Spitting images of distinguished diggers
Sara Paton
FACES OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN GREECE by Rachel Hood Leopard's Head Press, £26 (+ £3.50 p&p), pp. 304. Orders to The Knossos Trust, P.O. Box 5, Little Milton, Oxford, OX44 7 QS. Cheques payable to The Knossos Trust'.
The first half of this century was a hero- ic age for Aegean archaeology. Legendary 'cities were being unearthed — Troy, Mycenae, Knossos, Pylos, Tiryns, Sparta, Corinth. Much of this work was undertaken by the foreign schools, institutes set up in
Sir Arthur Evans, Knossos, 1924
Athens to promote research in Greece and to provide a base from which excavations could be organised. Archaeologists in those days were in steady supply; the rare bird was (and still is) that essential member of any dig team, the architect-draughtsman who can plan a site and record the build- ings and the finds in coherent, comprehen- sible form.
In this field no one has ever rivalled the skill of the architect Piet de Jong, a York- shireman of Dutch descent, whose first archaeological work was done in 1920 for Alan Wace at Mycenae. In 1922 he went on to work for Sir Arthur Evans at Knos- sos, and throughout the next 45 years he produced plans, reconstruction drawings and superb illustrations of finds, vases and frescoes for all the major publications of British and American excavations in Greece.
Piet de Jong's presence on an excavation was valued not just for his technical skills. He was a convivial member of the team, with the useful knack of having a birthday whenever the atmosphere seemed to require a party, and he also had a remark- able gift for caricature. His cartoon por- traits of friends and colleagues are complex, vivid watercolours, often harsh in feeling, built up in strong patterns intri- cately woven with allusion and private jokes, and far from reverent towards the academic giants of the day. Personal reac- tions were uneasy: William Cuttle was so delighted with his portrait that he learnt to reproduce it himself, but E. J. Forsdyke (director of the British Museum at the time of the controversial cleaning of the Elgin Marbles) was outraged by his, and never spoke to Piet de Jong again. Rachel Hood's admirable publication of these cartoons is the result of much detec- tive work. The short biographies and the notes which accompany each of the 44 por- traits are derived not just from archives, but also from talking to those who remem- ber the people involved and the circum- stances in which the drawings were made. They elucidate wherever possible the arcane references incorporated in many of the cartoons — references, in a few cases now beyond recovery, but in many others saved from oblivion by her research. The result is a wonderful anthology of figures involved in 20th-century archaeology, rang- ing from those whose names are now almost monuments in their own right, such as Evans, Wace and Carl Blegen, to those whose participation came by chance, such as Dilys Powell, drawn in 1932 while her husband Humfry Payne was directing excavations at Perachora.
But Piet de Jong's cartoons are more than just a rogues' gallery of academics; they are extraordinary drawings in their own right. In style they are architectural, as might be expected, but other powerful influences are apparent. Some of them, such as the origami-like portrait of Wace, remind one of the block-drawings of Cam- biaso. Others, especially the series done at Sparta in the mid-Twenties, have a strong flavour of late Cubism, recalling Picasso's work of 1918-20. In almost all of them there is a curious tension, a stress between the subject and the style. These were draw- ings, for the most part, of friends who felt lasting affection for the artist. And yet they are fierce and somehow chilly, as if the very forcefulness of the style had exposed feel- ings otherwise kept secret.
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