In 2003, Deutsche Welle published the findings of an archeological dig in southern Germany. Three figurative art objects carved in mammoth bone dating back 30,000 to 33,000 years, "a lion-man, a water bird and a horse," demonstrate early man's desire to capture and extrapolate from natural forms.
According to archeologist Nicholas Conard, the objects may have been used by shamans for guidance in the spirit world. The water bird, able to mediate water and land, had the potential to move between worlds. To hold the bird's image transferred its power to the shaman.
Ancient Egyptian and later civilizations rendered abstract and stylized versions of themselves. Spiritual subjects portrayed, such as Ra's daily movement through the sky in a bark, mirror their natural world.
Classical Greek art prioritized mathematical and geometric ideals rather than the real "math" of the actual human form. Recognizing that the artist must use the prism of his perspective when painting, drawing, or sculpting, Nicias, according to Pliny, endowed art with some portion of himself.
Through the centuries, figurative art seeks to capture subjects' natural, identifiable features. Great masters, such as Leonardo da Vinci, used skill and perspective to create art reflecting the actual mathematical relationships of human physiology.
Although precursors of modern photography have existed since the "pinhole camera" was written about by Aristotle 2,500 years ago, complete images were unknown until the mid-1820s. Figurative art and portraiture remained the preferred method of making a subject's "picture."
As photography techniques improved, abstract art's fresh, bold approach took many forms. Impressionism arrived with the late nineteenth century. Artists like Edgar Degas, while experimenting with new ways to use materials and techniques to capture light and a sense of movement in composition, never used "impressionist" to describe his work.
Diverging from photographic imagery to oscillating abstract forms, modern artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and others gravitated toward "action art" and a return to at least some of the elements of figurativism.
Blurring of abstract and, by now, symbolic use figurative art's elements of shape, color, line, light, texture, and view, culminated in the late 1940s to early 1950s. For example, David Park, an expressionist painter living in California, entered a figurative art contest and won. Considered by some as "failure to summon deeper resources" required to create abstract art, a critic remarked that most "non-objective painting was becoming as ineffectual as apocalyptic wallpaper."