Thousands of Years of Modern Art
When I took an evening class in Archaeology, one of the first things our teacher did was to talk about art. He drew a horizontal chalk line all around the walls of our classroom and said that it was a timeline of the history of modern art. Then he slashed a vertical line through the beginning of his horizontal line and said that that was the start of our modern human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, about one hundred thousand years ago. He slashed another vertical line where his horizontal line ended, and said that marked today’s modern art.
More than one hundred thousand years of modern art. That phrase still resonates with me years later, especially when I see awesome, inspiring films such as The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
This wonderful, abstract documentary covers the extraordinary Chauvet Caves in France, where the earliest known human cave paintings were made. The cave system was only discovered recently, but the amazing paintings within it were made perhaps 30,000 years ago.
Today we might do Silk Printing or Canvas Printing or T-shirt Printing, but our prehistoric ancestors did hand printing, for throughout the Chauvet cave system, there are prints of different people’s hands placed on the cave walls thousands of years ago.
Although the Chauvet Cave paintings are mostly instantly recognisable as prehistoric art, with the distinctive line drawings of extinct animals such as mammoths, cave lions and giant deer, many of them would not look out of place on the walls of the Tate Modern. They are not always representative, but often try to depict the spirit of or the idea of something.
Other cave paintings are purely abstract, a pattern of dots, lines, squiggles and other symbols that may have meant something to our ancestors, but today look just like modern art.
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