Primates and Pastorals
Take a close look at the painting, above. It's a pretty typical representation of an artistic subject matter that has been around nearly as long as human art has: the Pastoral Landscape. You've seen these paintings -- beautiful green landscapes, with trees, pastures, maybe a lake or a stream, some gentle animals grazing peacefully. Pretty sure that most museums have a fair number of these sorts of paintings stacked in some attic storage space. You've probably snapped photos yourself of something that looks kind of like this on vacation or during your travels.
Here's one by George Lambert: A Pastoral Landscape with Shepherds and their Flocks (1744). Woods, pasture land, sheep to graze it, water to drink.
. Here's another by Asher Durand titled, surprisingly, Pastoral Landscape (1861). Cows, this time.
Claude Lorraine got the ball rolling in the 17th century, with his depiction of the Roman Campagna: In the Campagna they have cows and goats.
The thing is, this particular form of landscape, with the trees, grass, water and peaceful (edible) animals is pretty universal. It seems to represent the favored landscape of humans from different eras and cultures across the globe.
In fact, in 1993, two expatriate Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, conducted a detailed worldwide poll, asking individuals and focus groups from all over what they would like to see a picture of -- interior or exterior, favorite colors, subject matter, what kinds of animals, etc. The result? Almost overwhelmingly consistent: people enjoyed seeing trees and pastures, calm waters, peaceful animals. Green and blue. A painting much like the Constable, above (or any of the million other such paintings in art history).
Komar and Melamid then produced a painting designed to meet the preferences of respondents from a number of different countries – a true art of the people! Unsurprisingly, the results are at once bland and weirdly unsettling…
Komar and Melamid then produced a painting designed to meet the preferences of respondents from a number of different countries – a true art of the people! Unsurprisingly, the results are at once bland and weirdly unsettling…
Here's what they came up with for the United States (left); next to it is Finland's "people's choice." Americans get George Washington in their pastoral; the Finns get a Moose.
There are exceptions. See the choice that the Dutch made, for instance, here: http://awp.diaart.org/km/painting.html.
Dennis Dutton, in his terrific book The Art Instinct, has a theory about the popularity of these landscapes. He believes such artistic preferences are our evolutionary inheritance: they're hardwired into our brains. He argues that our earliest ancestors -- the primates who left the African Jungles to start living on the encroaching grasslands -- would have sought a landscape that looks more or less just like this: a nearby forest for easy gathering of foodstuffs, fields or pastures green with fertility and close-cropped for easy hunting, nearby water for easy access and fishing.
Cezanne's Fishermen. It doesn't always have to be ungulates.
I find this kind of touching. Even some of our most sophisticated aesthetic preferences can be traced to our earliest dreams of peace, fertility and security. Call it the Primate Pastoral, perhaps…
San Rock, Drakensberg, South Africa