PALEOART: VISIONS OF THE PREHISTORIC PAST
By Zoë Lescaze with a preface by Walton Ford (Taschen, 2017)
“A gorgeous volume… As much as Lescaze’s Paleoart is a book about scientific discovery and artistic invention, it is also a history of artists grappling with the reality of extinction, and may be more relevant now than ever.”
—Rachel Poser, The New York Times Book Review
“Paleoart, a new book by Zoë Lescaze, is one of the most extraordinary and beautiful volumes on the topic yet conceived, and suggests that these images of prehistory were as much about the present as the past.”
—Caspar Henderson, The Economist
“Epic in size and scope, it’s a passport to a past that no one ever witnessed.”
—Erin, Blakemore, The Washington Post
“Flipping through Paleoart feels, in the best way, like taking a psychoactive substance and becoming a kid again.”
—Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review
selected PresS
UPCOMING EVENTS:
PAST EVENTS:
Panel discussion marking the 25th anniversary of The Last Dinosaur Book by W. J. T. Mitchell (online event, registration link here, December 12, 2023 at 5 p.m. (GMT) / noon (EST).
Guest lecture for “Doubting Vision: Seeing and Believing,” a course taught by doctoral candidate Sophie Lynch at the University of Chicago | April 26, 2023
Panel discussion with Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, Darren Naish, and Derek Turner, chaired by Sandra Shapshay | American Society for Aesthetics 80th Annual Meeting | Portland, Oregon | Saturday, November 19, 2022 | 9-11 a.m. PST
Guest lecture for “Visualization and Biology,” a course taught by University of Chicago associate prof. Michael Rossi at the Marine Biological Laboratory | Woods Hole, Mass. | September 3, 2021
Fishbein Workshop in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science | University of Chicago | May 7, 2021
NightSchool at the California Academy of Sciences | April 15, 2021 | recording here
Guest lecture for “The Cultural Politics of Dinosaurs,” a course taught by Professor Roberto Sirvent at Pomona College | September 16, 2020
Lecture | Zoological Museum of the University of Zurich, Switzerland | February 5, 2020
Lecture at the “Dinomakers” exhibition opening | Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands | January 30, 2020
Lecture and book signing hosted by the New York Paleontological Society | American Museum of Natural History, New York | March 17, 2019
Lecture and book signing | La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, Los Angeles | September 6, 2018
Book signing with Walton Ford | Gagosian Shop, 976 Madison Avenue, New York | November 30, 2017
Images of dinosaurs are everywhere, but paleoart—the practice of depicting prehistoric animals as they looked in life—is surprisingly new. It was in or around 1830 when an English scientist named Henry De la Beche painted the first picture of extinct reptiles based on fossil evidence: a chaotic, deliciously macabre scene of several dozen animals battling it out underwater.
From there, artists and scientists working across the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States created a unique new genre of natural history illustration, one that blended scientific fact and unbridled fantasy. Beginning with the same fractured evidence, they created wildly different visions of the prehistoric past in a diverse range of styles and media, including gothic engravings, exuberant oil paintings, bronze sculptures, frescoes, and mosaics the size of subway cars. While these artists are the reason we can imagine the prehistoric world, their names are obscure and the genre itself is oddly invisible.
Writer Zoë Lescaze has compiled the most comprehensive history of this dazzling tradition to date. In Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past (Taschen, 2017) she takes an art historical approach to a rich array of works, telling the story of how paleoart developed over its first 150 years. While the images in the book are no longer scientifically accurate, they remain fascinating artifacts that can teach us about the particular contexts in which they were created, our cultural ideals and neuroses, as well as our changing concepts of creation and destruction. From Victorian England to Soviet Russia, images of prehistoric animals often reveal more about their human creators than they do about the distant past. They are roads to understanding our relationship to the past and our place within the present. Some works of paleoart are broad, well-paved boulevards, others winding back alleys, but, Lescaze argues, they all lead to unexpected corners of the human psyche.
The first image of the prehistoric world: Duria antiquior, a small watercolor by the English geologist and clergyman Henry Thomas De la Beche, c. 1830.