Discussion Post

Art History

[Author Name(s), First M. Last, Omit Titles and Degrees]

Cave of La Madeleine is a famous artifact of the Paleolithic Age. In 1864, an image of a mammoth on a bone plate was discovered in the cave of La Madeleine (France), which showed that people of this remote time not only lived together with a mammoth, but also reproduced this animal in their drawings. Eleven years later, in 1875, the cave paintings of Altamira (Spain), which struck the researchers, were unexpectedly discovered, followed by many others. But the existence of the cave art of the ancient stone age was still disputed for a long time, until the accumulation of facts put an end to all doubts (Bar-Yosef, 2002).

Patiently collected by researcher’s new factual material completely undermined the attempts of a number of theorists to isolate art from society, to search for its beginnings in the animal world or to assert the primordial nature of the artistic feeling in humans. The accumulation of factual material also proved conclusively that art did not arise, as idealistically-minded art critics argued, suddenly and unexpectedly, in blinding brilliance, that its source was not at all the case and not the genius of the “chosen race”. The emergence of primitive art was prepared by hundreds of thousands of years of development of society and labor, in the course of which there was a progressive change in the nature of man himself, his senses and abilities. The development and improvement of the human hand was of great importance (Duarte, 1999).

In labor, a person developed speech and thinking, learned to reproduce the forms of things he needed according to a predetermined plan, which was the main prerequisite for creative activity in the field of art. In the course of the development of social and labor activity, finally, specific needs arose, which gave rise to the emergence of art as a special sphere of social consciousness and human activity. The first grain of art was sown, as we saw, at the end of the Mousterian time. These prerequisites and the beginnings of art were not in vain. They brought rich shoots when a man passed the Neanderthal phase and ascended to a new, qualitatively different, higher stage of his development.

To conclude, in the Upper Paleolithic, the technique of hunting is complicated. Housebuilding is emerging, a new way of life is taking shape. In the course of the maturing of the tribal system, the primitive community becomes stronger and more complicated in its structure. Along with these general achievements in the development of culture, the specifically important fact that the people of the Upper Paleolithic began to make wide use of the bright colors of natural mineral colors was also of great importance for the emergence and further growth of art. He also mastered the new ways of processing soft stone and bone, which opened before him previously unknown possibilities of transmitting the phenomena of the surrounding reality in plastic form - in sculpture and carving.

References

Bar-Yosef, O. (2002). The upper paleolithic revolution. Annual review of anthropology, 31(1), 363-393.

Duarte, C., Maurício, J., Pettitt, P. B., Souto, P., Trinkaus, E., Van Der Plicht, H., & Zilhão, J. (1999). The early Upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96(13), 7604-7609.