Ice Age Art at the British Museum: 'Not even Leonardo surpassed this'

British Museum art show Ice Age is full of wonders and mysteries. But showing them with modern works really shed light on these ancient masterpieces?

am looking for a woman with soft breasts, hips and faces without eyes wide. Your body is profoundly alien - disturbing in its total lack of what the modern world considers desirable. Nearby, the British Museum has installed two naked Matisse, one of many in this exhibition attempts to draw a parallel between the first and the art of our time. But this comparison only adds to the anxiety. To put it in language no archaeologist is likely to use:. Curves of a woman are sexy Matisse, projections and blanknesses these bare carved ivory in central Europe 30,000 years ago, are not

Then, something catches my eye: a bison sculpture, created 21,000 years ago. This is so true, so alive, I can almost hear him breathing and seal. It has the same magical presence, exciting realism itself, as I have also seen paintings, dating from the Ice Age: the images of mammoths, horses and bison. So why the artists chose to represent human beings with abstraction so strange? This is one of the mysteries that make this show so strange and intoxicating.

Ice Age Art is subtitled arrival of the modern mind. His thesis is that 40,000 years ago, when humans migrated out of Africa in a relatively temperate Europe, and were captured after thousands of years amid freezing temperatures and large hairy beasts of last frost, something miraculous happened. Art appeared: as sophisticated, it is shown that if cognitive abilities we today have evolved completely tens of thousands of years (the works here were made between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago). Only a mind of modern man, they said, could create a masterpiece that bison Zaraysk (name of city, near Moscow, where it was discovered). But this show is not only an encounter with modern minds first. It also reveals how these spirits were singular and mysterious. Why make art? Why numbers to resemble animals and women?

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first created in Europe laptops included works such as sculptures and engravings on this program, paints, which obviously have to stay. This gives the Conservatives a difficult task: how to display the first and last, while avoiding convey a sense of exposure to dust archeology. One solution is to juxtapose ancient ivory carvings of modernist works like a Henry Moore sculpture and drawing Mondrian. This is mistaken. The work of 20th century avant-garde echo ice - not to mention African masks, statues Oceania - because artists such as Picasso chose to imitate what their mind freed Western realism. These couples tells us nothing about the Ice Age and are a source of distraction.

The first exhibition here is a sculpture of a woman, carved ivory bulbous symmetry summary about 23,000 years. It was found in the cave Lespugue Curtains, France, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Known Lespugue Venus Picasso was fascinated, and his two replicas can be seen in a photo next to this exquisite sculpture. But what that Picasso loved what it reveals art of carving ice age? As the use of African masks tells companies that produced them. It feels like I liked: the presence of modern art assures us that we are looking for a fresh and current exposure - not just some intellectual depth in the old bundle. God forbid they should ask themselves to think outside of our cultural bubble.

• Unlike Matisse, Moore, Picasso and Mondrian, the creators of Ice Age art belonged to a world where people hunted for survival, but depicts animals that have disappeared, and they lived in a world no cities, writing and agriculture. These Ice Age humans could be biologically like us, but had ideas can only guess. Women who carved ivory, and even molded the clay in the valley of the Danube, are quite enigmatic. Maybe fertility goddesses? This question simply reflects the fact that it is difficult to associate after erotic nude images. I do not even know if they were carved by men or women, there is no proof. There is no reason to believe that the first artists were women. These figures may be emblems of matriarchal power

small human faces appear in this show are "the oldest portrait of a woman," as the title of a small art gallery in the Czech Republic made 26,000 years. Woman disfigured eye suggests it is an individual portrait, drawn from life. But the probability seems to be an exception: the human body in this exhibition are highly abstract, while the animals are accurately represented Gobsmacking - from drawings of reindeer lions carved in ivory. Although humans have done better than anyone - not even Leonardo - overcame these portraits of animals from the cold. The first cave paintings discovered in the 19th century, were rejected as false: it seemed too good to be the work of "savages." Today, dating techniques have silenced doubts.

So what we do works that fuse animals and humans? The oldest object here is the Lion Man a. Carve reconstructed from fragments found in the cave Stadel in the German Alps nearly 40,000 years, the human figure with lion head stands, smoking dreams, terrorists, magic rituals and myths. It makes me think Egyptian gods with animal heads, with its air of supernatural. Meanwhile, a video installation explores the world of intelligent man Leon. In a dark room, images of caves of Pech Merle and Chauvet flash through the rock like surfaces, hesitantly, as if the light of the fire in which these paintings were first seen. The effect is exciting, a great improvement on the pictures:. We see herds of horses, pictures of lions, as if we were in the caves

In the next room, which intensifies the feeling of idolatry. The sculpted head of a musk ox trades shade, surrounded by stone reliefs of galloping horses, it's like a cult image. What is the real star ice age animals art? This may be because this art reflects a long-lost religious belief he saw animals as supernatural beings, divine beings, gods. The first artists did not depict horses, but the spirits of horses. It seems very plausible, as South Africa archaeologist David Lewis-Williams argues in his book The Ghost in the cave, these artists were shamans who have worked in a trance.

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