Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind
The British Museum
Through May 26
Grayson Perry, the potter and Turner Prize winner, was gazing at a piece of bone less than 5½ inches long. It is 14,000 years old and on it are carved two deer.
"To be in the presence of this art is profoundly moving," he said. "Something as precise as this, made all those thousands of years ago, is brilliant. This is the beginning of art—it's like the Pixar studios of the day."
Mr. Perry was talking to a television interviewer on the eve of a new exhibition at London's British Museum titled "Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind." And though his remarks were not used on TV, they captured the essence of a museum show that is intriguing, erudite and, indeed, moving.
Moving because it demonstrates that as far back as 40,000 years ago there were people who, despite their grueling existence, were able to rise above the daily struggle for survival to carve, sculpt and paint. Even more moving because they did not only reproduce the world around them, but created works of imagination, decoration and entertainment.
The deer, which were found in the French départment of Poitou-Charente, are perfectly scaled. There is a sense of the empty horizon behind and a foreground that looks marshy. The draftsmanship is precise; the line of each creature's back has been formed with one stroke of a burin—a stone tool with a niblike end—which has also been used to pick out the shading of the pelt.
"What else could that be but art?" asks the exhibition's curator, Jill Cook. "It has the characteristics of a modern illustration. It is made to be looked at."
The exhibition is dated from the migration of settlers into Europe some 45,000 years ago—a time Ms. Cook prefers to call "deep history," as distinct from prehistory, which she dismisses as a "wretched" word that closes the mind to a time considered primitive but which has the power to make people wonder.
The earliest findings, which are 40,000 years old and carved with tools of flint from the ivory and bone of mammoths, are representations of the animals that shared the life of these early humans—the lions and snow leopards, the bison and horses.
But the Lion Man is different. This is a 12-inch carving of the head of a lion on the elongated body of a man. He dates from the same era but is evidence that the brain of deep-history man had become capable of imagining concepts rather than making mere reproductions. According to Ms. Cook, it is one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century.
Was he made in praise of power? Does he have religious or ceremonial significance? No one can be sure, but his creation suggests that this primitive society was beginning to bring form to its ideas by making images—and that, in turn, indicates the development of hierarchies and relationships that helped change social conditions.
We see, too, how society was evolving by the way people entertained themselves. Twenty-six thousand years ago, they would have played with a puppet whose articulated arms moved up and down, his head from side to side. They played the flute, the oldest more than 40,000 years old, carved with infinite delicacy from the wing of a griffon vulture, and we can guess from the Worshipper, a tiny relief on mammoth tusk that shows a figure with hands held high, that they danced, perhaps in a ritual or even for the fun of it.
Similarly, pendants—the most beautiful, two ivory swans from Siberia—could indicate marital status or a position in society. Maybe they made the wearer look flirty or interesting, or indicated religious beliefs.
Central to these burgeoning relationships are women. All the sculptures of them are naked—which suggests an idealized vision of the female form, particularly as the cold would have kept people well wrapped up—and often show the figures in various stages of puberty and pregnancy.
Many are simplified—perhaps objectified—with big breasts and broad buttocks, while some are manifested as only breasts sculpted onto rods. One archaeologist wondered if this was little more than "diluvial plastic pornography."
There are no representations of men here, nor indeed of a mother with baby. Ms. Cook speculates that it could be because they did not understand the male's reproductive role, in which case the female body must have seemed miraculous and worthy of respect and worship.
One of the best known statues is the ivory Venus of Lespugue, whose ample form greets the visitor to the show. Found in a grotto in the Pyrenean foothills of France in 1922, there is something cubist about her protuberant breasts, buttocks and stomach—so much so that an intrigued Picasso kept two copies in his studio.
"It is a sort of a challenge when you first look at it, because you think it could have been made in the 20th century and then you realize it's 23,000 years old," Ms. Cook says. "She helps break through the time barrier because she is the sort of thing that is familiar to us today."
Her thesis is reflected in paintings on display by André Derain and Lucian Freud and sculptures by Jacob Epstein and George Brassaï.
But, she says: "It's not about making analogies and comparisons but of making people comfortable that it's OK to look at this as art. It doesn't matter if it's 40,000 or 14,000 years old—it can give something to you. It may not be the same message as the maker had in mind but it's still a valid experience."
Mr. Holledge is a freelance writer based in the U.K.