Word: lascaux
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...date on the cave drawings at Lascaux or on the first drumbeat. But photography has a birthdate of sorts, 1839, the year it was ushered loudly into the world in a clamor of patents and the claims of two separate inventors, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England. For that reason 1989 is being marked as a sesquicentennial -- 150 years in which photographers have remade the world in their own images...
...hype have long been partners; there must have been some prehistoric Frenchman urging his fellows to catch the cave paintings at Lascaux. But movies, as the first mechanical art form, have always churned on assembly-line publicity. With the mid-'70s success of People magazine, and later + Entertainment Tonight, the celebrity industry went high tech and high gear. Nearly every hour of the TV day, from Today and Good Morning America through Oprah and Donahue to Carson and Nightwatch, is filled with show-biz interviews...
...these people is now one of the prime moral dilemmas Australia faces. It has also made whites more aware of the realities of Aboriginal culture. For here is the oldest continuous tradition of visual art on earth (30,000 years at least, more than twice the age of the Lascaux Cave paintings), tenaciously maintained in the face of pressures from the white majority. It is not a single tradition, for the Aborigines were never a homogeneous people. Between their arrival in Australia 40,000 years ago and the whites' arrival in 1788, their society ramified into hundreds of tribes...
Artists had drawn animals, of course, since the bisons of Lascaux. But Landseer was the only painter who ever became a court favorite and a national culture hero by painting dogs. He painted other creatures too-ptarmigans and parrots, monkeys, cats, horses, cattle and, especially, deer; there was a time when no cottage parlor or country hall lacked its framed print of Landseer's defiant twelve-point stag, The Monarch of the Glen...
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...