Dawn Pictures

Five months ago Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art crowned its notable 1936-3 7 season with a comprehensive exhibit of the very latest artistic wrinkle, Surrealism. With a vertiginous backward leap 200 centuries into the Fourth Ice Age, the Museum last week wound up its season by presenting an extraordinary collection of Prehistoric Rock Pictures. Director Alfred Barr Jr. saw no paradox. He recalled that many cave decorations were magic symbols to help the painter with his hunting, and thus "today walls are painted so that the artist may eat," whereas "in prehistoric times walls were painted so that the community might eat." Nevertheless, said he: "The formal elegance of the Altamira bison; the grandeur of outline in the Norwegian rock engravings of bear, elk and whale; the cornucopian fecundity of Rhodesian animal landscapes; the kinetic fury of the East Spanish huntsmen; the spontaneous ease with which the South African draftsmen mastered the difficult silhouets of moving creatures: these are achievements which living artists and many others who are interested in living art have admired."

What surprised even the best-informed artists and connoisseurs, as they made their way past a great collection of full-scale water color and photographic reproductions which filled three floors, was the sheer bulk of artistic material retrieved from the depths of the human past. Yet the Museum's exhibition was only a fractional facsimile of the 3,500 items in the Frobenius Collection at the Institute for the Study of the Morphology of Civilization, Frankfurtam-Main, Germany.

The Frobenius collection is one more example of the productive possibilities of the single-track mind. In 1886, when Leo Frobenius was a small Berliner of 13, he had made up his mind he was going to be an anthropologist. At 15 he had become such an expert on the American Indian that he amused himself compiling technical errors in the Leather Stocking Tales. He wrote a dissertation on the ethnographic significance of Marco Polo's travels. Before he was 20 he had had to work as a farmer and clerk, but by the time he came of age he had hammered his way onto the staff of the Bremen Museum.

In the late 19th Century, scientists were so puffed with the importance of their contemporary culture that discussion of prehistoric art remains discovered in Belgium and France, with their implication that a respectable culture had flourished in glacial times, was subtly but systematically suppressed. It was then held that Stone Age culture died when the ice receded northward for the last time. Leo Frobenius did not believe "anything so essentially alive could vanish so completely." He coaxed, cajoled and corn-pelled his elders to back his theory that Stone Age men had taken their chisels and paint brushes down into Africa after the last glacial period, and on his first expedition to North Africa in 1912, Professor Frobenius opened up the richest continental deposit of cave paintings and engravings. It was already known that in Magdalenian times some artist had smeared iron oxide on a cavern wall at Altamira, in north Spain. Cunningly he had fashioned a lively bison, with a fine high hump, muscular forelegs, a head set well enough to do justice to contemporary Animal Artist John Raltenbury Skeaping (TIME, May 3). In Khotsa Cave, 5,000 mi. from Spain in Basutoland, South Africa, Anthropologist Frobenius found the Altamira bison's twin. The long-legged silhouet of a wildly running bowman found at Saltadora, Spain was duplicated in Basutoland at Bogati Hill; other parallelisms or derivatives sprang up time after time.

One of the largest (24 ft. by 9 ft.) exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art show last week was a watercolor copy of a rock painting from Mtoko Cave in Southern Rhodesia. Covering a complete wall the Mtoko cave mural is a comprehensive prehistoric art collection in itself. Almost invisible, all the way across the top reach two hazy white elephants. Drawn in profile with only two feet, they are among man's earliest attempts at graphic representation, doubtless done early in the Aurignacian period. But the Mtoko mural is richest in its examples of later (Solutrean, Magdalenian, Mesolithic, Neolithic) art work, whose humans are always drawn in the frontal, wedge-trunk position (as in Egyptian art), whose women are handily identified by little bumps on their chests and whose animals, the quagga and antelope, are far more accurately observed and gracefully drawn than the people. There are also mystic lozenges, snaky lines and blobs which apparently are respectively symbols for mountain, rain and root. For briskness of conception, facility of line, the Mtoko paintings struck critics as being plastics of considerable honest merit in themselves. A small show of advanced abstractionists like Klee, Miro, Arp and Masson was added to the exhibit by Director Barr to show that some living painters are not very distant in spirit from the Mtoko masters.

Herr Doktor Frobenius, a lively, goateed little scholar currently lecturing in the U. S., is not surprised when people are slow to grasp the symbolic complexities of his great collection of "dawn art." "We modern Europeans," says he, "concentrating on the newspaper and on that which happens from one day to the next, have lost the ability to think in large dimensions. We need a change of Lebensgefiihl, of our feeling for life. And it is my hope that the enormous perspective of human growth and existence which has been opened to us by these pictures and by the researches of the modern prehistorian may serve to contribute in some small measure to its development."

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