Displaying items by tag: ice age art: arrival of the modern mind

London’s 255-year-old British Museum welcomed a record 6,701,036 visitors in 2013. In addition, the institution’s website saw an increase in online traffic of 47% with 19.5 million total visits.

The museum hosted a number of successful exhibitions last year including ‘Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum,’ which was the third most popular show in the museum’s history, ‘Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind,’ and Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art.’

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, said “I am delighted that so many people have visited the world collection at the British Museum in the last year. Displays onsite, loans and touring exhibitions nationally and internationally, big screen viewings and online access mean this is truly a dynamic collection that belongs to and is used by a global citizenship.”

A major exhibition titled Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind is now on view at the British Museum in London. With works dating as far back as 40,000 years, the show presents ice age objects from across Europe alongside works by modern masters including Henry Moore (1898-1986), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), and Henri Matisse (1869-1954). The juxtaposition is meant to illustrate the fundamental human desire to explore life and oneself through art.

Many of the ice age-era works on view are made of mammoth ivory and reindeer antler and tend to be diminutive in stature. Highlights include a 40,000-year-old flute made from a vulture’s wing bone, a mammoth tusk carved to resemble a pair of reindeer, and a 23,000-year-old abstract ivory sculpture found in Lespugue, France that had a profound influence on Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) sculptural work of the 1930s.

The works, which range from 10,000 to 40,000 years old, will be on view through May 26, 2013.