Worth 1000 Words: Discovering Lascaux

One day in 1940, four teenagers,

Marcel Ravidat, 











Jacques Marsal, 










Georges Agniel, 

Simon Coencas, 

And a dog named Robot

adventured in search of legendary treasure in the French woodlands. Robot took the adventure a step further getting stuck in a hole beneath the roots of a recently-fallen oak. Pulling Robot to safety, the boys discovered that the hole went on and on. They slid one by one down a tunnel, deep into a cave. At 14, Jacques was the youngest, and reported his terror at sliding down the deep shaft (what beasts would they find? How would they get out?) and his incredible awe on arrival.

Two of the discoverers with their teacher Laval and paleontologist Abbe Breuil after the cave opening had been greatly widened. Can't find the photographer to credit!

At the bottom of the shaft, they found a cavern 100 feet long and 20 wide, painted with layers of animals that pranced to life as if freshly conceived across the ceiling of the great hall of the cave of Lascaux, what would come to be known as “The Sistine Ceiling of the Paleolithic.”

Lascaux photograph Sisse Brimberg National Geographic, Sistine Ceiling photo Wikipedia. 

The boys returned day after day, soon relinquishing their vow of secrecy, for treasure they had found. They introduced commerce to the site, charging admission first to their friends, and then to a wider audience. 

The "young heroes", with their teacher and famous paleontologist Abbe Breuil. Can't find the photographer to credit!
Marsal became so obsessed with protecting the cave that his parents finally gave him permission to set up a tent and guard the site day and night from potential vandals (or would they be street artists, or graffiti-makers? )

The boys brought their teacher, Leon Laval, an amateur paleontologist, who described the experience like this:  “Once I arrived in the great hall accompanied by my young heroes, I uttered cries of admiration at the magnificent sight that met my eyes.... Thus I visited the galleries and remained just as enthusiastic when confronted with the unexpected revelations which increased as I advanced. I had literally gone mad.” 

Mad for the past: Amateur paleontologist Leon Laval. And what he saw. (source)


The cave captured the imagination of the time; their visual similarity to the work of artists of that time caused Picasso’s gasp, “we have invented nothing.” Their fluidity of line, gestural liveliness and direct power belied their age, which, it soon emerged, was between 15 and 20,ooo years old, when Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in Europe and lived as hunter gatherers.

Bulls from Lascaux Great Hall, Pablo Picasso, Bull Prints, 1945

Getty image, stairs to original Lascaux, source. 

Soon 1200 visitors a day traipsed through the cave, every breath they expelled in their awe wreaked havoc on its wonders. The atmosphere changed drastically, causing mineral deposits to form on the paintings. To solve this problem, the custodians installed new climate controls with nearly disastrous results.  


Workers seeking to control the fungal and bacterial growth destroying the paintings. source. 

A virulent mold began to grow on the interior of the cave, threatening, in a matter of days, to destroy the paintings that had existed in silence for 20,000 years. So cave authorities poured four tons of quicklime on the cave floor, raising the temperature rapidly, causing moisture to condense on the walls and wash away some portions of paintings. Lascaux remains off limits today; only a handful of scientists and scholars get permission to enter the cave each year. Destruction seems to have stabilized, and lessons learned from the modern damage to Lascaux govern archeological practices strictly today. To accommodate our desire for amazement, authorities funded the creation of exact replicas of two of the ‘rooms’ of Lascaux 200 yards from the original cave.

Images from Lascaux II, carved in the same hillside as the original. source 

The cave contains 2,000 images, including more than 900 animals, abstract signs, and human figures.

Images of horses dominate. 

Ralph Morse—Time/ Life Pictures/Getty Images Inside Lascaux, 1947. Read more: http://life.time.com/culture/inside-lascaux-rare-photos/attachment/111142669/#ixzz24yTGnfSp

Stags and bovines follow in frequency, and there are a few images of felines, humans, rhinocerous.
 

There are no representations of reindeer or plants, though those were the primary food, nor  representations of landcape or dwellings. Many animals display a high degree of naturalism in their execution, and sophisticated use of perspective and composition. This skill combined with the way that artists layered image atop image over thousands of years builds the whole into what looked to modern eyes as a highly contemporary style. The unified but diverse palette of color, form, style and content make Lascaux as a whole an exceptional masterpiece. That hundreds or of hands painted it over thousands of years makes the artwork a human one, rather than an individual, and perhaps adds to its near-universal appeal.

Entering Lascaux cave you walk first into the great Hall of the Bulls, where a wide band of decoration at ceiling height shows 36 animals including 17 horses, auroxes, stags, a bear,  Holes near the ceiling suggest that the artists used scaffolding to reach the heights of the ceiling on which they worked.

Great Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux, wikipedia

At the end of the Hall, you enter the Axial Gallery, which houses some of the most sophisticated collections of art from any time.  Artists painted three large horses, in red, black, and ochre. 











The horses rock across the cave walls with a grace that defies their exaggeratedly plump proportions, some right side up, 














some upside down, some barely missed by what look like arrows. All have exquisitely well-rendered, small, graceful black heads and dainty black hooves. 















No artist rivaled the perspective achieved with the horses,  in 

The Crossed Bison, Photo: © Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, http://life.time.com/culture/inside-lascaux-rare-unpublished/#1

the crossed bison, for about 20,000 years, until approximately 1500 c.e. with the Italian Renaissance.

Photo and text: © Norbert Aujoulat, CNP, Ministere de la Culture, 2004

Turning back from the axial gallery, one can bear off to the left to enter the passageway that leads on the right to the apseof  Lascaux , and on the left to the nave. That paleontologists named these sections of the cave after church architecture indicates their early theory, which further discoveries and study have reinforced, that the painted caves served a spiritual function. 

In a narrow, difficult to reach passage is one of the most mysterious paintings of Lascaux. Paleontologist Jean Clottes, describes the scene: “This scene consists of a man with a bird’s head, a composite creature, falling backwards in front of a charging bison. The bison, its hindquarters pierced by a barbed shaft, is disemboweled. A bird perches on a post. There is another barbed sign under the bird-man’s feet. Death—that of the bird-man and of the bison—is obviously a prominent theme of this mysterious panel, and the bird a significant motif.” Clottes’ focuses on the relationship between the hunt and death.

The images in the Shaft of the Dead Man, image source: Reddit.  

People have also read the scene as a rite of passage involving totem animals with the bird-headed man suggesting a shaman; others see the scene as evidence the conception of the passage from life to death; another reading sees a sacrificial offering to the hunt. Astronomers find that the eyes of the bull, birdman and bird represent the three prominent stars of the Summer Triangle: Vega, Deneb and Altair, suggesting the cave may hold a map of the stars, full of animal constellations. Other scholars think the combination of animals and geometric patterns depict visions achieved in trance-dancing, a theory which explains the distribution of similar styles across the world.

Chauvet Cave (key work!)

Modern Relationships

30,000 years ago, artists painted on the walls of caves, and painted over paintings, and painted over those paintings, beginning a tradition of painting on walls that has lasted into today. Examples of graffiti exist around the world since the dawn of Cro-Magnon humans, in the Americas, Oceania, Africa and Asia. Later, we find graffiti in Parisian catacombs, 

the brothels of Pompeii, the great monuments of Egypt, nearly everywhen and everywhere.

 The boldly sprayed graffiti of the NY heyday in the late 1970s starring Fab Five Freddie 


and Jean-Michel Basquiat set the most recognizable style of street art, built on traincar graffiti from the 1920’s and  protest graffiti from WW II and Vietnam. In the nineties, artists like 


Barbara Kruger

 
and Jenny Holzer worked both the gallery and street scene on billboards and handbills in a hybrid of street art, gallery art, guerrilla social justice, and advertising. That work may have initiated the crossover between street art and so-called ‘fine art’ that we see in 

Banksy, 


Swoon, 

 and JR

Today’s street artists may share more than you might conceive with the nameless first artists of the deepest history. Contemporary street artists and cave painters work in a world of risk (In Lascaux, risks included asphyxiation, starvation, bodily harm, rockslides, and getting permanently lost in pitch blackness). Today, street artists may face bodily harm, at the hands of property owners or police, and they risk legal recriminations. They inhabit dark alleys, and make work without hope of profit. The best known street artists today make work that delves deeply consequential topics that impact viewers powerfully. Their work demands confidence and the ability to achieve quality quickly despite formidable circumstances. Stone Age paintings share all these traits, and one other: young adult men dominate the world of street art, and they made most of the Paleolithic cave paintings.

So

Why do artists creep about at night , often taking extraordinary risks, to make pictures on Walls for which they will receive no public credit? Why do they need to leave their mark on public property? Why the gesture to paint and paint over and paint over again without the promise of permanence (immortality of the artist) or money or fame? What 5 works of art should everyone know from Prehistory? What can they tell us? How can we read art? (you’ll probably need to draw on both today’s and Tuesday’s materials.)

Marcel Ravidat, Simon Coencas, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel in 2010. Not shown: Robot, deceased.  

many artists, Cave of the Hands, Cueva de los Manos, 7,300 bce to 700 CE,  Archaic

Hand Prints and possible Guanacos and human figures, Cueva de los Manos, 7300 bce-700 CE, Archaic, present-day Argentina, oldest art in South American Continent. 

Hand stencils from Laeng Sakapao (nmore info). Some hand paintings at this site are least 39,000 YA. 

 "

Lascaux cave paintings replica workshop. The original Lascaux cave was closed to the public in 1963, with the Lascaux II replica opening nearby in 1983. Here, a restorer, in a workshop in Montignac, is testing the bamboo projection method of forming a hand print outline (example shown at right). The Lascaux cave paintings in south-western France, around 17,000 years old, were painted by Cro-Magnon man, an early European culture of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), using red, brown and yellow ochre, and black manganese dioxide. They may have had religious and artistic significance. Photographed in 2010." Source

Leang Sukapao. at least 34kya.  Leang Sukapao holds the Oldest representational art yet found on the globe.