There is a fascinating story in the June 23rd, New Yorker magazine. It is called First Impressions: What does the world’s oldest art say about us? It is written by Judith Thurman and it is an incredible read. It concerns the art of the earliest humans, done at least 32,000 years ago soon after Homo sapiens spread from Africa to the land of Europe that had once been the land of the Neanderthals. It is about the oldest man-made artifact on the planet—art. And although it stands as glorious proof of the importance of art along with the greatest artifacts of our history, art is neither an educational nor political priority in our contemporary society.
In the introduction of my book, Artist Survival Skills (www.artistsurvivalskills.com), I wrote the following: “Beginning with an image of the cave drawings in Lascaux, France, let your imagination take you on a walk through the images you have seen and admired in the museums you have visited throughout your lifetime.” I wrote this sentence because for me, the story of art began in Lascaux. But Judith Thurman’s article is about the Chauvet Cave system that contains a rich cache of cave drawings that predates Lascaux by 15,000 to 18,000 thousand years. The art of the Chauvet Caves is at least 32,000 years old. (www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en)
Thurman humbles us with her observations on the importance of the cave drawings: “What those first artists invented was a language of signs …; perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight the animals seem to s urge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magic lantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation). They also thought up the great lamp—a lump of fat, with a plant wick, placed in a hollow stone—to light their workplace; scaffolds to reach high places; the principles of stenciling and Pointillism; powdered colors, brushes, and stumping cloths; and … the very concept of an image.”
She goes on: “In the centuries since the modern study of caves began, specialists form at least half a dozen disciplines—archeology ethnology, ethology, genetics, anthropology, and art history—have tried (and competed) to understand the culture that produced them. The experts tend to fall into two camps: those who can’t resist advancing a theory about the art, and those who believe that there isn’t, and never will be, enough evidence to support one.”
Thurman’s story reads, in part, like a screenplay for an Indiana Jones movie. It is fascinating to read about the history of the cave discoveries and the curious characters that have found them. Thurman makes interesting note of the multi-million dollar litigation surrounding the Chauvet caves: the finders earn royalties from reproductions of the cave drawings while the owners of the land are financially compensated for expropriation of the site. Meanwhile, while the Chauvet lawsuit progresses through the courts, only they are allowed access to the site to do research—and only for only two weeks a year.
Also mesmerizing is to read about the constrictions within which the researchers work in order to protect the cave from the contamination that recently threatened the Lascaux drawings. “Of necessity, Fritz and Tosello spend more time Photoshopping their research than conducting field work…. They digitally photograph an image section by section, print the picture to scale, and take it back underground, where Tosello sets up a drawing board as close as possible to the area of study. The digital image is overlaid a sheet of lear plastic, and he traces the image onto the sheet, referring constantly to the original painting as h e does so. This dynamic act of translation gives him a deeper insight into the artists’ gestures and techniques than a mere reading would. He repeats the process on successive plastic sheets, each one focused on a separate aspect of the composition, including the rock’s contours. Then he transfers the tracings (as many as a dozen layers) onto the computer, where they can be magnified and manipulated.”
The article provides readers with a simple historical overview of the history of mankind and cave art. You can learn a great deal more about cave art, Lascaux and the Chauvet caves in two books which Thurman critiques in the New Yorker article: The Cave Painters (2006) by Gregory Curtis and The Nature of Paleolithic Art (2005) by R. Dale Guthrie.
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