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Letter from Southern France: First Impressions: Reporting &Essays: The New Yorker
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Jul 16, 1:11pm
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•http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/20...
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"What does the world's oldest art say about us?"*
 "A frieze of horses and rhinos near the Chauvet cave's Megaloceros Gallery, where artists may have gathered to make charcoal for drawing. Chauvet contains the earliest known paintings, from at least thirty-two thousand years ago."
*Interesting article by Judith Thurman in the June 23rd 2008 issue of the New Yorker on the cave paintings of Southern France. Picasso is quoted there, referring to these ancient artists, as saying, "They've invented everything." Apparently, the subjects of these cave paintings were mostly of animals many that they hunted, very rarely were humans depicted. Further, it seems that these caves were apparently only stopping points for a people that were in the main nomadic. Ms. Thurman also points out that the Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, who replaced the former, coexisted for a period of approximately 8,000 years (!) and yet there is no conclusive evidence that there was ever intermating between these species of humans, and if they did, it is possible that no offspring resulted or that possible offspring were infertile.
newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman [newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman]
Here is a brief excerpt:
"What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; 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 surge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magiclantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation). They also thought up the grease 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 stencilling and Pointillism; powdered colors, brushes, and stumping cloths; and, more to the point of Picasso's insight, the very concept of an image. A true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas--but not from a void."
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