The Secret Museum

by Molly Oldfield

  [The sauropod skull]

  The only complete skull of a sauropod ever described from South America. It’s really small, compared to the size of the dinosaur’s body.

  [Dippy]

  The dinosaur at the Natural History Museum in London is a cast of a Diplodocus skeleton found in Wyoming in 1899. Copies of the head are found on dinosaurs all over the world.

  ‘WE HAVE TENS OF THOUSANDS of handaxes in here,’ said Nick Ashton, curator at the British Museum, as he opened the door to the museum’s handaxe storage facility in the heart of hipster-friendly Hoxton, east London. ‘They vary in shape, size, thickness and beauty.’

  The storage room is lined with rows of tall cabinets. Each cabinet has a stack of slim drawers. There are 700 drawers per row and each one contains a few handaxes.

  ‘Let me show you my favourite,’ said Nick, pulling one drawer open and lifting out a stone handaxe. I could see why he liked it. There was something magical about it. The human who created it must have been something of an artist, because it is perfectly symmetrical and has an S-shaped twist on both sides. You can almost feel the presence of the person who made it 400,000 years ago, carefully shaping it into this beautiful form. It’s a fully functional handaxe, but it has the X factor; for some reason, the creator thought to make this handaxe prettier than it needed to be.

  Who was this artistic human being who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago? Well, he – or she – was an early Neanderthal who lived in an area now called Hoxne, on the border of Suffolk and Norfolk. He would have hunted with a spear and used this axe to cut apart the animals he killed to get meat for food and hides for clothing and shelter.

  At that time, what is now the East Anglian coastline was connected by boggy marshland to mainland Europe, so this individual’s ancestors would have made the intrepid journey on foot from southern Europe to Hoxne, surviving off the land as they went. The climate would have been colder, the landscape more akin to the heavily forested Scandinavian countryside of today, and there would have been lots of animals we wouldn’t see in Suffolk now, including elephants, rhino and spotted hyenas.

  Although this is one of the most artistic handaxes in the storage, the British Museum has an impressive range of the tools. Nick pointed some out. ‘Here are the oldest ones, made 1.2 million years ago in Oldavai Gorge in Tanzania. And here are ones from Sudan and these are from the Middle East.’

  The museum has lots of handaxes from Britain, mainly from Norfolk, Suffolk and southern England. The biggest in the collection of British axes is from Biddenham. Why is it so big? ‘I think he was just showing off,’ said Nick of the human who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.

  Each one was shaped out of a piece of rock – by banging the rock with a pebble, and then shaping it with a piece of bone or antler – into a tool that could fit into the palm of the user’s hand.

  We looked at a range from Swanscombe in Kent. ‘These are more typical,’ explained Nick. ‘Look closely and you can see where a series of flakes has been removed to create the handaxe’s sharp edges.’ Sometimes the museum has found the flakes that were removed from the stone to shape the handaxe. We looked at some flakes from Box-grove left behind by the maker who had walked off with his new tool tucked in his hand. Several original blocks of flint have been put back together from the flakes, leaving a hole where the handaxe would have been. Nick showed me one: ‘It’s like a time capsule in a way. You can see 20 minutes of someone’s time, half a million years ago preserved right here.’

  There is another handaxe from Hoxne that is less artistic, but very significant in handaxe history. It was the first handaxe ever to be recognized as such. John Frere (1740–1807), who lived nearby, found it near a gravel pit in 1797. He wrote to the Society of Antiquities informing them that he had found ‘weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals … The situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world …’ For six decades, no one really believed his claim that the rock was a tool made by early man. In those days the things we call handaxes were known as ‘thunderbolts’ because people couldn’t explain them. They imagined they were created by the ether during a storm. His thinking was far ahead of its time, much like that of the artistic man from Hoxne who created a handaxe to be beautiful as well as useful.

  Since John Frere’s time, we’ve learnt more about handaxes and the people who created them. A seismic shift in our understanding of life in Britain occurred thanks to a man called Mike Chambers, who was out walking his dog on the beach in Happisburgh, Norfolk (a small seaside village right on the edge of some cliffs, which are crumbling into the sea). He spotted a handaxe lying in the mud and called the Norwich Castle Museum. The handaxe was made 700,000 years ago, some 200,000 years earlier than any previously discovered artefact. The British Museum then began excavating at two sites in Happisburgh, and found the earliest-known human settlement in northern Europe.

  Palaeontologists believe these first settlers were a different species to the creative, early Neanderthal who made the stunning handaxe in Hoxne. They call this now-extinct species Homo antecessor, or ‘pioneer man’. They think the species walked from southern Europe into the dark forests, around 800,000 years ago, never to return. They made it across the land bridge, to Norfolk which was then at the edge of the inhabited world. The land was more forested, hillier and colder than it is now (we know this because beetles found at the site are now found only in chilly Scandinavia). At the time, the River Thames was flowing through Norfolk, out into the North Sea, so pioneer man must have lived in its estuaries, hunting and fishing by the water.

  Pioneer man disappeared from Britain because of an Ice Age. These occurred about every 100,000 years and, each time, Britain was depopulated. As it warmed up again, new waves of people walked from southern Europe to Britain. There were at least eight different waves of people that came in and died out before the most recent wave, which is the one that survives today: us.

  Treasures excavated from the 800,000-year-old home of pioneer man are stored in the room above the handaxes. We entered a room filled with bags full of sediment waiting to be sieved – the finest sieves are for beetles; the larger ones for bones – and looked in a tray filled with flints which are more primitive tools than handaxes. As yet, no handaxe has been found at this site. Perhaps these earliest settlers didn’t know how to make them.

  There are so many unanswered questions about pioneer man. ‘It would be nice to excavate a hairy human holding a handaxe,’ said Nick, ‘but, so far, all we know is they probably had smaller brains and smaller bodies. Did they know how to make fire? What about clothes and shelter? Were they the top predator?’ Nick explained that it was possible they were not, and they spent their days in competition with spotted hyenas and other animals that hunt for food. Pioneer man may have survived by scavenging scraps left behind by other animals higher up the food chain. How bizarre is that?

  Having spent hours looking at handaxes and talking about life on Earth millennia ago, emerging into twenty-first century Hoxton was quite a shock. These concrete city streets seemed an unnatural environment for humans to live in, after hundreds of thousands of years spent living on and off the land. Or maybe I was just unnerved as a man followed me along the road and asked me whether I was from MI5. Oh well, I thought, contending with oddballs is better than competing with a hyena for food. I nipped into a cafe to escape him, and looked around at people plotting ideas and creating projects over their flat white coffees. It was good to see the artistic spirit of the dreamer who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in Hoxne still alive and well. If he were alive today, he’d probably have been an artist living here in Hoxton.

  [The artistic handaxe]

  Of all the tens of thousands of handaxes in storage in Hoxton, this symmetrical one is the curator’s favourite. For some reason the creator thought to make his handaxe more beautiful than it neede
d to be.

  [Engraving by John Frere in Achaeologica 13,1800]

  Frere wrote to the Society of Antiquities saying that he had found ‘weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals’.

  [Happisburgh]

  The British Museum are excavating at two sites in Happisburgh, Norfolk. Happisburgh isn’t pronounced like a happy village; in true Norfolk style, it’s actually called ‘hayes-bo-rough’.

  ONCE THEY’VE HIT THE BEACH to soak up some sunshine and drunk from a few fresh coconuts or drunk caipirinhas, one of the first things visitors to Rio de Janiero tend to do is make the trip to see Christ the Redeemer the most famous symbol of Brazil, which stands, arms outstretched, on a hilltop embracing the city. On the same street as the jostling queue to catch the train up to see it there is a gem of a museum. Inside is the largest collection of naif art in the world.

  Painted a pretty pastel blue, it looks like a tumbledown former colonial home. When I visited, it had been closed for several years, after its founder, Lucien Finkelstein, passed away and the museum lost its funding (it has since reopened). When I arrived, a few dogs came to greet me, and I wondered whether I was at the right place until a curator at the museum, Tania, arrived, made delicious coffee in tiny china cups and kindly showed me around.

  The walls were mostly bare, and the paintings – over 6,000 works by painters from all over Brazil, and from more than a hundred other countries, from the fifteenth century to today – were stored around the building, stacked up against walls. The former storage room was a big mess of wires and rubble, as it was in the process of being rebuilt. Added to that, they had a marmot invasion to deal with. There were several paintings still hanging, though, including the two largest naïf art paintings in the world. The bigger of the two, Brazil, 5 centuries, by Aparecida Azedo, is a 24-metre long fresco running along the top two walls that shows the history of Brazil; the other, Rio de Janeiro, I like you, I like your happy people, by Lia Mittarakis, who lived in Guanabara Bay is a 4 by 7-metre celebration of the city of Rio that hangs on the main wall. Lucien Finkelstein commissioned both.

  Quotations adorn the walls, including one by the French poet Gérard de Nerval: ‘The verb to love suits only the souls who are thoroughly Naïve.’

  This chimes with Finkelstein’s definition of naïf art, which is also hanging in the museum. In it, he explains that ‘naïf’ is a term that was first used to define the paintings of Henri Rousseau but it is a style of painting that has always existed and always will. Its origins are in the art of cavemen. The artists are usually self-taught anarchists, who follow no rules and are not influenced by anyone, finding their own motifs and techniques within themselves. He believed the naáf artist paints by dipping the brush in his heart.

  Brazil, France, Haiti, Italy and the former Yugoslavia are where you will find the most involvement with naïf art. In each naïf art gallery around the world you will more than likely find a few creations by Brazilian artists. Brazilians, being a very expressive people, seem to love the naïf style: you find it everywhere in the country. I share their love of its colour and vibrancy and love the style. It’s interesting that, despite its simplicity, naïf art often tackles complicated issues.

  That is certainly true of the series of six paintings I came to see. They are the creation of Ozias (Ricardo de Ozias), a naïf artist still living in the city of Rio. They tell the story of slave traffic between Africa and Brazil in the fifteenth century through the eyes of Ozias, whose ancestors came to Brazil on slave ships.

  They were created as a commission by Finkelstein, who planned to show them at ‘just the right time’, perhaps to coincide with an anniversary of the abolition of slavery. That date never came within his lifetime and so the paintings have never been publicly displayed. Other than the curators of the museum and Ozias and his family, I am one of very few people ever to have seen them.

  The pictures are currently living in Finkelstein’s former office. His desk is still there, among a collection of paintings, books, photographs and sculpted figures, including a self-portrait in clay by Ozias. One photograph shows Finkelstein with the Queen and Prince Philip. When the royal couple visited Brazil, the Queen was presented with a selection of Brazilian jewels and asked to choose one. She chose a dolphin created by Finkelstein, so he kept a photograph of the moment in his office.

  We took the six Ozias paintings from the room and laid them out on the upstairs floor of the museum to get a good look. Many elements of the story are familiar. Forty per cent of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves ended up in Brazil. They were transported on ships and sold in ports along the coastline.

  The scenes depicted in the paintings are shocking and tragic: men being rounded up with guns, transported in ships, herded into pens, sold by traders and led in chains. The depiction of such terrible scenes in this naïf style – childlike and almost cartoony – makes them all the more disturbing.

  One curious aspect of these paintings is how Ozias paints the African people’s lifestyle as if they were extremely primitive, when we know that there were a number of relatively complex and sophisticated west African societies at the time.

  He also paints invading white warriors capturing tribal people and enslaving them by force. The less palatable reality is that the white traders mostly dealt with tribal kings and warriors, exchanging prisoners for guns and gunpowder. As Tatiana Levy, Finkelstein’s granddaughter, explained: ‘In his vision, he couldn’t imagine his African ancestors enslaving their own people.’

  But it was the life story of the painter Ozias that really got me interested. Born one of ten children, his family couldn’t afford for him to go to school so, by the age of four, he was working in the fields pulling carts. On his way home, he passed a school where he could hear children reciting the alphabet, so he’d sit outside and listen until he’d learnt it himself. Later, an older brother explained to him how the letters created words, and he taught himself to read. Soon afterwards his family moved to Rio de Janeiro, and Ricardo worked outdoors as a bricklayer and on the railways. Then, at the age of 46, he was offered an office job at the railway company.

  To begin with, he kept falling asleep. To keep awake, he began to paint, using anything he could find around the office. He used stored paint that had been used for maintenance on the railways, a chewed toothpick as a brush, or his fingers, and he painted on paper, wood, fabric, rubber – anything he could find. He still uses a chewed-up match as a brush for small details, and for his signature – which is wonderful: a curly ‘O’ and jagged ‘S’, both underlined.

  His co-workers thought he was going a little mad, as he painted compulsively, on any materials left hanging around the office. The same happened at home. His wife was fed up with fingerprints in paint all over the house and thought her husband had lost the plot. He told her he knew what he was doing, and suggested she take up painting too. Years later, she also became a naïf artist.

  From the moment he began, Ricardo wanted to become a painter: ‘As I didn’t know how to paint, I worked on many pictures at the same time, trying not to forget all ideas that came to mind. Now that I know better, I can take it slower …’

  Luckily, an engineer who worked with Ricardo recognized great talent emerging in his paintings of his childhood in Minas Gerais, featuring coffee plantations, cowboys, parties and mountains. She spread the word of her frenziedly creative co-worker, and Ozias was able to mount his first exhibition in 1987. All 52 paintings were created with his fingers. He later got enthusiastic about religion and became a priest, built a temple near his house and set up an art school, in which he taught children in his community to paint.

  Since I visited, the museum has reopened. I would love to have the chance to go back and see it one day. If you get to Rio first, and decide to queue to take the train up to the Christ the Redeemer statue, why not slip away and see what paintings by Ozias are on display? Several are dedicated to Brazil’s love of football and to the fate of the nat
ional team.

  Remember, though, that behind the scenes are more of his paintings, as yet unseen, waiting, just like their creator, for their time to come.

  [Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) self portrait (1890)]

  The term ‘naïf art’ was used for the first time at the turn of the nineteenth century, to describe the paintings of Henri Rousseau.

  [One of the series of six paintings by Ozias]

  The series tells the story of slave traffic between Africa and Brazil. The founder of the museum, Lucien Finkelstein, commissioned them and planned to show them at the ‘right time’ but that time never came and the paintings have never been exhibited.

  THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, Boston (MFA), stores more than 50,000 wood-block prints made in Japan in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The greatest treasure of the collection is a group of 6,600 prints that are never hung on the walls of the museum. They were collected in the 1910s by two brothers, William and Henry Spaulding. The Spaulding brothers donated the prints to the MFA in 1921 on one condition: that they would not exhibit them, to protect the delicate colours from fading. So, for over 90 years they have been kept in the dark, in cupboards, in numbered portfolios, just as the Spaulding duo donated them.

  I went to see the prints after hours at the museum. Everyone had gone home except for Sarah Thompson, assistant curator of Japanese art at the museum. Sarah explained that when the prints were created they were as cheap as a bowl of noodles. Most people in the city of Edo, now called Tokyo, had a couple pinned up at home. They would be ripped down and thrown away if they got tatty or a new, fashionable print took their place. Hundreds of copies of each print were made, if not thousands.