Art in the Modern World: From Caves to the Internet

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By James Zike, for Zike Studios.

Art is one of the oldest sets of artifacts left by humans, after basic stone tools and trash heaps. The walls and ceilings of caves, like those in Lascaux, France, served as the first canvases, and art galleries. And what a challenging medium and venue it must have been, with irregular curved walls vaulting the spaces. The earliest artists showed a great deal of skill, being able to create images that appear appropriately proportioned when viewed from the ground despite being painted on uneven surfaces. Some depictions show even greater complexity than tricks of perspective, like The Upside-Down Horse which wraps around a bend so that there is no way to view the entire horse. If we could take it off the wall, and flatten it out, the horse would be the right dimensions, consistent with the other horses in the cave. Stop for a moment and consider how crazy skilled the painter must have been, especially given that this was completed some 13,000 years before Geometry would be invented as a field of study. Seriously, if you've never done so, go take this virtual tour of the caves, and see for yourself. We'll wait, I swear.

The Upside-down Horse, Lascaux, France.

Photograph by Sara Howson.

Those cave paintings never cease to amaze me, when I consider the conditions those prehistoric artist must have been under. Crawling into pitch-black caves, either painting in complete darkness or by some kind of crude torchlight, carrying with them only the most rudimentary pigments and tools—nothing like modern bushes, or pallet knives. And how did they reach so high onto the walls of the cave, some kind of scaffolding, perhaps? I personally have no idea, but considering these aspects and difficulties they must have faced helps me contextualize the paintings themselves. Huge amounts of effort, and risk, went into painting things like bulls, horses, stags, and people. These symbols must have been hugely important to the early artists, for hunter-gatherers, who by their lifestyles alone had very limited resources, to risk so much and spend the effort, those images were likely the most important things to the artists, considered sacred even. The interpretation of the caves as the womb of the Earth is apt. The art prehistory humans painted was the “seed” of culture mixed with immense ingenuity, insight, and indomitability that has marked all of humanity's History. The importance of that art is this: civilization was born out from those cave paintings.