Word: magnon
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Like most contemporary primitives, Litwak is a far less sophisticated artist than the Cro-Magnon whose paintings, the earliest known, were found in a cave at Altamira,. Spain. The caveman's graceful, seemingly off-hand study of a charging bison was obviously true to life but Litwak's view of the Metropolitan Museum (see cut) is just as obviously a cockeyed, childlike impression, painted with the cramped, awkward care of an adult artisan. Explains Artist Litwak, whose colors are as hot and heavy as a fur coat in June: "I must have everything correct, just...
...queer, wild state . . . a place where they arrest people on account of the books in their libraries, where a 'nigger's got to know his place' . . . where the Ku Klux Klan still ranges in their primordial shirttails through the cow pastures and where cro-magnon men still roam the wilderness in dinner coats and black ties. . . . Also where they do not allow Charles Lindbergh to speak...
...Germany and Britain, still covered Scandinavia. The Alpine and Pyrenean glaciers shouldered far out into the adjoining plains; all Europe was cold, ranged over by reindeer, mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses (see cut, p. 50). Here, arriving probably by migration from North Africa, homo sapiens first appeared in Europe. The Cro-Magnon race inherited or seized the valleys of the small-brained, beetle-browed, long-armed, chinless and nigh speechless homo neandertalensis...
...Neanderthalers had no art. The first artists were the Cro-Magnon men, whose earliest culture-period is called the Aurignacian. The newfound cave at Montignac represents this glimmering dawn-culture on the vastest scale yet found. Its significance, says U.S. Prehistorian George Grant MacCurdy, is that the appearance of art "marks a distinct epoch in mental evolution." The Abbe Breuil calls the Montignac cave "the Sistine Chapel of Aurignacian...
...Magnon man did not make elaborate pictures to decorate his home. The pictures are most often in inaccessible crags or in the remote recesses of inhabited caves. Nor did he make them from sheer love of beauty, for the pictures are often so superimposed, retouched and crowded as to be quite unesthetic. His motive was religious. The cavern murals are a form of sympathetic magic: depicting an animal gave the hunter power over it, made the kill easier. In the eerie, torchlit, painted chambers, professional sorcerers led the hunters in ceremonial dances before the chase. Sometimes they hurled their spears...