Ice Age art

The Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum is on till 26 May. Now that the Pompei show is siphoning off the visitors in droves, Ice Age was relatively uncrowded - not quite like this pic from the internet, but empty enough to allow for some drawing -

In the photo you can see how modern works were mixed in, here and there. The "Self Portrait While Pregnant" by Ghislaine Howard was in the section with figurines of "mother goddesses"; elsewhere were etchings of bison by George Hecht, sculptures of very simplied female forms by Brassai, "Abstraction" by Henry Moore, one of Mondrian's trees, a nude by Matisse -

Venus of Dolni Vestonice and  Grand Nu (image from here)

Near the end you pass through a dark room with a video, the source of the dripping and other cave-like noises that made an unobtrusive sound background. As well as showing cave paintings on a large scale, the video was enlivened with flashes of some patterns and symbols derived from the art of the time, meant perhaps to simulate the "art experience" in non-literate, shamanistic societies.

The bookshop had its temptations, based on the idea of early man, traditional societies, the beginnings of art.

The book with the white cover is  The Origin of Stories: evolution, cognition and fiction, by Brian Boyd.

On the way out the back door of the museum there are some seal-gut parkas, another example of the survival skills of people living in resource-limited places -