britons« (begun in 1848, this research went on for several decades). Evolution as degradation, corruption, degeneration or alteration of farms ‘was eloquently illustrated in the horizontal series in which were disposed the coins of the Age of Iron. The head of a Medusa, engraved In a Greek coin, was trans- formed at the end into a carriage, and the horse of Philippe of Macedonia into a cruciform ornament." (Fig. 4) But this demonstration of degradation, which could ofien coincide with a simplification in reverse, was also transplanted in the study of the Paleolithic. Among the first publications of the Abbé Breuil, we can find those dedicated to the theory of degeneration of the forms of the Reindeer Age*: «A I'age du renne,« he wrote in 1905, Varts'estdevelappe sans doute avec un degré extraordinaire de vérité et d'observation dela nature, les grands artistes quien ont grave et sculpté les chefs-d'ceuvre, ou qui les ont peints sur les murailles des cavernes demandalent & une étude directe de la nature les sujets quills exécutalent avec tant de perfection, mals, & cite d'eux, des capistes plus ou mains expérimentés et informés, copiaient et défiguraient les ceuvres dont its sinspiralent, arrivant inconsciemment & modifier profondément, & abslir, et parfois inverser mime le 3¢ sens d'une figure naturaliste, jusqu'a la réduire au misérable rie de motif ornemental. Dans l'art quaternaire comme dans la plupart des arts sauvages, 4 cSté du stock bien limité des plus rudimentaines ornements primordiaux, et de ce qui résulte de la transfarmation en éléments décoratits de particularités industrielles, Vornementation est donc le fruit de I'altération de plusen plus profonde de l'art figuré West mémepermis de rappeler que c'est par une simplification toute analogue queles éeritures sont sorties de la pictographie, et que les caractéres ont perdu l'aspect et la signification dent ils étaient doués primitivement.” 54 John Evans, Tie Coins of the Ancient Britons, London 1864. 55. Evans( Ann, 54), 56 Henti Breuil, «La dégéndrescence des figures d'animaux en motifs arnementaux &l'époque du renne,« in: Comptes rendus des séances de ['Acudénie des Inscriptions et Belles-Letives 49 (January-February 1905), 105-120. $7 Beeuil (Amn. 56), 120.588 0 Maria Stavrinaki Fig 4: John Evans, The Coins of the Ancient Britons, London, B, Quaritch, 1864, plate A, Paris, Bibliothéque de INHA, Jacques Doucet. Rudiment or miserable rest? Crude beginning or the familiar alteration inheremt in a writing (écriture) whose conceptual resorts in occidental metaphysics Jacques Derrida has summptuously analyzed? It is this logic that Georges Bataille sought reach in several of his texts published in the journal Documents between 1929 andl 1930. His very first article was »Le cheval académiques (The academic horse}: forgotien source was most probably the work of John Evans, of which Bataille the paleographer, then working at the Cabinet de médailles of the National Library France, could not remain ignorant. Bataille was interested in the regressive going from ¢lassical ideal to barbarian alteration, such as it was revealed in Gallic coins, but, at the apposite end to Breuil’s, he considered that vleurs = ne présentent pas seulement les déformations barbares habituelles résultant de le maladresse du graveur. Les chevaux déments imaginés par les diverses 58 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatodogty, Paris 1967. 59 Georges Bataille, eLe cheval académique.« in; Documents 1 (1923), reedited in the the journal Documents 1 (1928), 27-31.Beyond Simpl elate Prehistoryofthe Modems S89 ne relévent pas tant d'un défaut technique que d'une extravagance positive. «" By making of alteration something positive in itself, Bataille was extracting it from the evolutionist chain, This was his difference from Deonna. Some issues later, Bataille would even consider alteration as the origin of art. Bataille also dedicated a lengthy review to L'art primitif, one of the books of the psychologist Henri-Georges Luquet."' One of the theses of Luquet in this book was that the scribbling on a white page or the dragging of fingers on a ay wall in a cave were two analogous ways for the subject - whatever its age - to-express his/her ‘will to power. On the contrary, Bataille saw there an alteration, the sadistic will of ‘the subject to destroy the support with which he/she was confronted and to finally assert nothing more than his or her own disaster, This interpretation was also meant ‘to contradict Luquet’s theory of »auto-imitation,« according to which the «first art- iste in the absence of any tradition to follow, should have recognized a fortuitous resemblance, emerging from an imprint, a scribbling, a stain inscribed in matter. Like the British evolutionists, Luquet was situating the birth of art in the recognition ofa resemblance in the midst of nature, later completed and patiently perfected by men." This accredited theoretician of child-drawing resorted to the theory of reca- pitulation, which postulated the accelerated physical and psychic repetition of the history of species by individuals. It was also this capitalization of the acquisitions, where nothing was wasted and nothing deviated from the norm, that Bataille could not approve. Bataille instead actually inverted this logic, by theorizing creation as a series of alterations leading to the informe — a formless indecipherable, mute, almost meaningless. Moreover, the contrast between the superb representation of animals and the grotesque representation of human figures confirmed, according to him, this cntological alteration, The latter had no regularity, no rhythm, no historical finality: it was a kind of a mess existing in itself and for itself, simply testifying to man’s con- frontation with death. Nevertheless, for Bataille too some historical moments were more likely to listen to the murmur of the informe and to understand art as an alteration. The text that immediately followed the one on prehistory was a tiny paragraph that Bataille wrote on the recent art of Joan Mird (Fig. 5). As for Deonna, the contiguity between pre- history and modern art was due to a curious resemblance. Writing in the year 1930, Bataille was acknowledging in the art of his time an alteration, a recapitulation in reverse, leading at a loss; «Joan Mird,« he wrote, est parti d'une representation des objets si minuticuse qu'elle mettait jusqu’a un cer- tain point la réalité en poussiére, une sorte de poussiére ensoleillée. Par la suite, ces ‘objets infimes eux-mémes se libérérent individuellement de toute réalité et apparurent comme une foule d'éléments cécomposés et d'autant plus agites. Enfin, comme Mind lui-méme professait qu'il voulait «tuer la peintures, la décomposition fut poussée 4 tel Point qu'il ne resta plus que quelques taches informes sur le couvercle (ou sur la pierre 80 Bataille, sLe chevale (Ann. 59), 28, S81 Geonges-Henei Luque, Lier primitif Paris 1930: Georges Bataille, «L”art peitmitive,s in: Doc- tuments 2 (1930), 389-597, $2. This theory is anchored in the theme of the spot, from Renaissance to Romanticisen.590 Maria Stavrinaki Fig. 5: Joan Mird, Pointing (Head), 1930, oil painting, 230.2 « 165.5, Musée de Grencble, tombale, si l'on veut] de la botte 2 malices, Puis les petits éléments coléreux et aliénee procédérent 4 une nouvelle irtuption, puis lls disparaissent encore une fois aujourd’hut dans ces peintures, laissart seulement les traces den ne ¢alt quel désastre. ‘Miré’s point of departure was the meticulous representation of the real, which his series inspired by the realist Dutch interiors, took to the extreme, to the point where things became their exact opposite: the light of Dutch painting was altered into dust and its meticulous bodies became formless stains. In conclusion, for Bataille, the alteration of the medium of painting by Miré was the sign of the ontological disaster of man of any time. For Carl Einstein, another editor of Documents and a very important theorist of modernism, on the contrarg the work of the same artist was expressing another kind of prehistory: the affirms tive, optimist, regular and recapitulative prehistory of a Deonna, a Read, a Breuil, @ Luquet. All the past painting of Miré expressed, according to Binstein, a useless amd pointless complexity - »une jonglerie d'associations, d'hallucinations dansantes< ‘but the collages that he exposed in 1930 indicated that he 63 Georges Bataille, »Joan Mid: Peintures récentes,s in: Documents 2 (1930), 399-404, bem 399.ofthe Moderns 592 Fig.6: Joan Miré, Collage, 1929, 74,4 x 73,7 « Fem, black pebbie/tar paper with two cut-outs, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne. s'est purgé la téte et s'est freing ia main. Un retour vers le cercle, le poteau, les boules tournoyantes. Il renonce 4 la tension dialgctique du grotesque [..]. Il fuit la métamor: phase comparative, au profit d'une ignorance plus simple. |[..] Mind a réussi undépouil- fement qui lui était nécessaire, [_] Simpticité préhistorique. On devient de plus en plus archaique. La fin rejaint te commencement. (Fig, 6] Tosum up: alteration could be periodical, the sign of an end and ofa beginning, but it could also ‘operate in the irregular fashion of a drive. In that case, it did not obey to any kind of evolutionism, going from the simplicity of the heginning to that of the end, and vice versa. History was formless, and was even deprived of the natural rhythm of the high and thelow tides, V. Complex Simplicity it's time to start considering that even the thoughts to which we are the mest in- bted in our understanding of a layered and disjointed time are not necessarily bereft of the scoria of evolutionism. Why would we need at all costs to sanctify the thinkers that we admire? Carl Einstein had thought with a rare constancy what to- wwe call, rather too quickly and generally, the »anachronismss of history. But by ‘nvesting the schema of simplicity and complexity with a precise rhythm, even a 4 Carl Einstein, »Joan Mind (papiers collés # la galerie Pierrel,« 244, here: 241-243, : Documents 2 (1930), 241-592 Maria Stavrinaki regressive, repetitive one, free of any kind of teleology of progress, Einstein protected himself from the vertigo of contingency and the hazards of history. ‘We could also enunciate the same idea in a different, even inverse manner: the General Pitt Rivers had also envisaged an exception in his implacable schema, by conceiving a »complex simplicity.« As a man of his age, atteritive to the achievements of industry, he wrote: #It may be said, a3 a rule, that simple forms have preceded complex ones, Within certain limits this must be true, but itis not always the case, for, in many instances, progress consists in eliminating superfluous complexity and reducing the expenditure of time and labour.«"* It was this evolutionism, concerned with ergonomic efficiency and profitability, that was active in the purging of forms by Le Corbusier and, some years later, by the Bauhaus, leaving behind the nostalgia of Middle-Ages: manual simplicity was transformed into complex simplicity. It was also the same evolutionism that we can find in the art of Léger, who in 1934 exhibited his drawings of different kind of objects - reots, flints, corkscrews, pieces of meat »L art moderne évolue logiquement vers le plus simple, rejeignant par [a les hautes époques = assyriens, chaldéens, ¢gyptiens.« he wrote. (Fig. 7) In other words, the chance of modern era lay in the fact that Its means, its modes of production, and its affects were perfectly compatible with the simplicity of origin and its resurgences along history. ‘The same idea can be found in the interpretation of prehistory and of modernism by Sigfried Giedion and his wife, Carola Gledion-Welcker, In the 1930s, the latter was one of the art historians who referred regularly to prehistory, following the logic of return, of repetition, of complex regression.” In these texts, she alluded to Vico's: Nuowa Sciewza in order to-defend ber own view of a periodicity of history: » Anfang und Ende, Erstes und Letztes unseres Zeitbewusstseins scheinen zu schmelzen. View goes round and round, heisst es bei fayce.«"* She mainly insisted on Neolithic art ‘without forgetting however the complex simplicity of Pitt Rivers." This tireless de- fender of modernist sculpture, wrote that modern tools revealed us the simplicity of forms,« exactly is in prehistory, characterized by »an economy of the means of expression and a sireplicity of form.<" She also quoted Brancusi, for whom »sim- plicitys is no beginning, but an xend.«” Finally, in her book Modern Plastic Art she explained the »return to the tirst principles, to the forces of expression and to simple images« because the modem individual was submitted to the psychological and sociological evolution of its epoch, which shared many common features with: 65 Pit Rivers, »Typological Museums« {(Amm. 33), 66 Fernand Léger, in: Thtve, Antithése, Synthéxe [Kuastmuseum Lacerne, February 24 ~ Marcie 41, 1935], Lucerne 1935, mp. 67 See Carola Giedion-Welcker, +Prihistorie, Vieo und die Moderne Kunst [1938),» in: Rest ‘hard Hobl (ed.), Carala Giedion- Weicker. Schriften 1926-1977. Statfonen cu elnem smait Briefen von Arp, Chillida, Ernst, Giacemetti, Jaye, Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Schwitters Koln 1973, 13-16, Giedion-Welcker, »Prihistaries: (Ann. 67), 16. Giedion-Welcker, »Prahistoriee (Ann. 67), 16. Gledion-Welcker, *Prahistories (Ann. 67), 16. Giedion-Welcler, Modern Plastic Art. Elements of Reality, Volume and Derintegration, Za wich 1937, LL. ae8aBeyond Simplici The Late Prehistory ofthe moderns 593 Fig, 7: Fernand Léger, Silex, 1933, ink on paper, 34. 25 om, Biot, Musée national Fernand Léger. primitive societies.” There is a universalist and humanist air that emanates from the writings of Carola Giedion-Welcker, something that today looks very much like the last utopia before the disaster. Quite differently, a persistent melancholy emanates from the book that Sigfried Giedion wrote in the 1960s on prehistory: now a dis- tant era, modernism was as much idealizable, as much utopian, as prehistory.” The Eternal Present was a desperate attempt on the part of one of the most authoritative historians of modernism to find serious analogies in the art of these two periods. He defined abstraction as one of the constituent elements of human spirit, related to its capacity to create symbols. But in the absence of abstract forme as such on the walls of the caves (except for some hermetic signs), Giedion saw in prehistoric art a general simplification and a concentration, mostly manifest in the outline of the represented animals (Fig. §). In other terms, he refuted the classic dividing of evolu- tionism between a naive Paleolithic and an abstract Neolithic, for the simple reason that for him «Art began with abstraction.«" Also, this simplicity of form did not go ‘together with the simplicity of composition. In the meantime, Max Raphael had been the first to argue in the 1940s that the contiguity and the superposition of engraved and drawn figures in the caves were not the mere effects of separate acts of paintings. This hypathesis, stripped of Raphael's Marxism, was adopted and further developed by the structuralists Annette Laming-Emperaire and André Lerol-Gourhan.” As for 72 Gledion-Welcker, Mosler Plastic Art (Arar. 71), & 73 Sigfied Giedion, The Eternal Present: A Candribuction an Constancy and Change, wal, l: The Beginning of Art, London 1982, 74 Giedion's book was a defense of Worringer, whose thesis ofan analogy between abstraction and «primitives art was contradicted by palaeolithic art and furiously criticized, 73 Max Raphacl, Trois exsais sur la signification de Cart pariétal paléolithigue, Paris 1986; Ane nelle Laming-Emperaire, La signification de Tart rupestre paléalithique. Méthades et applica- tins, Paris 1962; André Leroi-Gourhan, Last pariétal. 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