Art: Man v. Man

Is there an underlying theme that runs through the history of art, from the figures scratched on walls of prehistoric caves to splashes and forms on contemporary canvases? There is, says Dorothy Norman, poet, editor, photographer, art critic and publisher (who captioned Edward Steichen's photographic show The Family of Man). Her thesis is expressed in a challenging show, on view this week at Manhattan's Willard Gallery, and soon to begin a U.S. tour sponsored by the American Federation of Arts. What man has been doing through the ages, says Dorothy Norman, is reporting on his own "heroic encounter" with himself.

To document her thesis, Mrs. Norman spent a year ruffling through the whole range of man's art, from the caveman to Picasso, searching a "fresh correspondence between certain mythological concepts and life today." The subject she chose was the endless procession of legendary heroes locked in mortal combat with such ferocious beasts as the lion, wild bull and dragon. Treated with religious awe and epic endowments in their time, such old heroes never fade away, still have power in art. Dorothy Norman thinks she knows the reason. "Why," she asks, "do such age-old concepts as Theseus and the Minotaur, Job and Behemoth, continue to speak to us with such undiminished power?" Her reply: "Because they suggest to us not some remote force or personage, but phases of our own most essential struggle with ourselves."

Two-Faced Beasts. To bring her thesis into focus, Dorothy Norman assembled photographs of more than 100 art objects —the Assyrian Gilgamesh strangling a lion in an 8th century B.C. bas-relief, an Egyptian sculpture of the god Horus with lion-hunting gear, Heracles struggling barehanded with the Nemean Lion, as shown on a 5th century B.C. Greek vase, the herdsman subduing the ox in the Zen Buddhist Ox-Herding Pictures, a Russian icon showing St. George and the dragon. Oldest examples of her theme are drawings from the Lascaux Cave in France, done more than 30,000 years ago; one of the most recent is the symbolic bull in Picasso's heroless Guernica. Tied together with texts culled from sources that range from the Bible to the works of Carl Jung, Mrs. Norman's show is sure to make the viewer ponder even if he does not agree with the far-reaching thesis.

Admitting that The Heroic Encounter is a personal interpretation, Dorothy Norman (whose work was in part financed by the Bollingen Foundation) digs deep to find the meaning of the symbols artists have used through the ages. She finds the beasts of art to be two-faced. The regal lion she equates both with the sun and man's consciousness, as well as with "the will to power, stemming from ego, pride . . . destructive forces to be faced, overcome, transmuted." The powerful, majestic bull she sees as lunar, the great progenitor who nonetheless partakes of the dark unconscious and "the lower material aspects ... to be sacrificed, conquered, outgrown ... so that the positive, creative energies may be released." The reason Theseus had to search out and slay the half-bull, half-human Minotaur in the labyrinth, she suggests, is that the beast represents the "misused powers of the 'bull' in man."