STONE AGE ART

30,000 B.C. - 476 A.D.

From the beginning of time, man has used art to capture impressions of the surrounding world. Perhaps the search for beauty and understanding is part of our very being. It has certainly served us well on the journey from prehistoric to modern times. Primitive paintings on cave walls in present-day France and Spain present the world as our earliest ancestors saw it. Animals. Mountains. Sky. All in richly-colored, flat, two-dimensional shapes. We have traveled far from the caves of 2,000,000 B.C., yet many elements of our most contemporary art forms echo this simple time. The layers of complexity between the cave paintings of Lascaux and the paintings of Paul Gauguin tell the story of our world and our civilization.