fThere are three possible foundation dates for the beginning of modernism in art, which miraculously do not conflict: 1907, 1937 or around 37,000 BC. But all three are based on the art of prehistoric times. With Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”, completed and exhibited in 1907, with their carved facial masks and bodies dissolved in lines, it was always known that they had their origin in African masks enthusiastically collected by the painter, which in turn had their precursors in Stone Age stylizations of the human have face and body.
The director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York where Picasso’s prehistoric “Demoiselles” hang today, the legendary Alfred Barr, “only” had to complete his last thirty in his epochal exhibition “Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa” in 1937 Bringing years of art production together with that of the past thirty thousand: He placed the prehistoric images, above all of the African continent and Europe, next to the paintings of modern and surrealist artists, and lo and behold – the supposed zeroing of modernity by liberation from any tradition was not at all – rather that appeared Back to the origins of human artistic creation as a massive return to the pictorial worlds of the ancestors tens of thousands of years before the era.
The Big Bang of modern art happened 40,000 years ago
All these three founding legends are now presented in the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt. The universal collection from the pre-past to the so-called Beuys block does not exaggerate when it presents its large exhibition with 43 modern masterpieces from Paul Klee to Jean Arp and from Pablo Picasso to Willi Baumeister with the astronomically extended hyper-chronology “Big Bang of Art”. titled, because modern painting actually comes to a large extent from this. The amazing thing is that even the oldest artefacts found so far, such as the lion man carved out of ivory from the World Heritage Cave Hohle Fels in the Swabian Jura, as well as the palm-sized mammoth from the Vogelherd Cave there, with internal drawing engraved into the body and subtly indicated movement, are so artistic that they should actually have chronological predecessors on which they build.
But how did the artists at the MoMA exhibition in 1937 get hold of these models if, like Picasso, they didn’t stock up on African masks from flea markets or dark springs? It is mainly due to the ethnologists and cultural scientists interested in early history, such as Aby Warburg at the beginning of the 20th century, who concertedly examined and published the paintings of the increasing number of primeval caves found worldwide. The Berlin ethnologist Leo Frobenius was outstanding here. In almost thirty expeditions from 1905 to 1935, he researched the cave paintings of Europe (especially Scandinavia and the petroglyphs of the Lombard Valcamonica), Africa (his north, which was still fertile in the early days, but also Sudan and Congo) and his differently composed artist teams Asia (especially Papua in Indonesia), where more than eight thousand painted reproductions of this surprisingly diverse world of images were made on sometimes adventurous bamboo scaffolding, up to five meters high, at eye level with the rock carvings.
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