DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0087
THE FAMILY IN THE CAIRO MUSEUM
of the sitter’s social status, though of course it suggested that
he was human. (Who could deny that to van Eyck or
Rembrandt or Greco!) But in the nature of things his
humanity got entangled in his clothes. Painting thus seized
the excuse of lightening its labours by investigating the
attributes of knights, potentates, and burghers. Only an
abnormally intense personality succeeded in completely
objectifying his clothes and protecting the art which had
escaped from the clutches of the priests and turning it into a
class-production. For which reason it retired into private life,
and never attained to the independent universal humanity of
our Family of the fifth dynasty. It is doubtful how this
universalization could come about in a society which we are
accustomed to regard as the class-state par excellence, and
recur not as an accident in defiance of established order, but
a hundredfold, a thousandfold, till it really corresponded to a
mass-instinct.
I am amazed at the quality of these mass-products and
their intimate expressiveness. I wonder how conventionality
could be content with arrangement and gesture, and give the
sculptor free access to every bodily fact. When the clothes
fall aside, the man’s body seems to be released from a case
for which we always have to make allowances when represent-
ing the naked body. I do not know whether the usual
explanation of this phenomenon, which connects it with their
custom of going naked, is the right one; still less do I know
whether, in fact, they did go about naked. With us the body
becomes something abstract as soon as the clothes are
removed: a situation from which only the baroque has found
an escape. Nothing is less baroque than Egyptian art; no
vaporous play or convolution issues from it. Nothing is less
stiff, either, or less stylized. In front of our Family nobody
thinks of the object of sculpture. The studio-product called
a model, which in Europe results from the disappearance of
the sculptor behind his object, a soulless stone with, at most,
75
of the sitter’s social status, though of course it suggested that
he was human. (Who could deny that to van Eyck or
Rembrandt or Greco!) But in the nature of things his
humanity got entangled in his clothes. Painting thus seized
the excuse of lightening its labours by investigating the
attributes of knights, potentates, and burghers. Only an
abnormally intense personality succeeded in completely
objectifying his clothes and protecting the art which had
escaped from the clutches of the priests and turning it into a
class-production. For which reason it retired into private life,
and never attained to the independent universal humanity of
our Family of the fifth dynasty. It is doubtful how this
universalization could come about in a society which we are
accustomed to regard as the class-state par excellence, and
recur not as an accident in defiance of established order, but
a hundredfold, a thousandfold, till it really corresponded to a
mass-instinct.
I am amazed at the quality of these mass-products and
their intimate expressiveness. I wonder how conventionality
could be content with arrangement and gesture, and give the
sculptor free access to every bodily fact. When the clothes
fall aside, the man’s body seems to be released from a case
for which we always have to make allowances when represent-
ing the naked body. I do not know whether the usual
explanation of this phenomenon, which connects it with their
custom of going naked, is the right one; still less do I know
whether, in fact, they did go about naked. With us the body
becomes something abstract as soon as the clothes are
removed: a situation from which only the baroque has found
an escape. Nothing is less baroque than Egyptian art; no
vaporous play or convolution issues from it. Nothing is less
stiff, either, or less stylized. In front of our Family nobody
thinks of the object of sculpture. The studio-product called
a model, which in Europe results from the disappearance of
the sculptor behind his object, a soulless stone with, at most,
75