The First Artists: In Search of the World’s Oldest Art

349 Pages·2017·34.23 MB·English

by  Paul Bahn

Frontispiece:
1. Finger-flutings in the soft rock surface at Pech-Merle (Lot).

About the Authors
Michel Lorblanchet is a leading French specialist in the field of Palaeolithic art.
In his former roles as Director of Research at the French National Centre for
Scientific Research (CNRS) and research consultant for the Australian Institute
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies he pioneered experimental
methods of reproducing ancient art, as well as scientific methods for its dating.
His Art pariétal: Grottes ornées du Quercy (Editions du Rouergue, 2010), the
sum of forty-five years of research, is considered the definitive work on the art
of the Quercy region, which includes more than thirty painted caves.
Paul Bahn is co-author of Thames & Hudson’s hugely influential and
bestselling textbook Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, and has also
published a variety of popular books, including Easter Island: Earth Island (with
John Flenley), Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age (with Adrian Lister) and
Images of the Ice Age, widely regarded as the standard introduction to cave art.
Pierre Soulages is a painter, engraver and sculptor, described by French
President François Hollande as ‘the world’s greatest living artist’. He is known
as ‘the painter of black’, and cites prehistoric art as the inspiration for his
fascination with the ‘colour and non-colour’: ‘for thousands of years, men went
underground, in the absolute black of grottoes, to paint with black’. His work is
displayed in museums worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London. In
2014 the Musée Soulages, celebrating his long lifetime’s work, was opened in
his hometown, Rodez, France.
Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:
A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
Cave Art
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
Contents
Dedication
Foreword | Pierre Soulages
Introduction: what is ‘art’?
1 Theories, chimps and children:
early attempts to tackle the problem
2 Finding art in nature:
the first stirrings of an aesthetic sense
3 Can we see art in the first tools?
Polyhedrons, spheroids and handaxes
4 All work and no play?
Looking at marks on bones and stones
5 Figuring it out:
pierres-figures and the first carvings
6 Jingles and bangles:
the origin of music and decorated bodies
7 The first art in the landscape:
dots and lines
8 The writing’s on the wall:
the earliest cave art
9 A global phenomenon:
the appearance of rock art around the world
Conclusion
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Sources of illustrations
Index
Copyright
For Jean-Marie and Hélène Le Tensorer, and for Colin and Jane Renfrew
Foreword
When you go to the Louvre, you see five centuries of paintings, but even if you
saw ten, what are ten centuries when compared to three hundred? Because you
are seeing at least two or three hundred centuries in the prehistoric painted caves,
including the ones discovered recently, like Cosquer or Chauvet.
So should we look for meanings? One is perfectly entitled to do so, and we
may even find them one day – but we’ll never be able to verify them! On the
other hand, where the ancient artists’ techniques are concerned, if you put
forward a hypothesis, you can verify it. This is what Michel Lorblanchet does,
and that’s why I was immediately interested in his work.
When I enter a painted cave, like everyone, I am overwhelmed; one is
entering a belly, the belly of the earth! And when, in a moment of intense
emotion, I discover the products of people from hundreds of centuries ago, I am
more profoundly moved than when I go to the Louvre. There are certainly things
in the Louvre that overwhelm me, but they are far more recent – they are only a
few centuries old! I feel much closer to the lions of Chauvet than to the Mona
Lisa. When I see their works, I consider the prehistoric artists to be my brothers.
What interests me about these ancient paintings is what happened with the
people who made them, in terms of materials – that is the best way to approach
these things, far better than trying to figure out their meaning… because it’s well
known that when you talk of meaning, you’re only talking about yourself. We
don’t have the same myths, or the same society, as the authors of the prehistoric
paintings. Our view of them is personal. So what is a ‘work of art’? What
interests me are not the reasons why the paintings were made, but the practices
of the painters. What causes me to wonder and perplexes me is the way they
painted.
Painting began with black… Black is an original material! Painting began
with black, red, earth – and in the shadows, in the darkest places, beneath the
earth, where one can imagine that people could have sought different colours…
perhaps they already knew that black is the colour that includes all colours – it is
the colour of light! The word ‘presence’ is the key word for everything that is
artistic: a work is eternally ‘present’.