Thirty-five thousand years BCE

Such moments of innovation, of ebullience, of creative engagement with the surrounding environment are rare. You have to go a long way back in history to find them. And for the very first of such moments you need to go back thirty-five thousand years – and to the walls of caverns rather than the sides of subway cars.

I wish I’d been with the speleologist Jean-Marie Chauvet in December 1994 when he and two companions entered the cavern in the Ardèche that now bears his name. The Chauvet cave, hidden by a rock slide for millennia, turned out to contain the oldest examples of pre-historic paintings yet found: the limestone walls teem with vivid charcoal and ochre renderings of rhinoceros, bear, lion, mammoth, bison, ibex, aurochs, reindeer and other prehistoric creatures. A quirk of climate and geology has preserved these paintings perfectly, so that they look as though they were made yesterday. Yet they are thirty-five thousand years old, twice as ancient as most of those at the Lascaux caves in Spain, hitherto the most celebrated of European stone age sites. The draftsmanship of the Chauvet paintings – if an aesthetic judgment makes sense – is perceptibly more accomplished than those at Lascaux. And the Chauvet paintings are much older – though not more beautiful – than the Tassili frescoes in Algeria, or any of the vast treasury of rock paintings in Southern Africa.

Unfortunately for us – but fortunately for the future of these paintings – neither you nor I, nor any of the holiday makers walking and canoeing in the Ardèche today, in the landscape where rhino and mammoth and reindeer once roamed, will now be allowed into the Chauvet cave. For conservation purposes it has been locked and bolted, as the Lascaux cave has been. The paintings, however, are now published in book form. They really are extraordinary. Even at second hand, there is a thrill in this glimpse of the birth of representation, here in the original cave of making, the moment when the spark of art became a flame.

The paintings are made in a fluent style, often employing a single, continuous, flowing line, incorporating techniques of perspective that vanished after the Ice Age, and did not reappear in western art, as far as is known, until the Renaissance. It’s a bit daft that Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose draftsmanship has rather less to be said for it, should be making more waves than the publication of the Chauvet paintings, works that have a yet unchallenged claim to be the earliest art in the world.

5 April 1996 ★