Ever since the sixth and seventh decades of the 19th century not only tools but also pictures of animals engraved on bone and rock, and even miniature works of art, had been found. Finally, in 1901, two caves in the Dordogne, in southern France, were unearthed, Font-de-Gaume and Les Combarelles, which were both adorned with paintings.
In the former, two hundred masterly pictures of animals were found and in the second no less than three hundred, which included representations of human ritual dancers and trappers. The pictures at Altamira were then remembered and subjected to thoroughgoing investigation. To-day thousands of Ice Age paintings, in many caves, are known, which afford evidence of stylistic development.
During the long Early and Middle Stone Ages, when Man subsisted on the proceeds of hunting and food-gathering expeditions, there had not been any representative art. Nevertheless, the flint knives that date from the Old Acheulean Age already reveal, in their definite shape and careful polishing -which exceed purely utilitarian requirements, — a primitive pleasure in modelling and visual beauty.
In Europe, as George Hamilton pointed out in the catalogue of his “Object and Image” exhibition at Yale, this atlitude is historically associated with the early modern movemen in its heroic break with tradition and is diametrically opposed to a more recent trend toward an abstract but evocative imagery which reflects man’s consciousness and inner being. In America, few even of our pioneer abstractionists could be called purists. The latter began to appear here only in the 1930’s (many from abroad), and while they still form an active and vital group, they have always been a minority. Our tendency, more marked than ever today, has been toward kinds of abstraction which draw on observed reality to create, variously, a conscious imagery, an unconscious imagery or, at the least, a kind of organic and “natural” teleology of form.
The late Palaeolithic period, that of the cave-paintings, coincides with the last Ice Age, which ended about 10,000 B.C., and is divided into three principal stages, called after the French places where finds were made. They are named the Aurignacian, the Solutrean and the Magdalenian. Representatives of the cultures of this period were hunters and food-gatherers at a relatively advanced stage of evolution, occupying the ice-free regions of Europe and Asia.
The cave-painters’ art centred upon southern France and northern Spain, in the so-called FrancoCantabrian region, with offshoots in the direction of southern Italy. From its sudden first appearance in the Aurignacian to its end in the late Magdalenian age it retains a homogeneous character. The pictures are artistically true to nature; that is to say, the creatures represented are given, in slightly stylised form, the distinguishing marks of their species.
Cave-paintings have their origin in magic and ritual. They were designed to cast a spell on the game so necessary for survival. The picture was meant to ensure, by its magic, that the weapon or the pitfall used would successfully achieve its object. With increasing dexterity and longer practice came the desire, no doubt often unconscious, to produce something artistic. In art on a smaller scale the main magical object was quite frequently subordinated to a clearly discernible delight in pure decoration.
The first statuettes of human beings and animals belong to the Aurignacian period. They, too, served a magical purpose, that of ensuring either fertility among the clan or a plentiful supply of game. This is how we must interpret the two clay buffaloes found in the Tuc d’Audoubert cave, for instance, and also the exaggerated proportions of the bodies of the many female figurines discovered in France (the ‘Venuses’ of Lespugue and Brassepouy), Lower Austria (the ‘Venus’ of Willendorf), Czechoslovakia (Unter-Wisternitz), as well as in Russia (on the Don and at Kursk, Bryansk and Irkutsk) and elsewhere.
The multifarious flint and bone tools and weapons found were adorned with figures or designs at first composed of lines and dots and later of crosses, lozenges, spirals and so on. Ornaments consisting of the artificially treated shells of fish and snails, of ivory and animal-teeth, were also dug up. It is probable that late Palaeolithic Man also painted his body.
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