Week 1: An Introduction to Studying Art and Design History
Understanding the art and design of preliterate cultures
Some questions to ponder: why do certain kinds of images predominate during different periods in human history? Why do we create art in the first place? Does the nature of what we call "art" change over time?
Images starred with an asterisk on the slide list are included here; the others are in the textbook image collection. Including sketches or inserting photos into the "sketch/photo" space on the list will help you remember them, and the slide lists may be used on exams. Take notes in the "notes" space, always focusing on why I showed you the image in the first place. What is it meant to illustrate or exemplify? What principles, media, or other information does it demonstrate?
Art in the Paleolithic
Possible shell beads and incised ochre provide the earliest evidence of human interest in art or decoration at Blombos Cave and other South African sites, from around 70,000 years before the present. See this page from the National Science Foundation on the significance of recent finds.
Paleolithic Painting and Parietal Art
"Parietal" art refers to anything drawn, painted, incised, or otherwise applied to a wall.
Lascaux Cave. Paleolithic (ca. 17,000 BP). The Cave link should lead you to the English version of the French government cultural web page on Lascaux, which has been gussied up with Flash and sound (which you can turn off), but do take the time to "visit" the cave itself.
Bison, Altamira Cave, Spain. Another site (in Spanish) has multiple images, including the two I showed, and a map of the cave.
Cosquer Cave: Images of hand prints and marine birds. See also the Bradshaw Foundation's page on The Cave Beneath the Sea.
Chauvet Cave: Finger tracing of an owl on the soft outer layer of the cave surface. Go to "visit the cave" and roll your mouse over the red spots to see the cave's wide variety of images. Don's Maps has a good image of the owl (scroll down).
Paleolithic Sculpture
See "Women in Prehistory: The 'Venus' of Willendorf" and "The 'Venus' of Laussel" by Chris Witcombe for a discussion on these figures. These pages are from a more comprehensive website, "Images of Women in Ancient Art: Issues of Interpretation and Identity," which includes articles on other Paleolithic figures, as well as on women in Egypt, Palestine, the Aegean, Greece, and 'Barbarian Women.'
Some of my comments are drawn from Nigel Spivey's new book and PBS series, How Art Made the World; see especially the pages on episodes 1 and 2, "More Human Than Human" and "The Day Pictures Were Born." The series is now available in the Library on DVD.
The latest sensation in Paleolithic art is the little mammoth-ivory female figure from Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany, which dates to about 35,000 years BP. My views on this discovery can be found on The Owl of Athena (my education blog), where I talk about it and related topics. See the posts for May 25 and June 7, 2009.
For a nice exploration of human figures and what we can know about them, see the three short films from the Bradshaw Foundation in the section on Ice Age Art: The Nature of Figurines, Chronology, and Purpose. There's also a nice article on techniques, featuring the two Bison from Le Tuc d'Audoubert.
Mesolithic Art: The textbook does not cover the Mesolithic, so the images you're responsible for are included below.
Sculpture: The Lepenski Vir head (and another carved river cobble) can be found with the Wikipedia article. The Don's Maps page includes photos of the site, and diagrams of settlements and buildings--plus a large amount of technical information. The Lessing Photo Archive includes a page on the site, with several more examples of sculpted cobbles.
Painting: I showed several images from Castellón in Spain. Here's the Deer Hunt. I haven't been able to locate any of the others on the web.
These photos by Catherine and Bernard Desjeux are from Tassili n’Ajjer in the Sahara (Algeria). Click on "photo suivante" to see the next slide, etc. (or simply click on the slide itself to advance to the next one). Images # 14 and #20 are similar to the ones I showed. This page on Archaic Art of Northern Africa might also be helpful.
"The Cave of the Swimmers" was "discoverd" at Wadi Sora in the Gilf Kebir in Egypt near the Libyan and Sudanese borders by Count Laszlo Almasy, whose highly fictionalized biography is told in the film, The English Patient. This article from Cosmos (an online science magazine from Australia) includes the image of two swimmers, and talks about the way people lived during the period.
Creative engagement with the material
Here's a page from the Exploratorium on how to make your own petroglyph; it's for kids, but aren't we all (kids, that is)?
Remember, there is a workshop connected with this class meeting. Even if you missed the class you might benefit from trying the assignment although, as with all workshop assignments, you must be present in order to earn points.
Recommended reading (Kelley Library call numbers are listed for books/videos we own):
Nigel Spivey, How Art Made the World (New York: Basic Books, 2005); DVD: GE 550, 551David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002)
Paul Bahn, Journey Through the Ice Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)The Cambridge History of Prehistoric Art N 5310 .B34 1998
Barry Cunliffe (ed.), Prehistoric Europe, an Illustrated History GN 803 .O94 1998
Additional Resources |
For some background information on how human beings use symbols, and why we started doing so, see these resources: A New
Mexico based designer, Maggie
Macnab, has a website which featues a nice little section called
"Symbol Simple"; it's well put together and worth taking
a look at. Go to "About" and "History" for more
of her work on symbols and logos. Her new book, Decoding
Design is a superb guide to both symbol use and logo design. A couple of National Geographic articles of interest: Prehistoric European Cave Artists were women and Hand Stencils Through Time. Rock
Art & Petroglyphs National
Geographic's Paintings
of the Spirit by David Lewis Williams provides a brief glimpse
into his research on San rock paintings in southern Africa. Textiles and Clothing (new category) Clothing of figurines may be record of Ice Age tribes' skills is an article published in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette in 1999 about the "Venus" figurines and evidence of clothing. How We Know What We Know (another new category) The Penn Museum's page on Applied Science provides brief discussions of various dating techniques (but doesn't provide pick-up lines). The Humanities Toolkit, my essay on the various methods we use to explore different areas of the humanities, and how we go about conducting research into what we don't know. This was a basic component of my intro to humanites course. The internal links don't work at the moment, but I'll be redesigning and updating the page shortly. Blogs
and Miscellanea A post on the Cognition and Culture blog by Pascal Boyer, "Paleolithic art--awesome but not religious" offers an interesting perspective on the meaning of it all. For anyone not immediately turned off by political views of art (Feminist, Marxist, Post-modern, Whatever), another interesting perspective is offered by Eugene Hirschfeld in his Marxist Theory of Art blog. There are seven separate posts on Paleolithic art. OriginsNet is a fairly technical page that focuses on the origins of art, religion, and mind. You might want to compare some of the above perspectives with this one.
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