Nigel Holmes—Outlier 2021—Otto and Gerd in the Chauvet Caves

Otto and Gerd in the Chauvet Caves It’s a cliché to say that the cave painters were the first infographic artists. But you know what? They were! Recording, listing, teaching, showing, storytelling—isn’t this what information design is? Fast forward 32,000 years (a trillion seconds, by the way, but that’s another story!) to the 1920s, when the social scientist Otto Neurath was formulating a way to present statistics in a pictorial, almost non-verbal, way. He rethought abstract bar charts by lining up little pictures (icons) in rows that could be counted. (In Neurath’s words: they were “statistically accountable.”) He instructed his team of artists to make these little pictures by cutting them out of black paper, so that the images were as simple as possible, with scant detail. When the designer Gerd Arntz joined Neurath’s office in 1925, he changed the paper-cutting method to making linoleum cuts of the icons. (This also meant that multiple copies could be made.) But whatever the method, Neurath’s overall instructions was that artists were to find and depict the most telling view of the animal, or ship, or barrel, or human—and the most obvious view was invariably a silhouette, or profile. Ellen Lupton has described this as a sort of pre-chemical photography—it was as though the animal, or ship, etc, had cast a shadow, and that was what was drawn. It was in fact the closest the artists could come to making an image that was the real thing—it had “photographic” authority. So back now 32,000 years to the Chauvet Caves, in the Ardèche region of France. The young artists there (18 years was the typical life expectancy) were painting images that the art historian Herbert Read called the animals’ “essential character;” they selected “the significant details, the immediate silhouette…” My point is that Otto and Gerd are modern cave artists, using the same visual language of 1,200 generations ago: flat, iconic pictures to convey facts and tell stories about their surroundings, and using as few words as possible (did the cave painters have any words?). (Note: Apart from showing comparisons of cave icons with Arntz’s icons, I’ll be showing that many of the best-known images from the caves were actually painted or drawn inside the caves by artists who were allowed inside after their discovery. The most notable was a priest, Henri Breuil, whose paintings were somewhat romanticized.)