Surprise! We’re re-introducing our short-form series, “A Little Curious,” which will give you sweet snippets of bonus content on the “off” weeks between our normal episodes. In today’s episode, we’re jumping into cave paintings, often deemed the oldest of the old in art history--and while cave paintings sound, well, basic at the outset, we’re going to discover today why they are actually cool.

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Episode Credits:

Production and Editing by Kaboonki.

ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.

Additional music credits:

Theme Music: "Snowmen" by Kai Engel is licensed under BY 4.0

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Links and further resources

The Lascaux Complex’s Official Website

The New Yorker: First Impressions

Artnet: Scientists Have Discovered the World’s Oldest Figurative Art: a 40,000-Year-Old Cave Painting of Cattle
Smarthistory: The Hall of Bulls, Lascaux

https://smarthistory.org/hall-of-bulls-lascaux/

Gregory Curtis,  The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists  (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

The Guardian: Did art peak 30,000 years ago? How cave paintings became my lockdown obsession

Episode Transcript

For the next few episodes of A Little Curious, we’re going all the way back--all the way back--to talk about ancient art. It’s a topic I’ve done almost nothing on since beginning this podcast five years ago, and it’s about time we changed that--and that we share some fun details along the way. Today, we’re jumping into cave paintings, often deemed the oldest of the old in art history--and while cave paintings sound, well, basic at the outset, we’re going to discover today why they are actually cool. So just after the break, it’s time to get a little curious. 

Artists love art history-- or at least a lot of them do, as a way to glean inspiration from the places and people who created works of art before them. And almost no artist loved looking back on art history more than Pablo Picasso. We’ve discussed Picasso’s interest in art history a couple of times on ArtCurious, from his obsession with so-called “primitive art,” like the Iberian sculpture and African masks that purportedly inspired Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and how the paintings of the French Romantic Eugène Delacroix--as well as the works of his friend, Henri Matisse-- brought him his iconic late series of Les Femmes d’Alger, which we discussed on the last season of this show.  Picasso loved art history, and loved its beginning so much that upon visiting one of the most famous sites of ancient art, the Lascaux cave complex in Southwestern France, he supposedly proclaimed defeatedly, quote, “They invented everything.” Now, this story may or may not be true, and the quote has proliferated online in a variety of truly incorrect ways--like where Picasso was said to have declared, quote, “After Chauvet, all is decadence,” when that particular cave complex hadn’t been discovered until the mid-1990s, and Picasso had died in 1973. Anyway-- even if Picasso didn’t say it, I still get what he means, because these paintings--and there are many examples of prehistoric cave paintings around the world--are truly incredible, feeling at times life-like in their representation of animals like bulls or pigs or other animals, but also truly impressionistic in the true sense of the word--impressions of how the artist thinks, feels, or experiences the figure he or she is replicating.  So, take those iconic cave paintings from Lascaux. First, a bit of background on Lascaux, because it’s so-called “discovery”-- which is more like a rediscovery, really-- is just one of those fun stories. In the fall of 1940, a teenager named Marcel Ravidat was enjoying an afternoon wall with his dog, Robot--or maybe it’s Robot, since this is France we’re talking about--when poor Robot purportedly fell into a hole in the ground. Ravidat brought three friends back to the hole to help rescue Robot, and after they did, they opted to continue exploring the hole with the thought that it might be a secret passage long rumored locally to be linked to a secret treasure. It turns out that there was a secret treasure buried there, but it wasn’t the gold and jewels that these teenage boys were undoubtedly imagining--instead, they found a cave covered with incredible paintings of animal life. The boys were stunned, and they returned a few days later with a local priest, Abbé Henri Breuil --who also happened to be an archaeologist--and a curator from a local museum, who both immediately deemed the works an incredible find, possibly the earliest work of art known in Europe at that time. Abbé Breuil himself would later call the cave complex the “Sistine Chapel of Prehistory,” so, you know, no big deal. 

Much attention over the years has been focused on the so-called Hall of the Bulls, one of the largest spaces in the Lascaux complex-- around 11 by 6 feet, which isn’t huge, but could easily fit about 40 or 50 people all crammed in together, which is great, considering that some other “rooms” in Lascaux and other locales are nothing more than a tight squeeze for one very small person. The Hall of the Bulls tells you what to expect right there in the name: a bunch of bulls, but not just bulls--there are also lots of horses and even a bear and a rhino make appearances, attesting to the diversity of animal life during what we now affectionately sometimes call “The Stone Age.” What’s really remarkable about the animals in the Hall of the Bulls is that there’s a variety of ways that the animals themselves are depicted: sometimes they appear just like line drawings on the calcite walls, drawn in profile but with a so-called “twisted perspective” that allows us to see the bull’s horns on both sides of its head, as it it was turned to face us instead of profile. Others, though, are filled in with color from ochre and charcoal, making them bold and graphic, and one wonders if, perhaps, different artists performed different functions here. Did one artist specialize in those line-drawings? Did another prefer to paint in full stone-age color? Some archaeologists and art historians think so, and some have even gone so far as to declare some kind of ancient apprenticeship system at work here, wherein one artist might hold a lamp lit by burning animal fat-- which surely left a rather strong scent in the air-- while the other painted, or someone else would mix colors for the painter. Little indentations in the rock and in the ceiling of the cave have even led some to theorize that these Stone Age artists created scaffolding to get to the very tippy tops of the cave to paint it, which would be extra cool (and does make that “Sistine Chapel of Prehistory” denotation even more apt). All in all, these ancient cave paintings do look modern in some ways--or perhaps they look Modernist, which would make sense why Picasso in particular would find them so intriguing. Those bold lines, flattened space, experimentation with color and form and appearance, a breaking away from naturalism-- I’m thinking especially of the several angles of those Bulls you can see all at once-- a profile and that head-on feeling that their horns give you. It is, in some ways, a very, very early precursor to Cubism, in a really funny way. It’s no wonder that the U.K. art critic Jonathan Jones became obsessed with cave paintings during the COVID-19 lockdown, an obsession which led him to question, quote, “Did art peak 30,000 years ago?” 

When I recall my earliest days studying art history-- that first “intro to art history” course that I took under duress--see the Introduction to my recent book for that story--this is what I remember, whether or not it was accurate. I remember Lascaux, and maybe a little bit of Altamira complex, which is like Lascaux’s Spanish cousin. I remember those bulls, I remember big-stomached horses and bison, and I remember thinking two things in rapid succession: first, a sensation of boredom, because what college freshman was going to be thrilled to learn about boring old cave paintings? It was a thought that quickly dissipated, only to be followed with, Oh, wow, I want to see these for myself. (And this is where I have both good and bad news to share with you all and with little Jen of the past-- both Lascaux and Altamira, and many others like it, have been closed to the public for decades simply because our presence wrought so much damage to these vulnerable creations. Our breath, filled with carbon dioxide and moisture, our skin, exuding paint-corroding oils, our bodies emanating heat--all combined to not only mar the pigments themselves but to cause fungi and lichen to sprout over the long-dry walls, now wetter than ever. So Lascaux was closed permanently to visitors in the 60s, and Altamira followed a decade later. But-- the good news is that both complexes now have incredible visitor resources, including extraordinarily detailed replicas that let you understand the true feeling of being in the caves, all while keeping the caves themselves safe for future generations to study. 

So that was one of the moments that art history came to life for me, right there at the beginning, because the stories about Lascaux and other caves filled me with wonder. Not just Lascaux’s incredible origin story-- with teenage boys and a little scampering dog-- but the stories behind the works of art themselves. Why these cave paintings, why these animals? Why a Hall of Bulls, and why not a face of a loved one? Art History--especially for really ancient works of art here-- is full of mysteries. There’s no artist autobiography where a creator lets us know her thoughts behind a painting. There’s no written language at all--nothing but the art itself as a tool of its own understanding. Were these early artists simply depicting the animals they saw every day? Sure, maybe. Or was there something more involved? For Abbé Henri Breuil, for example, there was a ritualistic reason, which makes the art more fascinating: he posited that the repeated drawings of bulls were manifestations of so-called “hunting magic.” By illustrating their prey on the cave walls, these cave painters could effectively be meditating on an imagined successful outcome of a hunting expedition, a way of manifesting a win for their community by capturing and killing their food source. Perhaps it functioned like a prayer, or a wish-- a consequence sent out into the universe with great hope that the universe would respond in turn by granting it. 

And what is more human than that? That’s what gets me, every time I think about ancient art. Art allows us to say what we might not normally be able to say, to share our concerns, to express our wishes in a creative and visual way, whether it be our fears of being forgotten, as portraiture is able to help with, or a way to share our overwhelming sense of joy when seeing the beautiful landscape before us. Or to overcome our worry that we might not be able to feed our family without a great bit of good luck and a really big bison. Art tells stories-- our stories--and even when it was created 30,000 years ago, we can understand the impulse behind it.

For more stories of the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in art history, subscribe now to the ArtCurious Podcast on the podcatcher of your choice, follow on Spotify, or download and listen in on our website, artcuriouspodcast.com. I’ll catch you back here next week for our continuing series on “Cursed Art,” and again in two weeks for another little look at ancient art with A Little Curious.