According to the British Museum, the works of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse contain elements similar to the artwork of cavemen.
In a new exhibit called “Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind,” the history museum presents more than one hundred works ranging from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago alongside some of the more modern artists including Henri Matisse, Henry Moore and Joseph Hecht. The ancient pieces are made primarily of ceramic or mammoth bone.
Jill Cook, the exhibit’s curator, said “The modern works are there to show that way back in time, the key concepts of drawing, sculpting and modeling were well-known and utilized.”
“The modern brain has been able to create and formulate in these ways as far back as the ice age,” she added.
Many scholars have stated that Picasso and Moore’s works were influenced by paleolithic art. The French artist owned two casts of Venus de Lespugue, which was made with mammoth ivory, and is known to have lamented the vast stores of prehistoric art that has been lost or destroyed throughout the years.