Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, 40,000 years old, mammoth ivory, 12", found in present-day Germany
Woman of Hohle Fels, 35,000 YA, ivory, found in south ern Germany
Woman of Willendorf, 24-22,000 bce, along the Danube in present-day austria, 4.3" tall no confirmation of why her face is invisible. Why? they're harder to make more focus on the body goddess? of what? why so many female figures? is it a portrait? self-representation? history has frequently romanticized-- sexualized these figures as objects of desire
who is receiving them? women? pregnant women? women at puberty? children? men? men at puberty? early representational, naturalistic artifact with a highly harmonious presence.. For decades, in the 20th c., the Woman of Willendorf had the status of oldest representational object ever found. One of hundreds of palm-sized or smaller,, losenge-shaped female figurines from Siberia to Eastern Europe to Southwestern Europe with exaggerated reproductive characteristics and understated or absent hands, feet, faces, heads, sometimes also arms and legs.
Chauvet Cave, 37,000 YA, France
Rhinos, Chauvet
Horses, Chauvet
"Hall of the Bulls" Lascaux Cave, 22,000-17,000 oldest paintings, over 600 paintings in all
Questions to ask regarding form, function, manufacture, meaning : too many. Here are two posts: Questions to ask a work of Art and Formal Qualities that can help you access more about describing.
One comment about the filmmakers' choices; one fact about paleolithic art that we shouldn't forget
adventured in search of legendary
treasure in the French woodlands. Robot took the adventure a step further getting
stuck in a hole beneath the roots of a recently-fallen oak. Pulling Robot to
safety, the boys discovered that the hole went on and on. They slid one by one down
a tunnel, deep into a cave. At 14, Jacques was the youngest, and reported his
terror at sliding down the deep shaft (what beasts would they find? How would
they get out?) and his incredible awe on arrival.
Two of the discoverers with their teacher Laval and paleontologist Abbe Breuil after the cave opening had been greatly widened. Can't find the photographer to credit!
At the bottom of the shaft, they found a cavern 100 feet
long and 20 wide, painted with layers of animals that pranced to life as if
freshly conceived across the ceiling of the great hall of the cave of Lascaux,
what would come to be known as “The Sistine Ceiling of the Paleolithic.”
Lascauxphotograph Sisse Brimberg National Geographic, Sistine Ceiling photo Wikipedia.
The boys returned day after day, soon relinquishing their
vow of secrecy, for treasure they had
found. They introduced commerce to the site, charging admission first to their
friends, and then to a wider audience.
The "young heroes", with their teacher and famous paleontologist Abbe Breuil. Can't find the photographer to credit! Marsal became so obsessed with
protecting the cave that his parents finally gave him permission to set up a
tent and guard the site day and night from potential vandals (or would they be
street artists, or graffiti-makers? )
The
boys brought their teacher, Leon Laval, an amateur paleontologist, who
described the experience like this:
“Once I arrived in the great hall
accompanied by my young heroes, I uttered cries of admiration at the
magnificent sight that met my eyes.... Thus I visited the galleries and
remained just as enthusiastic when confronted with the unexpected revelations
which increased as I advanced. I had literally gone mad.”
Mad for the past: Amateur paleontologist Leon Laval. And what he saw. (source)
The cave captured the imagination of the time; their visual
similarity to the work of artists of that time caused Picasso’s gasp, “we have
invented nothing.” Their fluidity of line, gestural liveliness and direct power
belied their age, which, it soon emerged, was between 15 and 20,ooo years old,
when Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in Europe and lived as hunter gatherers.
Bulls from Lascaux Great Hall, Pablo Picasso, Bull Prints, 1945
Soon 1200 visitors a day traipsed through the cave, every
breath they expelled in their awe wreaked havoc on its wonders. The atmosphere
changed drastically, causing mineral deposits to form on the paintings. To
solve this problem, the custodians installed new climate controls with nearly
disastrous results. Workers seeking to control the fungal and bacterial growth destroying the paintings. source. A virulent
mold began to grow on the interior of the cave, threatening, in a matter of
days, to destroy the paintings that had existed in silence for 20,000 years. So
cave authorities poured four tons of quicklime on the cave floor, raising the
temperature rapidly, causing moisture to condense on the walls and wash away
some portions of paintings. Lascaux remains off limits today; only a handful of
scientists and scholars get permission to enter the cave each year. Destruction
seems to have stabilized, and lessons learned from the modern damage to Lascaux
govern archeological practices strictly today. To accommodate our desire for
amazement, authorities funded the creation of exact replicas of two of the
‘rooms’ of Lascaux 200 yards from the original cave.
Images from Lascaux II, carved in the same hillside as the original. source
The
cave contains 2,000 images, including more than 900 animals, abstract signs,
and human figures.
Stags and bovines follow in
frequency, and there are a few images of felines, humans, rhinocerous.
There
are no representations of reindeer or plants, though those were the primary
food, nor representations of
landcape or dwellings. Many animals display a high degree of naturalism in
their execution, and sophisticated use of perspective and composition. This
skill combined with the way that artists layered image atop image over
thousands of years builds the whole into what looked to modern eyes as a highly
contemporary style. The unified but diverse palette of color, form, style and
content make Lascaux as a whole an exceptional masterpiece. That hundreds or of
hands painted it over thousands of years makes the artwork a human one, rather
than an individual, and perhaps adds to its near-universal appeal.
Entering Lascaux
cave you walk first into the great Hall of the Bulls, where a wide band of
decoration at ceiling height shows 36 animals including 17 horses, auroxes,
stags, a bear, Holes near the
ceiling suggest that the artists used scaffolding to reach the heights of the
ceiling on which they worked.
Great Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux, wikipedia
At the end of the
Hall, you enter the Axial Gallery, which houses some of the most sophisticated
collections of art from any time. Artists
painted three large horses, in red, black, and ochre. The horses rock across
the cave walls with a grace that defies their exaggeratedly plump proportions,
some right side up, some upside down, some barely missed by what look like
arrows. All have exquisitely well-rendered, small, graceful black heads and
dainty black hooves.
No artist rivaled the perspective achieved with the
horses, in
Turning back from the
axial gallery, one can bear off to the left to enter the passageway that leads
on the right to the apseof Lascaux , and on the left to
the nave. That
paleontologists named these sections of the cave after church architecture
indicates their early theory, which further discoveries and study have
reinforced, that the painted caves served a spiritual function.
In a narrow,
difficult to reach passage is one of the most mysterious paintings of Lascaux. Paleontologist
Jean Clottes, describes the scene: “This scene consists of a man with a bird’s
head, a composite creature, falling backwards in front of a charging bison. The
bison, its hindquarters pierced by a barbed shaft, is disemboweled. A bird
perches on a post. There is another barbed sign under the bird-man’s feet.
Death—that of the bird-man and of the bison—is obviously a prominent theme of
this mysterious panel, and the bird a significant motif.” Clottes’ focuses on
the relationship between the hunt and death.
The images in the Shaft of the Dead Man, image source: Reddit.
People have also read
the scene as a rite of passage involving totem animals with the bird-headed man suggesting a shaman; others see the scene as evidence the conception of the
passage from life to death; another reading sees a sacrificial offering to the
hunt. Astronomers find that the eyes of the bull, birdman and bird represent
the three prominent stars of the Summer Triangle: Vega, Deneb and Altair, suggesting
the cave may hold a map of the stars, full of animal constellations. Other
scholars think the combination of animals and geometric patterns depict visions
achieved in trance-dancing, a theory which explains the distribution of similar
styles across the world.
Chauvet Cave (key work!)
Modern Relationships
30,000 years ago, artists painted on the walls of caves, and
painted over paintings, and painted over those paintings, beginning a tradition
of painting on walls that has lasted into today. Examples of graffiti exist
around the world since the dawn of Cro-Magnon humans, in the Americas, Oceania,
Africa and Asia. Later, we find graffiti in Parisian catacombs, the brothels of
Pompeii, the great monuments of Egypt, nearly everywhen and everywhere. The
boldly sprayed graffiti of the NY heyday in the late 1970s starring Fab Five
Freddie and Jean-Michel Basquiat set the most recognizable style of street art,
built on traincar graffiti from the 1920’s and protest graffiti from WW II and Vietnam. In the nineties, artists
like Barbara Kruger
and Jenny Holzer worked both
the gallery and street scene on billboards and handbills in a hybrid of
street art, gallery art, guerrilla social justice, and advertising. That work
may have initiated the crossover between street art and so-called ‘fine art’
that we see in
Banksy,
Swoon, and JR
Today’s street artists may share more than you might
conceive with the nameless first artists of the deepest history. Contemporary street
artists and cave painters work in a world of risk (In Lascaux, risks included
asphyxiation, starvation, bodily harm, rockslides, and getting permanently lost
in pitch blackness). Today, street artists may face bodily harm, at the hands
of property owners or police, and they risk legal recriminations. They inhabit
dark alleys, and make work without hope of profit. The best known street
artists today make work that delves deeply consequential topics that impact
viewers powerfully. Their work demands confidence and the ability to achieve
quality quickly despite formidable circumstances. Stone Age paintings share all
these traits, and one other: young adult men dominate the world of street art,
and they made most of the Paleolithic cave paintings.
So
Why
do artists creep about at night , often taking extraordinary risks, to make
pictures on Walls for which they will receive no public credit? Why do they
need to leave their mark on public property? Why the gesture to paint and paint
over and paint over again without the promise of permanence (immortality of the
artist) or money or fame? What 5 works of art should everyone know from
Prehistory? What can they tell us? How can we read art? (you’ll probably need
to draw on both today’s and Tuesday’s materials.)
Marcel Ravidat, Simon Coencas, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel in 2010. Not shown: Robot, deceased.
many artists, Cave of the Hands, Cueva de los Manos, 7,300 bce to 700 CE, Archaic
Hand Prints and possible Guanacos and human figures, Cueva de los Manos, 7300 bce-700 CE, Archaic, present-day Argentina, oldest art in South American Continent.
Hand stencils from Laeng Sakapao (nmore info). Some hand paintings at this site are least 39,000 YA.
"
Lascaux cave paintings replica workshop. The original Lascaux cave was closed to the public in 1963, with the Lascaux II replica opening nearby in 1983. Here, a restorer, in a workshop in Montignac, is testing the bamboo projection method of forming a hand print outline (example shown at right). The Lascaux cave paintings in south-western France, around 17,000 years old, were painted by Cro-Magnon man, an early European culture of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), using red, brown and yellow ochre, and black manganese dioxide. They may have had religious and artistic significance. Photographed in 2010." Source
Leang Sukapao. at least 34kya. Leang Sukapao holds the Oldest representational art yet found on the globe.
