Face of the 26,000-year-old woman!

[Neil]

By Damien Gayle

FIRST EVER portrait of a woman was carved into a tusk of a woolly mammoth (and it's smaller than a thumb)

 New Ice Age art show will include the earliest yet found representation of a woman's face. The 4.8cm tall carving is so detailed experts believe the subject may have suffered a stroke

Carved from a woolly mammoth tusk 26,000 years ago, the earliest portrait of a woman ever created is set to go on display at the British Museum.
 
The astonishing piece of art, smaller than a thumb at just 4.8cm high, was created in the middle of the last Ice Age, in a valley in what is now Moravia in the Czech Republic, using stone tools.
 
Experts believe it to be the earliest ever portrait of a woman and, among with a range of other ancient works of art, it is set to go on display at a groundbreaking new exhibition at the British Museum.

Ancient: The oldest known portrait of a woman. The 4.8cm work is sculpted from mammoth ivory and was found at Dolní Vestonice, Moravia, in the Czech Republic, it is around 26,000 years old
 
The show, entitled Ice Age Art: Arrival Of The Modern Mind, will juxtapose Ice Age art with modern works by the likes of Moore, Mondrian and Matisse to highlight how as far back as 40,000 years ago humans were already using figurative art to interpret their world.
 
Striking examples will be displayed as works of art rather than archaeological finds, alongside major works of modern art for comparison.
 
'All art is the product of the remarkable structure and organisation of the modern brain,' said Jill Cook, curator of the exhibition.
 
'By looking at the oldest European sculptures and drawings we are looking at the deep history of how our brains began to store, transform and communicate ideas as visual images.

'The exhibition will show that we can recognise and appreciate these images.

'Even if their messages and intentions are lost to us the skill and artistry will still astonish the viewer.'
 
Ms Cook told the Guardian of the Moravian portrait: 'The reason we say it is a portrait is because she has absolutely individual characteristics.
 
'She has one beautifully engraved eye; on the other, the lid comes just over and there's just a slit.

'Perhaps she had a stroke, or a palsy, or was injured in some way.
 
'In any case, she had a dodgy eye. And she has a dimple on her chin: this is an image of a real living woman.'


Also among the works on display is a 23,000-year-old sculpture of an abstract figure from Lespugue, France, which fascinated legendary Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and influenced his Thirties sculptural works.
 
Picasso was so fascinated with this ‘cubist’ piece, crafted from mammoth ivory, that he kept two copies of it.
 
The exhibition will show how figurative art first emerged in Europe in the midst of the Ice Age and that the people who created it were already capable not only of naturalistic expression, but also abstract representation.
 

A bison sculpted 20,000 years ago from mammoth ivory found at Zaraysk, Russia: Striking examples of Ice Age era European art will are set to go on display at the British Museum in a major new exhibition. They will be shown as works of art rather than archaeological finds, alongside major works of modern art for comparison
 
Fully modern people whose brains had evolved the complex super highway of the pre-frontal cortex began to arrive in Europe out of Africa just after 50,000 years ago.


At this time people lived by hunting, fishing and collecting food.


To protect themselves from the cold they wore clothes made of animal skins and furs.


Where they could they made camps under rock overhangs or in the entrances to caves but elsewhere they constructed complex settlements with tents and cabins made from animal skins supported on wooden post frames strengthened with mammoth bones.

Intricate: Faced with encounters with indigenous Neanderthal people and the rigours of periods of cold climate during the latter part of the last Ice Age, our ancestors began to draw and paint, as well as making models and sculpture. This tip of a mammoth tusk also found in Montastruc, France, is carved as two reindeer depicted one behind the other in this work work which is thought to be approximately 13,000 years old,
 
The portraits of three reindeer and an Ibex, engraved on a rib bone found in France's Courbet Cave: The care taken over the creation of Ice Age people's art shows how it was valued for providing a way of negotiating relationships within society, with nature and with the supernatural
 
Faced with encounters with indigenous Neanderthal people and the rigours of periods of cold climate during the latter part of the last Ice Age, they began to draw and paint, as well as making models and sculpture.
 
Their art shows that its creators had fully modern brains with complex synaptic links capable of storing, transmitting and analysing information through speech and visual symbols, British Museum experts said.
 
And the care taken over its creation shows how art was valued for providing a way of negotiating relationships within society, with nature and with the supernatural.

The opening section of the exhibition will establish the period of the last Ice Age, concentrating on the time 40,000 years ago when fully modern humans spread into Europe from Africa.
 
'New stimuli such as encounters with the indigenous population of Neanderthal people and the rigors of the cold climate at this time enabled their imaginations to flourish,' the museum said in a release.
 
'This resulted in the production of remarkable works of art, such as the famous painted caves in as Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira, as well as lesser known pieces made from stone, bone, antler and ivory

It was as the ancestors of modern Europeans struggled with the climate and strange terrain of their new home that figurative of the kind with which modern artists are associated with emerged on the continent.
 
The second section of the exhibition is devoted to some of the oldest figurative paintings and sculptures, including the Lespugue figure that Picasso loved.

'This figure demonstrates a visual brain capable of abstraction, the essential quality needed to acquire and manipulate knowledge which underpins our ability to analyse what we see,' Ms Cook said.
 
The third section of the exhibition will specifically examine how the female form has been represented - a constant theme of art made between 28,000 and 21,000 years ago.
 
Sculptures in ivory, stone and baked clay represent women of all ages, including detailed depictions of pregnancy, childbirth and obesity.
 
Throughout the exhibition works by modern artists from Picasso to Matisse will be included to establish the stylistic connections across time.
 

[Dryland]

From the way she's described, she sounds like a girl
I once knew 

[Val Beechey]

Some more to add to the collection of 'older than we thought' items.  It's nice to see a bit of lateral vision being added to the academic work by the book training that archies live by.
Goog post Neil, thats one exhibition I would like to see.

Val

[Napoleon]

  brigitte Bardot

[dances with badgers]

my mother in law ooooooh