Enter one Caixa Forum Barcelona And there it is, in the darkness, the chopped up skull of a man in his forties. A sculpted skull covered in plaster with shells in the eye sockets. No lower jaw. The normal in Tell is -Sultan, ancient Jericho, 9,500 years ago. “Perhaps it was made to honor the deceased, but it probably symbolized ancestral figures in general,” we read. “He became an object of worship,” he adds. Thomas A Cummins, Director of international exhibitions at the British Museum and curator of The Human Image. Arts, Identities and Symbolism”.
Excavated in 1953 by archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, the Neolithic skull is the starting point for an exhibition that explores 10,000 years of human representation through 150 works, alongside one of the oldest portraits in human history. A voyage from Jericho in 7,500 BC. to the screen print montages by the Iranian Paraviz Tanavoli; from female characters to culture halaf to the masked faces of Antoni Tàpies. A journey through all cultures, civilizations and forms of expression, showing that since art is art, man has made every effort to see himself and others. “It’s one of the most persistent issues in art history,” says Elisa Durán, Deputy Director General of the La Caixa Foundation.
Also, Cummins adds one of the most complex digestions. How else could one delineate centuries and centuries of display of the human body? How do you sift through vast amounts of modeled, sculpted, engraved, painted and photographed representations? At Caixaforum, it was decided to structure the exhibition into five major spaces, based on a combination of funds from the British Museum and a dozen pieces from the La Caixa Foundation’s art collection: perfect beauty, Portraits, the divine body, the political body and physical transformation.
In the latter we find one of the most striking pieces of the “image of man”: a Eros statue the Acropolis of Athens, destroyed by the early Christians in the 4th (or 5th) century. “For them, nudity was shameful, so nipples, stomach and genitals are scraped open,” the poster reads. “The body is a way of transmitting ideas,” Cummins emphasizes. And, having seen what has been seen, they also try to destroy.
Detail of the painting dedicated to the Iranian wrestler Gholamreza Tajti
However, the norm is the opposite: the body worship and the celebration of human beauty through Moche busts, Egyptian paintings, Alexandrian heads and even the Greek sculpture of an old woman, “something unusual,” according to the curator. Exceptional, however, is the peculiar and colorful altar dedicated to the Iranian wrestler Gholamreza Tajti, National hero made an object of worship and surrounded by garlands and twinkling lights. Composed of comings and goings, cultural dialogues and artistic explorations, the exhibition brings together nudes by Matisse, medals featuring Napoleon’s death mask, floating heads by Frank Auerbach, portraits by David Hockney, engravings by Goya, abstract bodies from the Cyclades, Obama and Trump badges and Jerusalem death masks.
In the hallways, marble became flesh and art as a reflection of society. A relief of a couple from central India and a bust commemorating a couple from Palmyra who swore eternal love. “Sometimes it’s the symbols that count, not the person himself,” slips the inspector into the realm of power. Behind him a statue of Marcus Aurelius, a king of the Kuba dynasty, and portraits of Emperor Menelik II and King Farouk of Egypt. The painting to which Luis de Madrazo dedicated is also impressive Elizabeth the Catholic. “The political portrait is carefully designed to evoke the idea of an omnipotent being,” emphasize those responsible for the sample. Not far away, in an adjoining glass case, a pair of pharaohs are watching Old houses Porcelain shares space with a carving of the Queen Victoria Made by a Yoruba artist.
Dialogue between antiquity and modernity in “The Human Image”
In the section focusing on ideal beauty, there is a single idea: everything is relative. Dürer engravings, Hittite ivory figures, Maratti female nudes, the Japanese model Ohisa, an odalisque by Matisse… “Ideal beauty is a social construct that influences people greatly,” Cummins defends. Indeed, ideal beauty was not the same in 11th-century Rajasthan, 4th-dynasty Egypt, or 19th-century Sierra Leone. When in doubt, the Americans Christopher Williams dismantles photographic conventions and commercial tricks in “Deconstruction of the Image of Beauty”. Far from claiming sexualization and glamour; Close-up, clips to fasten the bra and careful construction of the beauty.
Religious icons, tomb guardians carved from volcanic rock, scrawny ancestors from Rapa Nui and a helper from the spirit world of West Papua link the divine body to ultimate detachment, transformation and ultimately death. Ritual masks, funerary stelae and a black basalt sarcophagus coexist here with the traumatized bodies of Leonard Baskin, a Ziggy Stardust etching courtesy of David Oxtoby and Japanese devil masks.
The exhibition ends, but the question remains. “Why are we so fascinated by the image of man?” Cummins asks. His colleague Brendan Moore provides the answer, or one of them, in the exhibition catalogue. “These pieces are embodiments of our knowledge of life with all its possibilities and limitations. They are projections of our humanity; Models for who we think we are and what we want to be.
