Ice Age art now

A beautifully illustrated book that demonstrates how artistic creativity existed thousands of years before traditional art histories suggest, as an essential part of human life.

Ice Age art now presents extraordinary drawn and sculpted images from the final 20,000 years of the last Ice Age in the British Museum’s collection. These astounding works, some dating back to around 23,000 years ago, reveal the deep roots of drawing, sculpture and modelling in the era of the great painted caves of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. This period may be described as a renaissance in the applied and fine arts of people who had narrowly avoided extinction in the harsh cold of the Last Glacial Maximum, who then asserted their ways of life through art. Seven thematic sections explore specific artworks, highlighting the skill and vision of artists through objects such as an ingeniously sculpted spear thrower made around 13,500 years ago in the form of a mammoth (illustrated above). The final section delves into the alternative world of a painted cave.

The imagery in this book conjures up a lost time when people were part of and dependent on nature and showed their respect for it through beautiful, closely observed images of animals. Although the materials supporting the works may be different, techniques of composing, drawing and shading, as well as abstracting and animating, are achieved in the same ways. As a reminder of this, historical and contemporary works by Francisco de Goya, Rembrandt van Rijn, Henri Matisse and Maggi Hambling are included to encourage new ways of seeing.