Trivializing Ancient Egypt

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The New York Sun

Egypt has long held captive the imagination of the West. Egypt’s sun is the brightest. Its river the longest. Its sky the bluest. Its desert the vastest. And its art is the most religious and the largest. Thousands of years before Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone, Egypt was a leading tourist attraction, and tourism is now by far the country’s leading source of income.


It may be merely coincidental that Jean-Francois Champollion began to decipher the Rosetta Stone at about the same time as the invention of the steam engine, photography, periodicals, and posters – innovations that brought ancient Egypt to the West and modern Westerners to Egypt. But so much to do with ancient Egypt feels driven by fate. The modern world was given the tools to understand our past at the very moment when, through the industrial revolution, we severed the cord that connected us to it.


The West’s 19th-century fascination with ancient Egypt is the subject of the Brooklyn Museum’s show “The Popularization of Ancient Egypt: Images from the Wilbour Library of Egyptology.” This engaging and wide-ranging show, the second segment of the ongoing exhibition “Egypt Through Other Eyes,” includes works from the 1820s through the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Like many of the ancient Egyptian artifacts in the museum, several of the show’s roughly 30 objects – wonderful books, prints, photographs, posters, and periodicals – originally belonged to American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833-96), for whom the library and show are named.


All artworks begin to lose their power once they have been uprooted from their original context. This is especially true of ancient Egyptian art, which – compared to French painting, for instance – makes exponentially less sense the farther it travels from the Nile. After seeing ancient Egyptian art in situ, you see everything that followed – from Greek columns to the frontality and flatness of Mondrian’s paintings – in a different way. To experience the pyramids at Giza is to return to the womb of art and to tap into the source of Western culture, where nature, landscape, and the cosmos, art, life, and the afterlife, all unbelievably become one.


The Brooklyn Museum has one of the greatest collections of ancient Egyptian art in North America, yet its recent reinstallation, which includes cheesy theme-park decoration, seemingly to update, popularize, and make the artwork accessible, is one of the worst I have ever seen. “Egypt Through Other Eyes,” which was organized by Deirdre E. Lawrence, principal librarian/coordinator of research services, and Mary Gow, assistant librarian, is displayed in an adjacent gallery.


Like the museum’s Egyptian antiquities, the show’s fabulous ephemera transcend their less-than-fabulous surroundings. Among these are chromolithograph plates; photographic picture books; a large, sensitively illustrated color plate of Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park from an 1887 deluxe limited-edition volume; a skillful illustration by Charles Dana Gibson, “Karnak, January 2, 1898,” that depicts an excavation at the Temple of the Goddess Mut; and John Gardner Wilkinson’s 1837 engaging attempt at a comprehensive encyclopedia of Egyptian culture.


The elegant illustration of a Nile houseboat in Thomas Cook & Son’s travel brochure “Cook’s Dahabeahs, ‘Osiris,’ ‘Isis,’ ‘Horus,’ ‘Hathor,’ ‘Nepthis,’ and ‘Amon-Ra'” (1892-93) is gorgeous. A selection of heliogravures of the Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza, the Temple of Amon at Luxor, and the Great Obelisk at Karnak (all after original 1893 views by R.M. Junghaendel) are straightforward yet hauntingly beautiful.


Many objects in “Egypt Through Other Eyes” show how removed the culture of the time was from the ancient roots of Egyptian art and culture, and how laughable and odd responses to it were. Phillip Schaff’s “Ascent of a Pyramid” – from the book “Through Bible Lands: Notes of Travel in Egypt, the Desert, and Palestine” (1888) – hilariously portrays a man in frock coat and top hat being helped up a pyramid. “A Day with Royalty, being a truthful account of the doings of that greatest of monarchs, Kimanli, recorded for the benefit of posterity, by that wondrous writah, Tellali: B. C. 475, Temple of Karnak, that’s me” (1901) – in which President William McKinley (pharaoh “Kimanli”), in full royal procession, readies himself to throw out the first baseball of the season – has to be seen to be believed. In Senator James Ewing Cooley’s biting travel diary “The American in Egypt, with rambles through Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land during the years 1839 and 1840” (1843), satire takes precedence: Below an illustration of suspicious men robbing a mummy from a tomb, is the caption “Scientific Researches.”


In general, however, a mixture of ignorance, reverence, and 19th-century colonial complacency can be felt in most of the exhibition’s illustrations. In the embarrassingly wonderful “Egyptian Museum” (1853), a black-and-white poster advertising the first major exhibition of Egyptian antiquities in North America at the Stuyvesant Institute, the exhibition and the goofily drawn artworks and hieroglyphics (1,000 objects that “were almost all taken from tombs and ruined cities of Egypt”) are treated equally as decorative elements and as a circus attraction filled with confounding curiosities.


Much of the work here is competent and colorful, but done in a Victorian or Edwardian style, so that the final product only vaguely resembles the original tomb art. A number of the illustrations’ Egyptian figures look like bored Caucasian servants in fantastical dress. Although practically all ancient Egyptian art is abstract, most of the 19-century illustrations naively make it representational. In the atlas “View of the Interior of the Temple at Ybsombul in Nubia Opened by G. Belzoni” (1820), etched by A. Aglio after an 1818 drawing by B. Belzoni, the numerous animal-headed figures on the columns and friezes are relaxed, occasionally rolling their eyes. They resemble figures shaking hands on suburban streets.


What the works in this show suggest – and the decor of the museum’s Egyptian galleries makes clear – is that even as we continue to romanticize and exoticize the art of ancient Egypt, we also continue to trivialize and modernize it. We attempt to possess and bring to the light of day objects and concepts meant to exist only metaphorically, in the darkness of tombs, and to be experienced only by gods.


“Egypt Through Other Eyes” reminds us that nothing short of going to the source can reveal the truth and power of art. “You ask me whether [Egypt] is up to what I imagined it to be,” Gustave Flaubert wrote to his mother in 1850. “Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions – so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.”


Until December 2005 (200 Eastern Parkway, between Flatbush and Washington Avenues, 718-638-5000).


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