Strenuous Eden
Picturing rocks in Valcamonica and Darmstadt.
Once the glacier left and the valley greened, humans came and carved themselves into Valcamonica.
All of this began to happen in Lombardy about 12,000 years ago. At first, the valley was hunted. Elk and deer were there, as were fish in a river now dammed. Later, its birch and pine slopes became settled. Writing as BC turned into AD, the geographer Strabo calls these alpinists the Camunni. He doesn’t say much more.
The pictures the Camunni left in their valley over thousands of years tell their own stories. We see the elk get killed off and ploughs turn up, weapons change, and new symbols appear. Figures raise their hands in combat and in prayer. A Celtic deity with his own set of antlers, carved into a rock in the sixth century BCE, suggests that this remote spot got visitors.
Valcamonica runs down from the Alps north to south. Two mountains leaning over each side of the valley get in the way of the sun. To see the carvings, it is better to go to the eastern side in the raking morning light, and west in the afternoon. At the wrong time of day there will be nothing to see but rocks polished smooth by slow-moving ice.
Boulders falling into the valley were also carved where they lay, and then carved again. On this boulder in the hamlet of Cemmo, stone tools were used to peck a megalithic menagerie into shape.
Daggers carved over some of the animals make them into less familiar beasts.
Locals called this menhir the “stone of the puppets” (Preda dei pitoti), and in 1930 the first photographs of it were published. As the ‘30s wore on, thousands of petroglyphs were unearthed from their moss and sod coverings.
Leo Frobenius, an ethnologist with his own research institute in Frankfurt, sent out his band of illustrators to document the carvings,
“something which is not easy and which can be done satisfactorily only by those who have, so to speak, immersed themselves in the material and are sensitive to the spirit and mentality of an age which has passed.”
The artists of the Frobenius Institute also took photographs, and so we find Elisabeth Krebs and Elisabeth Pauli in 1937, brushing off a rock in Valcamonica before they start work. Earlier in the decade, both Krebs and Pauli had been with Frobenius documenting the rock art of the Gilf Kebir in Egypt’s Western Desert. The paints they used, tubes of brown ochre and raw umber, were found in 2010 among the rubbish in the Cave of Swimmers.
In Valcamonica, this small group of (mostly woman) artists made rubbings of the carvings and painted them at first hand.
So Maria Weyersberg paints a detail of two of the stags on the boulder at Cemmo. She attempts to replicate not just this pair in profile, but also the purple textures of the sandstone, and even its fissures. She’d learned to do this on an earlier visit to southern Africa, where she worked together with Agnes Schulz to make a full-size facsimile of the rock shelter paintings in the Matobo Hills of what is now Zimbabwe.
As in Valcamonica, the artists wanted to capture the layers of painting over painting, as well as the feel of the granite beneath.
Paintings by Weyersberg, Schulz and Pauli, and even one by Frobenius himself, are now on display at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, as part of the exhibition “The Big Bang of Art” (Urknall der Kunst).
Running until 9 July, this show pairs works by artists of the Frobenius Institute with those of their better-known near-contemporaries, including Hans Arp, Paul Klee, André Masson, and Joan Miró.
Works such as Willi Baumeister’s Not Yet Deciphered (1942) are framed by Frobenius Institute versions of rock paintings in South Africa and Zimbabwe; and Elisabeth Pauli and Katharina Marr’s bison from the Cave of Altamira are together with a herd of Picasso bulls.
Animal and human bodies, or at least their hands or feet, turn up again and again across place and time. Some of the prehistoric forms are less easy to give a name. Frobenius called these “formlings” (Formlinge) in publications we know artists like Baumeister to have owned.
Apart from his books, Frobenius organised exhibitions of the reproductions all over the continent. Picasso and Miró were both invited to the one held in Paris in 1930 (then again, so too was Pierre Bonnard.)
In the spring of 1937, the reproductions went to New York to be displayed on the first three floors of MoMA, arranged by country, with no mention of the copyists involved. On the floor above hung paintings by Miró, Masson, Arp, and Klee.
That summer, Frobenius Institute artists would return to document more of Valcamonica, while paintings by Klee and Baumeister would be shown in Munich as “degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst).
MoMA’s director Alfred H. Barr writes of the prehistoric floors on West 53rd Street:
“We can, as modern men, no longer believe in the magic efficiency of these rock paintings; but there is about them a deeper and more general magic quite beyond their beauty as works of art and their value as anthropological documents. Even in facsimile they evoke an atmosphere of antediluvian first things, a strenuous Eden where Adam drew animals before he named them.”
The show in Darmstadt feels like another full-size facsimile, of that exhibition long ago in Manhattan.
But in Darmstadt we have Joseph Beuys to bring us as far as the 1980s. Beuys had a long fascination with elk and deer, wondering aloud in 1984: “Perhaps I am a reborn cave artist”.
Both in Valcamonica and in Darmstadt, the past draws us near — a Holocene of fight and worship, in carved valleys and painted deserts, that we can neither return to nor escape from.
A fascinating post, thanks Beatrice
what a marvelously telescoped history is here, Beatrice, and how nimbly you move between the distant past and the almost now, with those two Elizabeths and then Miro, Klee and co.