(Ebook) What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity by Jean Clottes ISBN 9781518240973, 1518240976

(Ebook) What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity by Jean Clottes ISBN 9781518240973, 1518240976

Was it a trick of the light that drew our Stone Age ancestors into caves
to paint in charcoal and red hematite, to watch the heads of lions,
likenesses of bison, horses, and aurochs in the reliefs of the walls, as
they flickered by firelight? Or was it something deeper—a creative
impulse, a spiritual dawn, a shamanistic conception of the world
efflorescing in the dark, dank spaces beneath the surface of the earth
where the spirits were literally at hand? In this book, Jean Clottes,
one of the most renowned figures in the study of cave paintings, pursues
an answer to this “why” of Paleolithic art. While other books focus on
particular sites and surveys, Clottes’s work is a contemplative journey
across the world, a personal reflection on how we have viewed these
paintings in the past, what we learn from looking at them across
geographies, and what these paintings may have meant—what function they
may have served—for their artists. Steeped in Clottes’s shamanistic
theories of cave painting, What Is Paleolithic Art? travels from
well-known Ice Age sites like Chauvet, Altamira, and Lascaux to visits
with contemporary aboriginal artists, evoking a continuum between the
cave paintings of our prehistoric past and the living rock art of today.
Clottes’s work lifts us from the darkness of our Paleolithic origins to
reveal, by firelight, how we think, why we create, why we believe, and
who we are.