BRADFORD.- Ice Age Art Now is a British Museum partnership project with Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture and Bradford District Museums & Galleries on view at Cliffe Castle Museum, Keighley in the Bradford district.


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The exhibition presents work by people living in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age, between 24,000 and 12,000 years ago. At this time, the slow recovery from near extinction caused by climate change stimulated an extraordinary artistic renaissance. As the climate warmed, there was a vast increase in the production of drawings, sculptures, decorated tools and weapons, jewellery and complex patterns. These artworks were not crucial to the physical survival of human groups but then, as now, art contributed to people's psychological and emotional wellbeing, helping to establish the strong social bonds essential to sustaining their ways of life.

This period saw the rise of small-scale engravings of incredible delicacy on bone, antler, ivory and stone, which were created alongside the more familiar images found on cave walls. These drawings depict the animals that would have been relied upon for food and raw materials, such as bison, horse, ibex and reindeer.


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Works by Rembrandt, Matisse and Maggi Hambling are also included to highlight such essential elements of line, form, shading, composition and abstraction present in the long history of art, despite being separated by thousands of years.

The exhibition connects with displays in Cliffe Castle Museum's permanent galleries via a family-friendly trail, extending the interest of the show across the ground floor and engaging with local natural history, archaeology and the history of the museum. Visitors will also be able to experience an immersive installation that evokes the inside of a decorated cave.

Key objects

The exhibition features over 75 objects from the British Museum collection, many of which are rarely lent due to their great age and fragility. Highlights include:

• Flint point found at Volgu, Saône et Loire, France, 24,000 years old. This is a masterpiece of the stone tool maker's art. Thousands of quickly made, effective but mundane stone tools represent everyday tasks over long periods of deep history. Occasionally, as in this Volgu point, they also exhibit technical virtuosity and aesthetic quality which has nothing to do with functionality. 28 centimetres long, astonishingly thin and beautifully finished, this leaf-shaped point is one of sixteen found at Volgu, Saône et Loire, France. It reveals the ability and dexterity of the artisan, as well as the capacity to materialise and communicate ideas through the production of high-quality, non-functional objects.

• Engraved drawing of a horse on bone, found at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire, England, about 13,500 years old. This is the oldest known work of figurative art from England, and was found at Robin Hood Cave, Creswell Crags in Derbyshire. Drawn on a well prepared piece of rib bone, the horse had a series of vertical lines drawn through it, before being deleted by vehemently incised horizontal lines. The bone was then broken.

• Two reindeer drawn on bone, found at La Madeleine, Dordogne, France, about 13,500 years old. Originally part of a larger composition interrupted by an ancient break. The younger animal is perfectly proportioned and naturalistically drawn and shaded by engraving the lines with a stone tool. The bone was then coloured with red ochre still visible in the lines.

• Engraved bone pendant depicting a wolverine, found at Grotte des Eyzies, Dordogne, France, about 13,000–12,000 years old. This thin sliver of bone extracted from the surface of an animal shoulder blade and perforated for suspension as a pendant, frames an engraved drawing of a wolverine. Rarely depicted in Ice Age imagery, wolverines are shy but ferocious carnivores with magnificent, highly valued fur coats. This miniature masterpiece is a rare representation, remarkable in its accuracy and vivacity. The naturalism and quality of the shading achieved by use of a stone engraving tool is as fine as that achieved in the engraving of Goya's anteater by means of a metal burin in 1776.

• Maggi Hambling (b. 1945), Study for The Descent of the Bull's Head. Charcoal on paper, 1985. A study for the first of a series of bull paintings by Hambling, inspired by both bull fights and the legend of the Minotaur. By giving the bull multiple heads, the artist represents motion, a device also seen in Ice Age art.