Thousands of years ago, before reading and writing appeared, or until languages formed, Neanderthals attempted to write down their history in a simple way through which we today in the twenty-first century see how he lived, and what is the nature of his life.
Simple carvings, pictures of wild animals, hunting tools, and copies of human hands drawn on the walls of caves that show us a lot about Neanderthal life.
The Stone Age man, like the modern day man, was in need of beauty or visual pleasure, and he wanted to decorate his abode, so he engraved and painted on the walls of the caves pictures that narrate the nature of religious rites, hunting rituals, and prey forms such as antelopes, deer, and even predators, and these were the most common representations.
Art historian Matthew A. Macintosh states that the art of the Stone Age represents the first achievements in human creativity before the invention of writing, and that what distinguishes those drawings - which is called prehistoric art - is that they were drawn in an abstract manner inclined to realism.
The stone age man forty thousand years ago or more tended to use simple lines to draw the elements of the story that he wanted to record on the walls of the caves, the main feature of prehistoric art is the spontaneous depiction of the observed elements.
According to Macintosh, human beings in that period and for the first time began to produce permanent artworks to express themselves and their lives without any other purpose serving their desire to survive.
Portraits of humans for themselves in that period were rare, and usually of a symbolic nature, so copies of the hands' paws themselves were very common, and the colors used in that period were red and yellow pigments of manganese or black carbon, and they were applied using the fingers of the hand.
Common artistic features
The same “language of the picture” - as Macintosh put it - appeared again from the late nineteenth century until the late twentieth, as a huge part of formation in modern art were spontaneous expressions and hot colors that tended to be excessively simple trying to express feelings And emotions in a subjective style without being bound by any realism, and this is evident in the production of artistic movements such as expressive, expressive, abstract and cubic.
"At critical moments in the history of modern art, painters have returned to using pre-historic artistic techniques to push art forward, to new and exciting areas," said archaeologist George Nash, who believes that the social, economic, political, and ritual backgrounds that prompted artists to sculpt and paint In modern times it is similar to that which prompted humans to engrave and draw on prehistoric rocks.
Both teams wanted to express what could stand in his chest and say, by drawing, "I was here, I have witnessed this and that."
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the movements of modern art began to tend towards free expression in paintings, and successive artistic movements have emerged that are a clear reflection of a situation in which modern humans lived. The world of modernity, even if it witnessed the decline of metaphysics in the interest of modern scientific theories, has paved the way for the emergence of postmodernism. .
Perhaps the most prominent thing that combines prehistoric and postmodern art is the state of wandering in which people of both ages lived in search of meaning for the world and desperate attempts to reach God in the midst of fierce daily battles for survival.
If a prehistoric person struggles to survive in extreme harsh natural and environmental conditions, then modern man struggles in the midst of global wars, trying to find a meaning that justifies existence itself.
Quoted graphics
For example, Pablo Picasso - one of the most famous pioneers of modern art - relied on many of his expressive illustrations of bullfighting on the style of cave art, and he believed that this metaphorical method was more capable and eloquent in expressing the symbolic intricacies of any artwork.
Also, the Mexican artist Rovina Tamayo, in the "Angry Puppy" 1983 painting, adopted a mixture of graphic techniques in an abstract (spiritual) expressionistic style to tell the story of attacking a dog just like the cave paintings in Choufeau, France.
According to Google for art and culture, Cubists tended to paint people and objects in the form of geometric figures, believing that this deeply spiritual expression of the nature of the human soul, and they were influenced by pre-historic African arts, most of which were simple shapes on a two-dimensional surface.
Prehistoric art was a great source of inspiration for many of the movements of modern art, and it can be said that these movements were found in the excessive simplicity that Neanderthals used in expressing a means of expressing the very complex disorders of the twentieth century.
Sometimes the effect of cave paintings on contemporary art is so evident that it is difficult to distinguish between them, according to Google for Art and Culture.