Paleoart - The Evolution of Dinosaur Paintings, From Watercolours To Soviet Visions

29/9/2017 Paleoart: the evolution of dinosaur paintings, from watercolours to Soviet visions
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BOOKS 18 SEPTEMBER 2017
Paleoart: the evolution of dinosaur

paintings, om watercolours to Soviet
visions
Zo Lescaze's book is a hulking greatsauropod.
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BY TOM
HOLLAND
I
n 1830, an English geologist named Henry Thomas De

la Beche painted a watercolour of Dorset. The scene it

portrayed was not a conventional one. Cows and green
elds were notable by their absence. Instead, palm trees
sprouted from otherwise bare lumps of rock. Shark-like
reptiles with bristling teeth and giant eyes swam in a
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/09/paleoart-evolution-dinosaur-paintings-watercolours-soviet-visions 1/16
sinister, monster- lled sea. Overhead there soared strange

creatures, half-dragon, half-bat. Bucolic it was not.
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De la Beches theme was Duria Antiquior: a more ancient
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Dorset. As a young man, he had become an associate and
admirerFREE book
of Mary Anning, the daughter of a cabinet-maker
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from Lyme MORE
Regis whose unrivalled eye for fossils had
brought to light a whole host of astonishing discoveries.
The seas and skies of Dorset, it appeared, had once teemed
with remarkable creatures. Geologists made their names
presenting Annings nds to learned societies in London.
Anning herself, meanwhile, as someone who stood outside
the scienti c establishment, was denied both the credit

and the nancial rewards that were properly her due. De la
Beche, outraged on her behalf, painted Duria Antiquior to
make amends. Reproduced as a lithograph, it proved wildly
popular. Annings discoveries were introduced to a
fascinated public, and her celebrity assured. De la Beche,
meanwhile, had initiated an entire new genre: what Zo
Lescaze, in her hulking great sauropod of a new book,
terms paleoart.
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Laelaps by Charles RKnight, 1897. Picture: American Museum of

Natural History, New York
The ambition to put esh on prehistoric bones did not

originate in 19th-century Britain. The Roman emperor
Tiberius, presented with a fossilised tooth over a foot long,
is said to have commissioned the model of a human head
proportionate to the scale of the artefact. At Klagenfurt in
Austria, the statue of a dragon sculpted in 1590 was given
a head modelled on the skull of a woolly rhinoceros. Only
with the emergence of palaeontology as a science, though,
were artists at last able to portray what long-extinct
creatures might have looked like with a reasonable degree

of accuracy and, what was more, to situate them within
landscapes thrillingly di erent to those of the present day.
This is why De la Beche ranks as such an innovator.
Few genres of art were more authentically representative

of the industrial age than portrayals of the prehistoric
past. As the artist Walton Ford puts it in his preface: This

is a book brimming with images born in the heat of
startling discovery,
SUBSCRIPT urgent works of
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handcrafted time travel.
As such,FREE book
they are images not just of prehistoric life, but of
how di LEARN MORE at di erent times have imagined
erent people
prehistoric life. Hence, perhaps, why the earliest
illustrations compiled in the book tend to be the most
agitated and unsettling of all. They are the expressions of
an entire upheaval in sensibility, of the shock felt by
complacent humanity at the discovery of just how
immense were the cycles of geological time, and of how
brutal had been the repeated cullings of creatures that
were now only to be found entombed in rock.
Prehistory, as Lescaze puts it, could not help but

engender uncomfortable musings on a benevolent Gods
capacity to annihilate entire species. A shadow of the
apocalyptic hung over the earliest works of paleoart.
Volcanoes exploded, oceans seethed, beast preyed on beast.
In Duria Antiqua, such was the terror of one plesiosaur
that the wretched animal was shown voiding proto-
coprolites on to the sea oor.
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Pteranodon by Heinrich Harder, reconstructed by Hans Jochen

Ihle, 1982. Picture: Taschen
This conviction, that life in prehistory had been nothing

but endless competition, achieved its most iconic
expression in America ttingly, in 1928, just a year
before the Wall Street Crash. Charles Knights illustration
of a Tyrannosaurus rex confronting a Triceratops
established a template for dinosaur-on-dinosaur action
that has never been superceded. It was an image bred of
American mythology and speci cally of the mythology
of the lands across which both species of dinosaur had
once roamed. In Knights rendering, they advance through
the haze, as Lescaze nicely puts it, like gunslingers
outside a saloon.
Di erent cultures, though, could imagine the Mesozoic in

di erent ways. In an early Second World War Soviet
painting by Konstantin Konstantinovich Flyorov, the
ceratopsians are altogether less individualistic. Banding
together into a collective, three of them see o a
tyrannosaur which, like the Nazis in Stalingrad, proves

unable to breach a determined defence. Almost fauvist in
its use of colour
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prove revelatory to anyone brought up, as I was, on an
exclusive diet of Western paleo-illustrations.
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The art MORE
form, Lescaze argues, reached its apogee under
the Soviet regime, ourishing in a society that not only
prized science, but craved glory and international
prestige. As she brilliantly demonstrates, prehistory
provided artists under Stalin with a theme that could
legitimately encompass ambivalence, mystery and doubt.
There is no single narrative, no blatant message
impressed upon the viewer. The startling images that
Lescazes has assembled from the former Soviet Union,
justify the price of this sumptuous, beautiful book alone.
So too, though, do the studies of better-known paleo-
artists, whose work will be instantly familiar to anyone who

enjoyed a dinosaur-obsessed childhood in the 1970s or
1980s: Rudolph Zallinger, who toiled in Yales Peabody
Museum throughout the Second World War over a colossal
fresco of Mesozoic megafauna; the troubled, ghoulish
Czech, Zdenek Burian, whose mammoths, brachiosaurs and
Neanderthals burn with the artists obvious fascination
with fur, esh, scales, and skin; Neave Parker, a beer-
drinking, self-proclaimed clairvoyant who worked at the
Natural History Museum, and had a taste, when drawing
dinosaurs, for hyperarticulated muscle.
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Tree of Life by Alexander Mikhailovich Belashov, 1984.

Picture:Borrissiak Paleontological Institute RAS
The only real disappointment of the book is that it stops

when it does: for there is no room, in Lescazes otherwise
panoramic study of paleoart, for more recent developments
in the genre. The work of contemporary paleo-artists such
as Julius Csotonyi or Mark Witton bear comparison with
anything in the eld that has gone before: true to
palaeontology, but true as well to the traditions of eeriness
and inventiveness that have been constants in paleoart
since De la Beche settled down to paint Jurassic Dorset.
Tom Hollands most recent book is Dynasty: the Rise and fall of
the House of Caesar (Little, Brown)
Paleoart
Zo Lescaze
Taschen, 286pp,ION
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om just 1 per issue
This article rst appeared in the 14 September 2017 issue of the

New Statesman, The German problem
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CBS.
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TV & RADIO 28 SEPTEMBER 2017
Star Trek: Discovery shows promise. 'ach

qatlh bID 'oH neH Klingon?
And the English dialogue is, if anything, worse.
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BY JONN
ELLEDGE
r
ut, 'AY' bravest laH je rav Dogh. roD mu'mey chong tu', 'ej

SoH qaStaHvIS Segh Star Trek: Discovery, wa'DIch cha'-

episode-baS DaH lupoQ Net ix UK.
But its also a good description of that show, the rst

scene of which is conducted entirely in Klingon. Indeed,
though I havent timed it, Id guess that not far short of a
third of its entire run time so far is in that most mucus-
logged of made-up languages. Given that the pointStar

Trekstopped being
SUBSCRIPT huge coincided almost exactly with the
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point it disappeared up its own mythologys arse, this feels
like a strange choice to me, but I guess thats why they
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dont pay me the big bucks.
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It has at least helped prevent copyright theft. One friend in
the US who got sick of trying to make the o cial CBS All
Access player do its job told me that hed downloaded an
illegal copy, only to nd that the subtitles for the Klingon
sections were in Russian. That forced him to watch the
traditional, legal way, adverts, long periods of bu ering
and all.
'ej maHvaD ghu'vam yuDHa' vIHtaHbogh ghu'vam: qIm vagh

tup Qap je subtitles, qar ghojwI'pu'lI' vIHtaHbogh DujlIj
Klingons' Da'elDI' bImejnIS. chu' ghewmey jIH, mo' DeSDu' wa'
lang, naQ cha' tup staring DeSDu' Twitter ngejtaH 'e' nuq tlher-
nach SuvwI' qawlu' vIghaj vay' qech jIH lop jImejbej mojpu'
jatlh Doch.
In some ways, all this is a shame, as the plot is actually

quite promising. Most iterations ofTrekhave been entirely
episodic: whatever happens to the characters or their ship
in their 45 minutes on screen, it wont a ect their mood
next week in the slightest. And so long as youre not the
sort of nerd who obsesses about how many pips these
people have on their collars, you can watch the episodes in
pretty much any order.
That made sense in the age when US TV was made for

syndication, when most people would watch the episodes
in anSUBSCRIPT
essentially
IONrandom
OFFER order, but its not so great in a
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world when people are used to ongoing plots and
developing characters. SoStar Trek: Discoverydiverges from
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that format. Ive no idea where its going, but its already
clear byLEARN MORE
the end of episode two that what weve seen will
a ect the characters were going there with.
Thats the good stu . The bad includes the fact that much
of the dialogue spoken in English is, if anything, worse
than the Klingon. As a journalist who primarily writes
about transport and housing policy but occasionally
dabbles in TV criticism, one thing I found uniquely
irritating was the way characters kept explaining their
backstory to each other. It reminded me of that John
Finnemore sketch about a Radio 4 play, called saying the
plot out loud.
Then theres the fact that we keep ashing back to the

protagonists childhood, as a human raised byfamous
Vulcan Sarek, which were clearly meant to understand as
the key to understanding her character. All the way
through those sequences I kept thinking ofthe lesson my
childhood English teacher imparted to me, so many years
ago: Good drama should show, not tell. (Itsstrange she
had such an impact on me. We came from such di erent
cultures.)
'ej vaj pa' fucking Klingon. laH buS 'Iv jawbe' maHvaD vagh tup
Qap vIHtaHbogh politics tlhIngan, HeghDI' mojpu' qach 'oH
fucking Klingon?
There are good things. The cast is diverse, probably more

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than any previousTrekseries (although since its not
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entirely clear who the regular cast will be yet, its hard to
FREE
be certain). book
The refrain of Remain Klingon theidea
that theLEARN
aliens MORE
hate Star eet because, when they say they
come in peace, they actuallymeanit is a neat piece of
retconning, and one which feels like it might say
something about our world, rather than the made up one
on screen. Its got enough good stu to keep me watching.
Nonetheless, it feels a bit too obsessed withStar Trekfor its

own sake, rather than as avehicle for telling stories with
broader resonance.The fact its a prequel series, set before
Kirk and Spock ew o into the void, makes me suspect
that problem is likely to persist.I sort of wish theyd gone
for a di erent bit of the future, just to give themselves a
blank state.
The worst thing, though, the absolute worst thing, is the

names. The lead character is called Burnham, which is
obviously a huge problem if you pay even the slightest
attention to British politics. Theres another character
called Brett Anderson.And the name of the series as a
whole has the acronymSTD.
jupwI'. tu'lu' pagh quvHa'ghach neH Google lo'.

Klingon sections courtesy of Bing Translate. The New Statesman takes
no responsibility for any grammatical errors which occur in the Klingon
sections above, or the o ence that they might cause.
Jonn Elledge edits theNew Statesman's sister site

CityMetric, and writes for the NS about subjects
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including politics, history and Brexit.You can
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nd him onTwitteror
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Paleoart - The Evolution of Dinosaur Paintings, From Watercolours To Soviet Visions

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29/9/2017 Paleoart: the evolution of dinosaur paintings, from watercolours to Soviet visions

BOOKS 18 SEPTEMBER 2017

Paleoart: the evolution of dinosaur

Sign up for our weekly email

sinister, monster- lled sea. Overhead there soared strange

SUBSCRIPT ION OFFER

the scienti c establishment, was denied both the credit

SUBSCRIPT ION OFFER

Laelaps by Charles RKnight, 1897. Picture: American Museum of

The ambition to put esh on prehistoric bones did not

creatures might have looked like with a reasonable degree

Few genres of art were more authentically representative

past. As the artist Walton Ford puts it in his preface: This

Prehistory, as Lescaze puts it, could not help but

SUBSCRIPT ION OFFER

Pteranodon by Heinrich Harder, reconstructed by Hans Jochen

This conviction, that life in prehistory had been nothing

Di erent cultures, though, could imagine the Mesozoic in

tyrannosaur which, like the Nazis in Stalingrad, proves

So too, though, do the studies of better-known paleo-

artists, whose work will be instantly familiar to anyone who

SUBSCRIPT ION OFFER

Tree of Life by Alexander Mikhailovich Belashov, 1984.

The only real disappointment of the book is that it stops

This article rst appeared in the 14 September 2017 issue of the

Martin Amiss Modernist Forest Dark: an

SUBSCRIPT ION OFFER

TV & RADIO 28 SEPTEMBER 2017

Star Trek: Discovery shows promise. 'ach

Sign up for our weekly email

But its also a good description of that show, the rst

third of its entire run time so far is in that most mucus-

logged of made-up languages. Given that the pointStar

'ej maHvaD ghu'vam yuDHa' vIHtaHbogh ghu'vam: qIm vagh

In some ways, all this is a shame, as the plot is actually

That made sense in the age when US TV was made for

Then theres the fact that we keep ashing back to the

There are good things. The cast is diverse, probably more

Nonetheless, it feels a bit too obsessed withStar Trekfor its

The worst thing, though, the absolute worst thing, is the

jupwI'. tu'lu' pagh quvHa'ghach neH Google lo'.

Jonn Elledge edits theNew Statesman's sister site

Are all human Broad City's SRSLY #112:

SUBSCRIPT ION OFFER

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