Word: artfully
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...long last, a collection of 250 of the world's oldest known works of art is on display at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, in an exhibition called "Ice Age Art." A few, like the carved stone amulet of a female pregnant on one side but not on the other, are priceless originals...
Most of the others are skillfully rendered copies in realistic settings. Captured on film by Frenchman Jean Vertut, who specializes in photographing cave art, a Lascaux mural of horses, bulls and stags covers an entire wall of the show. Designer Henry Gardiner's theatrical lighting suggests the flickering oil lamps by which the cave artists must have worked. The exhibit also includes elegant silk-screen reproductions crafted by Douglas Mazonowicz, an artist and writer who has studied rock art around the world. Perhaps most impressive of all are the full-size replicas of Cro-Magnon man's sculptures...
...dazzling collection includes, for example, a tiny, 6.4-cm-long (2½ in.) curving sculpture of a horse carved out of a mammoth tusk; it hardly seems possible that this graceful piece, fashioned more than 30,000 years ago, is one of the oldest objets d'art ever found. No less remarkable are the voluptuous "Venus" statuettes, some of them coiffed in Stone Age chic, that date back some 27,000 years. Even the wall paintings, some of them on a larger-than-life scale, show a mastery of form and perspective that was not seen again for almost...
What that culture was like remains an enigma. What, for instance, is the significance of the Venus figures, with their exaggerated sexual features? What role did the great cave paintings play in the lives of those ancient people? Whatever the answers, it is clear the art is exceptionally complex, more than simple "hunting magic," as some turn-of-the-century scholars thought. Every indication is that Cro-Magnon man was deeply involved in rituals, ceremonies, myths, perhaps even a kind of religion...
...artistic and symbolic traditions of the civilizations that began to develop not long after the ice melted, about 10,000 B.C.?" No one can say for sure whether paleolithic man did in fact light that intellectual spark. But it is undeniable, as Marshack notes, that the complex art comes from "persons like us, with our brains and our capacity, and that no visitors from space were required to teach them...