A History of the World in 100 Objects

by MacGregor, Neil

  A new 50p piece was issued in 2003 to mark the centenary of the WSPO

  PART TWENTY

  The World of Our Making

  AD 1914–2010

  The twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first were an era of unprecedented conflict, social change and scientific development. Technological innovation enabled more objects to be produced and used by humankind than at any previous time in history, changing the way we relate to each other and to the material world. But many of these objects (particularly since the invention of plastic) have been ephemeral and disposable, which has given urgency to questions about the environment and global resources. As has been true for almost two million years, the objects we have produced over the last century convey our concerns, our creativity and our aspirations, and will continue to reveal them to future generations.

  96

  Russian Revolutionary Plate

  Porcelain plate, from St Petersburg, Russia

  PAINTED AD 1921

  Arise, ye workers from your slumber,

  Arise, ye prisoners of want.

  For reason in revolt now thunders,

  and at last ends the age of cant!

  Away with all your superstitions,

  Servile masses, arise, arise!

  We’ll change henceforth the old tradition,

  And spurn the dust to win the prize!

  Those are the words of ‘The Internationale’, the great socialist hymn written in France in 1871. In Russia in the 1920s, it was adopted by the Bolsheviks as the anthem of the Russian Revolution. The original words were about looking forward to a time of future revolution, but significantly the Bolsheviks changed the tense in the Russian translation, moving it from the future to the present – the Revolution was now. The workers, at least in theory, had taken control.

  Throughout this book we have seen images of individual rulers – from Ramesses II and Alexander the Great, to the Oba of Benin and King Edward VII – but here we have the image of a new kind of ruler, not an ‘I’ but a ‘We’, not an individual but a whole class, for in Soviet Russia we see the power of the people, or, rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The object in this chapter is a painted porcelain plate that celebrates the Russian Revolution and the new ruling class. In vivid orange, red, black and white, it shows a revolutionary factory glowing with energy and productivity, and, in the foreground, a symbolic member of the proletariat striding into the future. Seven decades of communism are about to begin.

  The twentieth century was dominated by ideologies and war: two world wars; fights for independence from colonial powers, and post-colonial civil wars; fascism in Europe, military dictatorships across the world; and revolution in Russia. The great political contest, lasting for most of the century, was between liberal democracy on the one hand, and central state direction on the other. By 1921, the year in which the plate was painted, the Bolsheviks had imposed on Russia a new political system based on Marxist theories of class and economics, and were setting about building a new world. It was a Herculean task – the country had been abjectly defeated in the First World War and the new regime was under threat from foreign invasion and civil war. The Bolsheviks needed to motivate and lead the Soviet workers with whatever means they had at their disposal. One of those means was art.

  The designer has exploited the circular shape of the plate to intensify the image’s symbolic power. At the centre, in the distance, is a factory painted in red – this is clearly a factory that belongs to the workers – puffing white smoke, evidence of healthy productivity, with a radiant sunburst of vivid yellow and orange driving away the dark forces of the repressive past. On a hill in the foreground, a man strides in from the left of the picture. He’s aglow, like the factory, with a golden aura around him, painted in red silhouette without any detail, but we know he is young and that he is looking fervently ahead. He clearly represents not an individual but the entire proletariat, moving into the brighter future that they are going to create. At his foot is an industrial cogwheel and in his hand the hammer of the industrial workers. With his next stride he will trample over a barren piece of ground where the word KAPITAL lies broken, its letters scattered over the rocks. The plate had been made twenty years earlier, in 1901, and left blank. The artist who designed it, Mikhail Mikhailovich Adamovich, transformed a piece of imperial porcelain into lucid and effective Soviet propaganda. It is this re-purposing that fascinates the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm:

  The most interesting thing about this is precisely that in one object you can see the old regime and the new regime, and the change from the one to the other. There are very few objects like this where historic change is so clearly present before you. Ideology is important as far as the artists were concerned. There was this enormous sense, among the people who felt themselves to have made the revolution, that we have done something that nobody in the world has done. We are creating a completely new world, which won’t be complete until both Russia and the world are transformed, and we have the duty of showing it and pushing it forward – that’s the ideology.

  Not long after the Bolshevik takeover, the Imperial Porcelain Factory was nationalized, renamed the State Porcelain Factory and placed under the authority of an official with the ringing utopian title of ‘The People’s Commissar of Enlightenment’. As the Commissar of the State Porcelain Factory wrote to the Commissar of Enlightenment:

  The Porcelain and Glass Factories … cannot be just factory and industrial enterprises. They must be scientific and artistic centres. Their aim is to encourage the development of Russia’s ceramic and glass industry, to seek and develop new paths in production … to study and develop artistic form.

  In the Russia of 1921, the year of our plate, there was an acute need for striking messages of unity and hope. The country was embroiled in civil war, deprivation, drought and famine: over four million Russians starved to death. The worker-owned factories like the one shown on our plate were producing a fraction of what they had done before the Revolution. Eric Hobsbawm sees the art typified by the plate as indicating the power of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation:

  It was made at a time when almost all the people engaged in it were hungry. There was famine in the Volga and people died of hunger and typhus. It was a time when you would say, ‘This is a country lying flat on its back, how can it recover?’ And what I think one has to re-create by imagination is the sheer impetus of people doing it, saying: in spite of everything we are still building this future, and we are looking forward to the future with enormous confidence.

  The plate brings us what one of the ceramic artists called ‘news from a radiant future’. Normally regimes will revisit and reorder the past, appropriating it to their current needs, as we have seen many times, but the Bolsheviks wanted people to believe that the past was over and that the new world was going to be built from scratch.

  This image of the new egalitarian world of the proletariat is painted on porcelain – the luxury material historically associated with aristocratic culture and privilege. Painted by hand over the glaze, it was for display, not for use. The plate is scallop-edged and very fine – it was in fact a blank made before the Revolution that had been left over from the Porcelain Factory’s imperial days. The Empress Elizabeth had set up the Imperial Porcelain Factory near St Petersburg in the eighteenth century, to produce porcelain which would rival the best that Europe could offer, for use at court and for official imperial gifts, as Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, explains:

  Russian porcelain became an important part of Russian cultural production. Russian Imperial Porcelain became famous: beautiful dishes that are now extremely expensive at world auctions. It is a good example of art in connection with economy and politics, because it was always a kind of expression of Russian empire – military pictures, military parades, the love of life of ordinary people, pictures from the Hermitage – everything which Russia wanted to present to the world and to itself in a beautiful m
anner.

  This plate is an example in microcosm of the way in which the Soviet rhetoric of total rupture could never match the reality: given the speed of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had to take over existing structures where they could, so much of Soviet Russia continued to echo Tsarist patterns. They had to do it that way – but in this case, they deliberately chose to do it. On the back of the plate are two factory marks. Underneath the glaze, applied when the blank plate was first made, is the Imperial Porcelain Factory mark of Tsar Nicholas II for the year 1901. Over the glaze is painted the hammer and sickle of the Soviet State Porcelain Factory and the date 1921. This painted plate was made in two stages, twenty years apart, and in astonishingly different political circumstances.

  You would have expected the Tsar’s monogram to have been painted over, blotting out the imperial connection, and it often was. But, as somebody at the factory realized, there was a great advantage in leaving both marks visible. It made what was already a collector’s item even more desirable, so it could be sold abroad for a much higher price. The regime was desperate to raise foreign currency, and the sale of artistic and historic objects like this plate was one obvious part of the solution. The records of the new State Porcelain Factory report that, ‘For foreign markets the presence of these marks alongside the Soviet marks is of great interest, and prices for the objects abroad shall doubtless be set higher if the earlier marks are not painted over.’

  The imperial factory mark of Tsar Nicholas II and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet state

  So we have the surprising situation of a socialist revolutionary regime making luxury goods to sell to the capitalist world. And you could argue this was perfectly coherent: profits from the plate supported Soviet international action, designed to undermine the very capitalists they were selling to, while at the same time the porcelain propaganda promulgated the Soviet message to Russian enemies. ‘Artistic industry,’ wrote the critic Yakov Tugenkhold in 1923, ‘is that happy battering ram which has already broken down the wall of international isolation.’

  This conflicted, symbiotic relationship between the Soviet and the capitalist worlds – initially seen as a transitional necessity until the West was won for workers and communism – became the norm for the rest of the century. The front of the plate shows us the compelling clarity of the early Bolshevik dream. The back shows us pragmatic compromise – negotiation with the imperial past and political realities, and a complex economic modus vivendi with the capitalist world. Broadly, this is the pattern that would be sustained for the next seventy years as the world settled into two huge, competing but in many ways interdependent ideological blocs. The front and back of this plate chart the path from worldwide revolution to the stability of the Cold War.

  97

  Hockney’s In the Dull Village

  Etching, from England

  AD 1966

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (which was rather late for me) –

  Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban

  And The Beatles’ first LP.

  So wrote the poet Philip Larkin, master of the regretful lyric, in one of his jollier verses, pinpointing what were for him the key aspects of the Swinging Sixties – sex, music and then more sex. All generations think they have invented sex, but none thought they had done it as thoroughly as the young people of the 1960s. Of course there was a great deal more to the sixties than that, but the decade has now taken on mythic status as a time of transforming freedom – or destructive self-indulgence – and the myths are not unjustified. All over the world established structures of authority and society were challenged, and in some cases brought down, by spontaneous mass activism in pursuit of political, social and sexual freedoms.

  In the previous two chapters we examined big political issues – the realization of rights for whole sections of society, whether votes for women or power (in theory) for the proletariat. In the 1960s the campaigns were more about ensuring that every individual citizen could exercise those rights, asserting that everybody should be free to play their full part in society and to live the way they wished, as long as they caused no harm. Some of these new freedoms were hard won, and people paid with their lives: this was the decade of Martin Luther King and black civil rights in the United States; of the Prague Spring, the heroic Czech rebellion against Soviet Communism; of the 1968 Paris student uprisings and waves of campus discontent across Europe and America; of the campaigns oppposing war in Vietnam and supporting Nuclear Disarmament.

  It was also the decade of the psychedelic Summer of Love – played out to the sounds of Woodstock and San Francisco, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. In the private realm there was a sexual revolution – Women’s Liberation, the contraceptive pill – and the legalization of homosexual relations. There is no earlier decade in which David Hockney’s etching In the Dull Village could have been published. Hockney began his art studies in the 1950s, but it was the 1960s that formed him, and he in turn helped shape the decade. He was gay and prepared to be open about it, both in his life and his work, at a time when in the UK homosexual activity between men was criminal, and prosecutions were frequent. He divided his time between California, where he made his famous paintings of naked young men in deep blue swimming pools, and Britain, where he drew and painted his family and friends.

  In this etching, two naked men, who could be in their 20s, lie side by side in bed, half covered by a blanket; we are looking down at them from its foot. One lies with his arms behind his head, his eyes closed as if dozing, while the other looks eagerly at him. We have no idea whether the relationship between the two men is recent or of long standing, but at first sight this looks like a calm, entirely satisfactory morning after.

  It is one of a series of etchings inspired by the poems of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, on which Hockney began work in 1966, while the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, was drafting the legislation to decriminalize homosexuality in England and Wales ; and it was published in 1967, just as Parliament passed Jenkins’s Sexual Offences Act. Hockney’s image was shocking for many then, and for some is still shocking today, even though there is nothing at all explicit about it – the blanket covers both men up to the waist. Yet it raises perplexing questions about what societies find acceptable or unacceptable, about the limits of tolerance and individual freedom, and about shifting moral structures over thousands of years of human history.

  One of the constants of this history of the world, not surprisingly, has been sex – or, more precisely, sexual attraction and love. Among our hundred examined objects, we have the oldest-known representation of a couple making love, a small stone carved 11,000 years ago near Jerusalem, we have harem women, voluptuous goddesses and gay sex on a Roman cup. Surprisingly, given this long tradition of representing human sexuality, David Hockney’s relatively decorous print was nonetheless a courageous – indeed provocative – act in the Britain of his day.

  The young men in Hockney’s etching could be American or British; but they inhabit the place of the picture’s title, which matches that of Cavafy’s poem – ‘In the Dull Village’. The poem is about a young man trapped by his circumstances, who escapes his dreary surroundings by dreaming of the perfect love partner. So perhaps Hockney’s dozing boy is gently fantasizing his ardent companion, who is imagined, rather than actually present in the longed-for flesh.

  He lay in his bed tonight sick with what love meant,

  All his youth in desire of the flesh alight

  In a lovely tension all his lovely youth.

  And in his sleep delight came to him; in his sleep

  He sees and holds the form and flesh he wanted …

  The cosmopolitan family of Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) had moved between Turkey, Britain and Egypt and was part of the huge Greek diaspora that for 2,000 years had dominated the economic, intellectual and cultural life of the eastern Mediterranean. He lived in a broad, Greek-speaking world, which defined it
self essentially less in terms of mainland Greece than in the twin centres of Constantinople and Alexandria. It was a world created by Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in the fourth century BC and which ended only in the middle of the twentieth century – a world we have encountered several times before in our history, notably in the Rosetta Stone, where the languages of Greece and Egypt appear side by side. Cavafy was very aware of this rich inheritance, and his Alexandrian poetry has a deep sense of ancient history, and of a Greek world in which love between males was an accepted part of life.

  The world of Bradford as experienced by the young Hockney was a very different place. In Yorkshire in the 1950s, homosexuality was an unmentionable subject and for an artist a risky one. So the poems of Cavafy, which Hockney found in the Bradford library, were a revelation.

  I read more of his poems and I was struck by their directness and simplicity; and then I found the John Mavrogordato translation in the library in Bradford in that summer of 1960, and I stole it. I’ve still got it, I’m sure. I don’t feel bad now because it’s been redone, but you couldn’t buy it then, it was completely out of print. Mind you, in the library in Bradford you had to ask for that book, it was never on the shelves.