DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
A look at the world's first artists
The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists
Gregory Curtis, 2006
This is the second article in a series, "Imaginative Worlds," which began with a review of David Pena Guzman's book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (2022). Future articles will discuss dramatic art, romantic love, cultural meaning, and possibly other subjects as well.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the scholarly excellence of Gregory Curtis' book, The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists (2006), the best introduction (by far) to the cave art of Southern France and Northern Spain. Curtis' background is in art history, and he responds to cave paintings and engravings as great art, with astute comments regarding the techniques and perspectives of the creators. Curtis writes with admirable clarity; and he is deeply informed, balanced and judicious in his accounts of controversies that have elicited some truly bad behavior among famous and not so famous scholars touting their scholarly methods and assumptions, as well as their interpretations of cave paintings and engravings. Curtis is an investigator who inspires confidence, though his views regarding the meaning of cave art (like all others) are arguable, because of his clarity, the breadth of his attention, and balanced way of discussing conflicting perspectives.
Curtis' subject is the cave art that appeared between 30,000- 40,000 years ago in one part of Europe, i.e. southern France and northern Spain on either side of the Pyrenees. It is of the utmost importance that cave art and wall art with similar themes has been found on other continents, including Australia, Africa and North America, but Curtis has little to say about cave art outside one small area of Europe, which is the only major flaw of his book from my perspective.
Most of the Curtis' chapters discuss the paintings and engravings of eight caves: Altamira, Lascaux, Font-de-Game, Les Combarelles , Niaux, Les Trois-Freres, Chauvet and Cosquer. One hundred twenty five caves with paintings or engravings on walls or ceilings have been discovered in this area of Europe (but not Germany), but a small number of caves stand out for their size and the amount and magnificence of their art. According to carbon dating, the oldest cave art discovered by 2006, the year in which the Cave Painters was published, is at Chauvet where some of the paintings are 32,000 years old. Cave art continued to be created in this area of Europe for more than 20,000 years. Curtis maintains that the cave paintings in Chauvet demonstrate as great or greater skill than the greatest masterpieces in caves painted many thousands of years later. According to Curtis, cave art "was the most impressive part of an outflowing of creativity by Homo sapiens that began about 45,000 years ago and has continued ever since." The big brains of early humans brought big imaginations reflected in cave art, an artistic vision and world view that does not appear to have changed much for 20,000 years, which is astonishing if true.
According to Curtis, the oldest cave paintings found at Chauvet in southern France "show huge vivid herds of animals spilling across the walls. ... there are lions and horses all painted with an individuality and a dynamism that make them masterpieces. The lions are on the hunt and look fierce and wild-eyed. ... The paintings there have all the refinement, subtlety and power that great art has had ever since." Cave paintings and engravings for thousands of years were of large animals: lions, bears and mammoths in many of the oldest caves; horses, bison and reindeer in most later cave paintings. Cave painters often painted or engraved animals they rarely, if ever ate. For this reason, the initial idea of Henri Breuil (the most famous early scholar of the caves) that the paintings and engravings were a type of hunting magic, has been dismissed by scholars for decades.
Curtis argues that what is not visually represented in the caves is revealing: "There is also a strict consistency for 20,000 years in what is not pictured. Fish are rare ... with one or two exceptions there are no insects ... no rodents ...no reptiles, and no birds except for a few owls ... Many species of mammals were excluded, beginning with bats and extending to many larger, common animals, such as hyena. ... The cave painters were not creating a bestiary or a zoological catalog. Nor were they attempting to re-create and record the world around them in complete detail." Rather, "they chose to paint animals that had a special place in their culture."
The cave painters worked in a tradition with strict conventions: "None of the thousands of animals is shown in a landscape." Many of the animals appear to be floating rather than grounded. "There is never a tree or bush or a flower. Nor are there rivers, lakes, cliffs, rocks or caves." The animals are moving "in empty space. There's no sky either, no stars, no moon and no sun. That's a peculiar, puzzling omission, since prehistoric people surely observed the sky closely in order to mark time and anticipate the coming seasons and migration of the animal herds," Curtis states.
Curtis asserts: "the caves are very chaste." There are pictures of vulvas and penis' (some erect) and, occasionally, pregnant women and geometric shapes that suggest male or female genitals. However, neither animals or humans are mating or giving birth, except for a few carvings on weapons. Cave paintings and engravings rarely picture young animals.
The cave painters used two main colors: red and black, though some paintings have elements of brown and yellow, and even purple. According to Curtis: "The cave artists poured all their genius into pictures of animals. When they did paint or engrave pictures of people, they did so with little care or effort, most of such pictures are stylized stick figures or simple line drawings ... creating pictures of people evidently did not interest the cave artists very much. ... Far from being the dominant creature in the planet, people were insignificant, hanging on as best they could at the edges of a world that belonged to animals, teeming swarms of animals. ...the earth belonged to the animals by right. .. They seemed to have power over it. And the power, privilege and dominance of animals are exactly what the cave paintings show," Curtis asserts.
However, the cave paintings and engravings contain more than representations of large animals, most importantly a profusion of geometric figures, including rows of colored dots, circles, vertical and horizontal lines, crosses, upside down T's, triangles, rectangles with and without inside lines, arcs. Some signs appear alone, other are inside or next to paintings of animals. Curtis states: "The signs weren't writing, since the signs didn't repeat the way writing would. Instead, they must have been an elaborate code ... The signs marked the paintings in some way." Some scholars have speculated that the signs were used in association with specific animals to symbolize male and female gender, an idea which Curtis asserts has been abandoned by scholars who have studied the caves for many years, though for reasons which are unclear to me. It appears that signs are sometimes utilized to represent dualities/ polarities, though of what specifically is uncertain.
The caves contain many representations of human hands, which compared to other depictions of humans or parts of human bodies "are nearly all realistic." Curtis states:
"Their frequency and realism are an argument in favor of Max Raphael's theory of the primacy of the hand in Paleolithic thinking and of its role in leading the cave painters to base their work on the golden section." Cave art and wall art around the world, including in the U.S. Southwest, has images of human hands in great numbers. According to Curtis, "The hands weren't painted as the animals were, but ... were made by placing the hand on the wall and blowing red or black paint around it, thus leaving a negative image."
Jean Clottes and David Lewis Williams have speculated that the purpose of this method "was to cause the hand to appear to melt into the wall," a way of entering the spirit realm contained in caves. Curtis asserts: "touching the wall and leaving a record of the touch was immensely important. Maybe by touching the wall the person received some power from the animals pictured or from the wall itself."
The scholar, Max Raphael, maintained that the human hand was a symbol of power in Paleolithic societies "because human intelligence could dominate the animal world only because the hand could make tools, blades, spears and other weapons. ... the hand was the body part that became the instrument of domination. "And, Raphael asserted: "Paleolithic man took for granted the formal analogy between the animal and the hand, which for us remains a paradox." According to this perspective, hands pressed on walls were a means of capturing the power and beauty of large animals represented ( and through representation, created ) in the cave.
Raphael' s speculations regarding the analogy between the power of large animals in their huge herds and the human hand, and his ideas regarding the Paleolithic era as a period when humans were imaginatively engrossed in the excruciating psychological process of separating from animals, may suggest the mistaken idea that scholarly study of cave art has been theoretically bold and well informed regarding the beliefs and practices of early humans. Actually, the opposite is the case, as Curtis discusses at length.
Many decades were required to map the caves, catalog and complete drawings of the paintings and engravings, to understand the techniques utilized by cave painters and to date and analyze the art of various caves. Henri Breuil spent much of his life drawing with great skill paintings and engravings on walls and ceilings in extremely difficult physical circumstances, but scholars who came after Breuil reacted against his depictions of individual animals based on the idea that many, possibly most, paintings were compositions in which the relationships between and among the animal species depicted were a key to the meaning of the art. For example, in some caves, horses and bisons appear together in a way that suggests duality/ opposition, possibly gender differences. There has been much statistical analysis of the relative distribution of various animal species, Curtis states.
The reaction against Breuil's theory that cave art was hunting magic led influential scholars to propose a dubious methodological rule, i.e., understanding of cave art must come from the archaeological evidence gathered through painstaking "digs" and analysis of the composition of paintings and engravings, rather than ethnography, or speculative accounts of the social practices and beliefs of Paleolithic groups. It would be difficult to imagine a more self defeating rule for interpreting cave art than the idea of ignoring the historical context and major developments of the 20,000 years when cave art was created. Much valuable technical information regarding how cave art was created has been developed through "dirt" archaeology, but (not surprisingly) little or no theory or insight regarding the meaning and uses of cave art in Europe.
In Curtis' view (with which I agree), the most compelling interpretation of cave art and its creation has come from David Lewis-Williams, a South African anthropologist, a colleague, T.A. Dowson and Jean Clottes, a highly esteemed scholar who has done groundbreaking studies of cave art in Cosquer and Chauvet. Lewis-Williams is the author of The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, which I highly recommend. Lewis-Williams has written extensively regarding the rock art paintings of the South African San people created in the nineteenth century or earlier.
Lewis-Williams found that San paintings "were really a spiritual meditation. The paintings were especially concerned with trances, visions seen in trances, and with shamanistic rituals." Lewis- Williams and Dowson have argued that there is a "neurological bridge" that sheds light on Paleolithic art. They maintain "that when drugs, fatigue, pain, insistent rhythms, or other stimuli induce a trance, the nervous system produces a pattern of hallucinations derived from it and not from cultural clues. ... They call such visions "entoptic phenomena" such as "jagged lines or herringbone patterns." Citing research on use of psychedelic drugs such as mescaline and LSD, they "identify six principle entoptic phenomena: a grid, parallel lines, dots, zigzags, nested curves and filigrees." These phenomena appear in the first phase of trance. In the second phase, there is an attempt to make sense of these phenomena by giving meaning to the shapes. In the third phase, there are powerful hallucinations in which a shaman might experience transformation into an animal.
There is much cave art that depicts human/ animal hybrid beings and a famous painting of a sorcerer deep in a part of Les Trois-Freres. Shamanism was the most widespread approach to the world of spirits during the Paleolithic era. In my view, there is the same chance that cave art stood apart from shamanism as the idea that Medieval art could have been independent of Christianity, i.e., zero. According to Lewis- Williams and Clottes, "The larger galleries were for rituals that many people attended. ... The smaller, difficult out-of- the -way places that are covered with engravings are where individuals or large groups went to experience visions." According to this perspective, the large galleries of cave art prepared the way for visionary experiences that were sought deeper in the caves.
Shamanism has been extensively studied around the world. In trance states, shamans "could converse with spirits, tell the future, heal the sick, influence game animals. Shamanic societies believe the world has three tiers: the upper tier of the heavens, the everyday world and the depths of the earth and the world below. Shamans are believed to have the power to travel between and among the three realms. Lewis- Williams and Clottes hypothesized that cave walls were believed by the Paleolithic civilization that created cave art to be a "membrane" between the real world and spirit world. Through images of hands on cave walls, "People were sealing their own or others' hands into the walls, causing them to disappear beneath what was probably a spiritually powerful and ritually prepared substance ... hands reached into the spiritual realm behind the membrane of the rock."
Curtis acknowledges that Lewis-Williams' and Clottes' ideas regarding shamanism, trance states and cave art have been met with ridicule, personal insult or silence from most scholars, yet he maintains that the evidence in the caves is consistent with their interpretation: "It is consistent with the clear structure of the caves and with typical shamanistic practices from around the world. ... certain qualities of the paintings ... support the ideas in Shamans. Why do the animals appear to be floating rather than standing on the ground? Why don't the animals appear in natural surroundings? ... The painters didn't care at all about the relative size of the animals. ;; The animals, generally speaking, don't react to one another ... But all of these apparent anomalies make sense if the animals on the walls ... were first seen as visions in hallucinations."
While it seems obvious (at least to me) that cave paintings and engravings were created and experienced by early humans in a shamanistic framework, there is another important meaning of cave art that transcends the spiritual framework within which it was created: caves could become powerful embodiments of the world of spirit accessed through the beauty and power of large animals. The portal of beauty and power represented in animals was available to everyone, but the caves had deeper sections that could only be accessed with difficulty by persons willing to risk their sanity and lives to develop powers that depended on a fuller participation in the imaginative world of large animals, experienced as Power in its purest form.
Humans exist in a spirit world as indicated by the experience of beauty, taken for granted by modern humans because this experience is universal. Early humans who created cave art and utilized the caves to access the spirit world did not take beauty for granted, or its association with the overwhelming power of large animals in herds captured through mental representations rendered in art.
-- Dee Wilson