Friday, June 09, 2006
27,000 Year Old Portrait
A 27,000 year old portrait drawing has been found in a cave in France, which makes it the oldest ever discovered.
The Modigliani/Picasso-esque head is from a time where man was much less developed and was probably chasing big Mammoths around, but it wouldn't look out of place sitting a modern art museum.
Old masters
"Why did the first artists draw like Picasso? It has to be because of their attitude to the face, to their own embodiment and that of the people they lived with - it has to be because of how they saw human beings specifically, because this is very different from the way they painted animals. Stone Age artists could paint with a verisimilitude that takes your breath away; the horse panel in the Chauvet cave, older than this drawing, is covered with acutely observed heads of aurochs (extinct relatives of cattle) and horses whose tufty manes are painted with a clarity Da Vinci would have admired. Why is the human face so much harder to decipher, so stylised?" Guardian
>> General Art News ¶ 5:27 AM
A 27,000 year old portrait drawing has been found in a cave in France, which makes it the oldest ever discovered.The Modigliani/Picasso-esque head is from a time where man was much less developed and was probably chasing big Mammoths around, but it wouldn't look out of place sitting a modern art museum.
Old masters
"Why did the first artists draw like Picasso? It has to be because of their attitude to the face, to their own embodiment and that of the people they lived with - it has to be because of how they saw human beings specifically, because this is very different from the way they painted animals. Stone Age artists could paint with a verisimilitude that takes your breath away; the horse panel in the Chauvet cave, older than this drawing, is covered with acutely observed heads of aurochs (extinct relatives of cattle) and horses whose tufty manes are painted with a clarity Da Vinci would have admired. Why is the human face so much harder to decipher, so stylised?" Guardian
>> General Art News ¶ 5:27 AM
"Why did the first artists draw like Picasso? It has to be because of their attitude to the face, to their own embodiment and that of the people they lived with - it has to be because of how they saw human beings specifically, because this is very different from the way they painted animals."
Whether or not this was written by an art historian, writer, critic, or artist, in four litle words it encapsulates much that is wrong with writings on art (by many but not by all)....It had to be, nonsense, there are dozens of other reasons why whatever it was came to be. Obviously, it would be quite acceptable to say, my hypothesis, which has one chance in a hundred of being partially correct, is that....For a sad current example of failure to observe this basic concept of scientific and scholarly rhetoric one might well turn to Henry Adams recent 'attack' on Thomas Eakins in a psychobabble reading of evidence and hypothesizing on same.
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Whether or not this was written by an art historian, writer, critic, or artist, in four litle words it encapsulates much that is wrong with writings on art (by many but not by all)....It had to be, nonsense, there are dozens of other reasons why whatever it was came to be. Obviously, it would be quite acceptable to say, my hypothesis, which has one chance in a hundred of being partially correct, is that....For a sad current example of failure to observe this basic concept of scientific and scholarly rhetoric one might well turn to Henry Adams recent 'attack' on Thomas Eakins in a psychobabble reading of evidence and hypothesizing on same.
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