Blog: Ice Age Art Now

As we look forward to the opening of Ice Age Art Now at Cliffe Castle Museum, British Museum curator Jill Cook introduces the themes of the exhibition.

The British Museum’s 2013 show Ice Age art: The arrival of the modern mind, which brought together sculptures, models and engraved drawings from across Europe, was a revelation. Despite academic awareness of the imagery displayed and tourism to the famous painted caves of France and Spain, the works shown had been considered niche and barely acknowledged in mainstream art history. The exhibition changed this. Now exhibiting sculptures, models, ornaments and drawings dating between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age reflects the acceptance of their significance in the long history of art. The invitation to the British Museum to provide an exhibition of Ice Age art as a contribution to Bradford’s celebration of its designation as City of Culture 2025, marks this shift.

Ice Age Art Now will be staged in the central rotunda at Cliffe Castle in Keighley from June to September this year. All the objects are from the BM’s collection, with a trail connecting them to the displays in Cliffe Castle’s permanent galleries forming a web around it. As the strengths of the BM collection are based on the last 20,000 years of the last Ice Age in western Europe, the show focuses on that period of renaissance which followed the harsh, dry cold period of the last glacial maximum about 23,000 years ago, when European populations reached the verge of extinction due to habitat change and severe climate conditions. As the climate warmed new lifestyles emerged in which self-awareness, metaphor, symbol and aesthetics spilled out into drawings, sculptures, decorated tools, weapons, jewellery and complex patterns. These were not crucial to the physical survival of human groups but then, as now, art contributed to their psychological and emotional wellbeing, helping to establish strong social bonds essential to sustaining their ways of life.

As visitors enter the exhibition, regulars to Cliffe Castle will encounter a familiar figure with whom they usually engage in the entrance hall. This is Roosevelt bear, a 1.2m American standing stuffed teddy gifted to the former owners of the house in the early 20th century and named after the 26th president of the US who had declined to shoot a tethered bear on a hunt in Mississippi and unwittingly started a craze for soft bears. It is hoped that the familiar, family-friendly sight of Roosevelt dressed in a hat, tie and waistcoat, will put people at ease with a subject that might seem daunting. More than this, he reflects the uneasy relationship between people and wild animals visualised to calm fears, offer respect and acknowledge unspoken bonds sometimes broken by killing, mitigated by sadness, apology and affection through the cuddly, safely accessible replica. Such feelings may also have motivated some Ice Age image making.

Roosevelt directs the visitor to the first object, which is a stone artefact. This is after all about a period popularly known as the Stone Age, but whereas this old-fashioned description calls up ideas of simple stone tools, the display presents a masterpiece of the stone workers’ art. The 24,000-year-old Volgu point is 28 centimetres long and wafer thin. It was found in a cache of sixteen points all made from a block of high-quality flint sourced some 150 kilometres away from the site in Saône et-Loire, France. The way in which the point has been skilfully shaped by removing long shallow flakes from each face gives an attractive rippled effect and thin, sharp, slightly serrated edges. There is no damage on the delicate tip or sides of the piece which, had it ever been hafted or used, would be chipped and broken. The maker envisaged this elegant symmetrical form within the lump of stone then followed a complex sequence of actions to release and finish it. This is the same brain-eye-hand process that is always required for making a sculpture, creatively conceiving, visualising and materialising an idea. It shows the intellectual ability to create a concept over and above a utilitarian implement. The point’s aesthetic qualities perhaps relate to ideas of power, wealth, status and relationships between the maker or owner, wider social groups and supernatural agencies. Made in the era when artists started painting images in the caves of Lascaux, France and Altamira, Spain, as well as engraving drawings outside on the extensive rock surfaces of the Coa Valley, Portugal, this remarkable treasure is a good starting point for the ensuing era of visual imagery revealed in the exhibition.

The main arc of the display groups objects according to drawings, sculpture, decorated tools and weapons, personal ornaments, patterns and female representations, before introducing the tools used on the portable imagery on view in daily life, as well as the lamps, paints and crayons used in the darkness of caves. Visitors will leave through a darkened space with an installation throwing images and signs onto an uneven ‘rock’ wall with a soundscape evocative of the inside of a decorated cave. They will then exit into Cliffe’s galleries to follow a trail connecting the loan objects to local history and natural history, such as birds and animals extant in the area since the Ice Age, as well as mammoth and reindeer remains from Creswell Caves, which were reoccupied as climate started to improve some 13,500 years ago. More recent rock art from the hills around the town extends the theme of patterns into a landscape topographically shaped by the Ice Ages with habitats later modified by the inward migration of the first farmers six to seven thousand years ago. The high Victorian drawing room evokes the discovery of ancient history and the shaping of attitudes about non European and past ‘others’, while the lithophone, a musical percussion instrument with graduated stone keys struck with sticks, in the conservatory is a reminder of the Ice Age soundscape and the music that accompanied the imagery.

The loan exhibition of 75 Ice Age objects in the rotunda includes a selection of historic and contemporary works which, being more familiar to the modern audience, provide ways of seeing and enjoying Ice Age skills and creativity.

The drawings of animals at the start of the exhibition might almost be seen as a field guide to Ice Age wildlife in western Europe at the end of the Ice Age. Bison, horse, ibex and reindeer are most common and reflect a habitat in which the numbers of animals present in large herds significantly exceeded those of the scattered groups of people who depended on them for food and various raw materials from bone and antlers to pelts, sinew, gut and stomach contents. This dependency fostered familiarity, which shows in the brilliance with which a few confident lines engraved with stone tools into bone, antler or stone instantly convey the character of an animal.

The simple realism of a bull bison positioned on the broad, flat palmate part of the top of a reindeer antler dominates the negative space, making his powerful stance recognisable and characteristic of his alpha status as he makes a bid to mate. The artist’s empathy with the subject is clear and relays the intimate, observed knowledge of individual animals in a hunter’s territory, also evident in a group of empathic reindeer portraits with an ibex engraved on a bone. Realism is also evident in the precise drawings of a young reindeer which has survived the first dangerous months of life but is bleating after its mother as the characteristic features of its pelt emerge and its antlers start into growth.

Similarly, the solitary life of the ferocious wolverine constantly moving through the landscape in search of food is superbly evoked on a bone pendant. The body of the animal is carefully shaded with tiny oblique incisions to show the colour variations in its valuable fur coat using techniques like that seen thousands of years later in the printed engraving of Goya’s anteater.

Such images are seen in three dimensions on the so-called swimming reindeer sculpture of a male following a female reindeer made on the tip of a mammoth tusk, a bison modelled from clay staged underground in the cave of Tuc d’Audoubert, Ariège, France, as well as engraved or presented in low relief on tools and weapons. The latter may reflect individual or group identities or perhaps beliefs. The inclusion of fish sometimes schematised into patterns is notable because while fish also provided food and materials, they, unlike humans, live in water and may migrate seasonally to places unknown, occupying a mysterious realm of the cosmos within which they might serve as spiritual avatars.

Informed by the research of BM curator Claire Lucas, it is inferred that the use of intricate engraved and relief patterns on objects follows basic rules of layout and the conjugations of elements such as raised shapes, crescent forms and groups of oblique lines varies between groups of sites and regions. Although less evocative or empathetic than figurative drawings, patterns may have communicated in ways that words and brand symbolism do now, suggesting identities, promoting social bonds, commemorating ancestry or acknowledging occasions. Like the remarkable range of beads and pendants among the personal ornaments they may reflect aspects of identity, social engagement and a sense of wellbeing essential for a celebration of life despite its practical rigours. Plus ça change? Human nature shows through these arts.

Ice Age Art Now is at Cliffe Castle Museum from 21 June to 14 September as part of the Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture programme. A book of the same name by Jill Cook will be published to accompany the exhibition: www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/ice-age-art-now.html