Prehistoric Cave Painting—A Beautiful Oneness of Strength and Delicacy

What can the cave paintings drawn by prehistoric artists 35,000 years ago teach students today in 21st century classrooms? Through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, I am fortunate to be able to show my students that the purpose of art—from prehistoric to a modern abstraction—is to like the world through knowing it, and that art says something about the questions of our own lives! The basis of my lessons is this principle stated by Eli Siegel:

“The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” 

Strength and delicacy, power and precision are opposites in both the technique and meaning of art from its beginnings, including the earliest known record of man’s visual expression that began some 35,000 years ago deep inside the earth on cave walls. Using large flat bones for palettes, red and yellow clay for pigment, animal bristles and reeds for brushes, these early artists painted horses, deer, bison, bulls, and many other animals, with such precision that their species can be identified today.

In order for my art history students at LaGuardia High School for Music and Art to get a sense of how these images were placed on the cave wall we looked at the main hall of the cave at Lascaux, France. Students were in awe of how carefully these animals were studied by the early artists who observed and depicted them with great feeling and accuracy. In our textbook, Gardner’s Art Through The Ages, Helen Gardner writes that the stone-age artist attempted:

“to represent as convincing a pose and action as possible…The artist saw and recorded only those aspects that were essential to interpret the appearance and character of the animal—its grace, or awkwardness, its cunning, dignity or ferocity.”

We looked closely at a drawing from Niaux, France Deer and Head of a Horse, which dates from between c. 15,000 – 10,000 B.C.

I asked the students if they thought it was beautiful. They did. And I asked them to describe what they saw. Students observed how the line is strong, thick and dark; how it delineated the contour of the animal’s back yet is so delicate as it comes down around the deer’s tail. The precision of the line is powerful and also sensitive as it moves around the contour of the animal. It is never mechanical. It goes over soft flesh and hard bones—goes in and out, moves up and down, gets thick and thin, breaks off and continues, all to show what that prehistoric deer was.

We saw that opposites are throughout this drawing. The antlers have grace and power. They are a oneness of gentle curve and sharp point. The heavy body of the deer is supported upon slender, delicate legs. The thick strong line of the back is gracefully contoured. A graceful, sweeping diagonal joins deer and horse. The line itself is both soft and firm. 

I asked: “Is this drawing a beautiful oneness of strength and delicacy, power and exactness?” The class agreed: It is! It’s not delicate for two inches and strong for the next two inches. I told my students that these prehistoric paintings were beautiful for the same reason art of any age is beautiful. “All beauty,” Eli Siegel is the critic who explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” And art, I learned, is the greatest opponent to contempt because an artist wants to see meaning in the things of the world and to express them with form and respect. 

Seeing how strength and delicacy, power and precision were one in this cave painting affected my students very much, including several young men, who liked showing how tough they were. They thought being sensitive made them weak and vulnerable. Students long to be both strong and graceful, and they suffer because they feel they can’t be. This is a question teachers have too. We feel we have to be strong and then feel awful because we don’t feel we’re kind. I was once asked in an Aesthetic Realism consultation: “Do you have a ‘gentle’ attitude and a ‘fist’ attitude?  Have you been unkind in both ways?” I had been! And I learned that in every instance of successful art, opposites are working well together. 

I asked my students “Would it have been possible for early stone-age artists to paint these animals with that oneness of grace and strength, power and delicacy, 1) if they didn’t have these possibilities in themselves; and 2) if they didn’t observe these qualities in the animals?” The answer was a resounding, “NO!”

Students who can feel painfully separate from the people they see every day were moved to think about the feelings of a person who lived 35,000 years ago. As they saw they were related through the opposites to people so far back in time, what was far away and strange came to have immediate meaning for their lives.

They came to have a great care for these paintings and have a great respect for the mind of early man who painted them. And they began to think about the people they knew in a deeper, kinder way, including each other.

“When you think about how long ago these paintings were done,” wrote Grisel, “and how they were trying to make sense of what they saw in the world, this gives me a feeling of closeness to people.” And Tyshona was excited to see that “People thousands and thousands of years before me were trying to fulfill the same things I am.”

The ancient artist—like the modern artist and like us—was trying to put opposites together. What an artist long ago did beautifully in these cave paintings we now can learn from. The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method has enabled my students and me—through the meaning and technique of art—to have large emotions about beauty, and to have a new respect for the world and for all people, of the past and now.

This article appeared in ArtBeat, the magazine of the Art Educators of New Jersey,
Volume 2, Fall 2010, p. 4-5