Reply To: Prehistoric Abstraction

[ckocsis]

Although it’s impossible to know the intent behind making these pieces of art and whether or not they were intentionally abstracted, I believe that they were. The skill required to make a lot of these pieces, like the Venus of Willendorf, makes me think that if the artist wanted the figurine to be realistic, they could have easily done it. Also, in this figurine, the female form is abstracted in a way to accentuate the parts of the body that would be most important for reproduction. This also implies that this was intentional abstraction. Another example of this would be the Lascaux cave paintings, where the meaty part of the animals bodies are accentuated and the heads and legs, parts I would think were less important to prehistoric people, are minimized.