Prehistory, a modern enigma

Presentation by the curators

With this new exhibition the Centre Pompidou puts the spotlight on the link uniting prehistory to modern and contemporary art. In the course of a chronological tour, discover how artists and society have experienced the attraction of our origins during the modern period, yielding to a fantasy vision of what existed before history. A rich collection of more than three hundred works and documents, some specially created for the occasion, shows how prehistoric art established itself not only as an object of fascination but also as a concrete model for varying kinds of experiences. Discover, alongside iconic prehistoric works like the Venus of Lespugue and the Mammoth of the Madeleine, the works of essential modern artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cézanne and Marguerite Duras, and contemporary artists like Dove Allouche, Pierre Huyghe and Giuseppe Penone. This vast body of works is also complemented by films and books such as Jurassic Park and La Guerre du feu, evoking the dissemination of prehistory in popular culture.

Prehistory is a modern concept: the word itself was not definitively established until the 1860s. The corresponding reality was built up progressively in the course of the 19th century as an indistinguishable mass of discoveries, opinions and fantasies. We can distinguish three major stages: the growing awareness of the long duration of earthly life through the analysis of fossils at the turn of the 19th century; the new understanding in the early 1860s of human prehistory, both from the point of view of the species and the emergence of techniques and arts; and lastly, the specific recognition of parietal art at the dawn of the 20th century, establishing the decorated caves of the Upper Palaeolithic era as essential references in our imaginary world. In the 20th century this great mass of images, hypotheses and speculations had an immense effect on collective culture and individual creation. Not only prehistoric art (or that described as such) but also, more generally, the concept of prehistory as such, profoundly modified our representations. The revelation of an earth without humankind, followed by a slow process of hominization led people to consider, symmetrically, the possible extinction of humanity. The transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies (Palaeolithic era) to more sedentary farmer-breeder societies (Neolithic era) gave rise to considerations concerning humanity’s assumption of power over the environment, leading to the industrial era.

Nourished by archaeological discoveries, but far from simply reflecting on them, this common idea of prehistory exceeded its strict scientific definition based on the emergence of humanity up until the invention of writing. Functioning as a powerful machine for stirring up time, it modelled the mental horizons of modernity. It encompassed different events, like geological upheavals, the beginning of life, extinct species, the first hominids and the lost cultures of the Palaeolithic era and the Neolithic revolution. And through it, forces were brought to bear that drew their fecundity from their very contradictions: the need for deconstruction and for reform; the desire to leave history and for total immersion in it; calls for revolution and apocalyptic panic.
Since Cézanne, innumerable artists have been haunted by this question, with a concrete, continuing and constantly renewed attraction for fantasised origins: Jean Arp, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso; Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Jean Dubuffet, Marguerite Duras, Barbara Hepworth, Yves Klein and Robert Smithson; and, among our contemporaries, Dove Allouche, Miquel Barceló, Tacita Dean, Marguerite Humeau, Pierre Huyghe, Giuseppe Penone, etc.

The contemporary echoes of major prehistoric sites –beginning with the painted caves at Lascaux, Mas-d’Azil and Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc – and the formation of a prehistoric iconography from the19th to the 21st century, has already given rise to exhibitions in the wake of the two seminal events, in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1937 and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1948. However, the question of the invention of the concept of prehistory and its effects on modern and contemporary art had not yet been the subject of an overall exhibition. "Primitivism", as it was presented in the MoMA exhibition in 1984, and continually debated, did not include prehistory which, in fact, is fundamentally different from it. For the modern western world, the "primitive" is generally rooted in specific cultures, usually described as exotic; the question of temporality is secondary to its geographical and cultural otherness. Prehistory, on the other hand, is seen above all as an indefinitely stretched time span, and thus largely indecipherable (whether in terms of nature or the first human cultures). The indistinct nature of its content is paradoxically what makes it fascinating: the primordial feeling that comes to the fore is that of a temporal gulf that radically overturns our dream of mastering linear time, as 19th century historicism chose to formulate it. This is also what leads us to position prehistory in a universal dimension: to look to prehistory is to seek to apprehend shared structures, functions, actions and symbolic processes, while constantly reinventing them in the absence of sufficiently clear documents to interpret them. For this reason, the exhibition "Prehistory, a modern enigma" prioritizes the broadest possible cultural approach in which emblematic prehistoric works and documents tracing the progressive invention of this concept of prehistory are contrasted with modern and contemporary creation.
The chronological tour opens with a preamble that takes us back to the turn of the 20th century (Paul Cézanne, Odilon Redon). In landscape, Cézanne detected traces of ante-historic movements that radically transformed his perception. The earth came to life and human figures blended into it. During those same years, feeling "the weight of the end of time", Odilon Redon drew the hallucinatory forms of his collection Les Origines, half-way between Darwin and Pascal. The tour continues with a central core extending from the 1930s (Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, and others) to the 1980s (notably with Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Lucio Fontana, Robert Morris, A. R. Penck, Robert Smithson) and concluding with a contemporary part (Dove Allouche, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Carl Andre, Andrea Branzi, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tacita Dean, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Dov Ganchrow, Michael Heizer, Marguerite Humeau, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jaccard, Christian Kerez, Bertrand Lavier, Richard Long, Wim Wenders and others).

In the course of this progression, our thoughts and eyes are directed toward different subjects: the depth of time; earth without humans, imagined before and after history; the relationship between humanity and animality ("Humans and Animals"); the question of the body and techniques ("Gestures and Tools"); the fantasy of the cave and its archaeological reality; different visions of the Neolithic revolution ("Neolithic Eras"); and lastly, contemporary inspiration, between apocalyptic games and ecological issues ("Prehistoric Presents"). Some themes are recurrent in today’s art, sometimes continuing on from previous generations – the depth of time, short-circuiting temporal distances, the silence of interpretation – and others are sometimes specific to the anthropological crisis we are going through, in a dramatic redefinition of our relationship with the earth, with techniques and with plant, animal and human life. The focus on discovering unknown realms of thought and life is built up from and with the idea of this unknown earth that is, structurally, prehistory.

All this is punctuated by the presentation of major prehistoric evidence: fossils, sculptures and Palaeolithic engravings (e.g. The Venus of Lespugue and the Mammoth of la Madeleine), hewn or polished stone tools, and anthropomorphic Neolithic figures.
Lastly, a cultural thread is spun out at the same time, illustrating the progressive formation of interpretations of prehistory and their popular dissemination with the results of excavations and investigations, as well as "prehistoric" novels and cult films representing this mythology of origins The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933) etc.

Exhibition curators

Cécile Debray, Director of the Musée de l'Orangerie

Rémi Labrusse, professor of Art History, Université Paris Nanterre

Maria Stavrinaki, lecturer in Art history, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne

In Code couleur n°34, may-august 2019, p. 6-11