I have places inside me where there are works of art: internal abysms that feel full, physical, like forces that fuse past and present. In the early 2000s, I spent four straight days in the Prado; all of it's still within me like some huge, Proustian madeleine. Almost every Bosch, Cézanne, Matisse, Alice Neel, Bill Traylor, Martín Ramírez, and Marsden Hartley that I've ever seen can flash like lightning at will. I spent a day enraptured by Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. (I still wonder if I became invisible that day, when guards silently allowed me to remain in the museum while it closed for its two-hour lunch.) I have a psychic zero-point for all the Seurat drawings I've ever seen, and at the center of this point is the small Giovanni di Paolo in Chicago that I saw when I was 10 years old, which set me on the course of my life — the genesis moment when I understood that paintings weren't only things to be looked at but are
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What I gleaned from them was so paradigmatically extensive that it recalibrated almost everything I knew about art. Even though this internal lightning is always with me, it went bioluminescent a few months ago, when paintings found on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia were estimated to have been made 40,000 years ago. That's 10,000 years older than the oldest cave paintings in Europe (in the Chauvet Caves). Not long before that came reports of decorative beads and mixed pigments dating back more than 75,000 years. Not to mention the deliberate, delicate symmetries in newly discovered stone axes made 100,000 years ago by an entirely different and extinct species: Neanderthals. (There's evidence that Neanderthals also built and sailed watercraft; there are Neanderthal stone cleavers that date back 170,000 years.) How could I not use these revelations to relate my own come-to-cave-art
What I gleaned from them was so paradigmatically extensive that it recalibrated almost everything I knew about art. Even though this internal lightning is always with me, it went bioluminescent a few months ago, when paintings found on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia were estimated to have been made 40,000 years ago. That's 10,000 years older than the oldest cave paintings in Europe (in the Chauvet Caves). Not long before that came reports of decorative beads and mixed pigments dating back more than 75,000 years. Not to mention the deliberate, delicate symmetries in newly discovered stone axes made 100,000 years ago by an entirely different and extinct species: Neanderthals. (There's evidence that Neanderthals also built and sailed watercraft; there are Neanderthal stone cleavers that date back 170,000 years.) How could I not use these revelations to relate my own come-to-cave-art