What I really want to talk about is my visceral reaction to the thought of those paintings being lost forever. It literally made my head swim. The article states that “Bruno Desplat… one of the cave’s caretakers… who lives next to Lascaux and has devoted more than 15 years to its care, says that when he saw the luxuriant bloom, he became physically ill.” And who can blame him? I felt exactly the same, thinking that something like this might disappear:

The paintings at Lascaux are more than 17,000 years old by anyone’s best scientific estimate. Which does not even make them the oldest of the known cave art galleries. The paintings at Altamira, Spain are 20,000 years old. At the moment the oldest known cave paintings belongs to the caves at Chauvet, also in France, which are carbon dated at 32,000 years old and may have been in continuous use for about 6,000 years! These extraordinary paintings go back to the very beginnings of our dominance as a species. They may even mark the moment that we finally arrived as homo sapiens sapiens.

Although the first of the great caves was discovered in the 1860s, it took another 40 years for our modern scholars to accept these works as real. As being the work of our early human ancestors. Today, we realize that these are the great works of our first communicators. Our first reporters, our first accountants, our first story tellers, our first shamans, our first… Artists. These early human Artists were Us. And we are them. Their heirs, their descendents, their means of continued expression.

Humans are, first and foremost, visual animals. A picture is worth a thousand words, is one of our most expressed truisms. Even our alphabets arose from pictograms. Take, for a quick example, the letter “D.” Our modern letter can trace its form backwards through history to the earliest Roman alphabet (approx. 7th c. b.c.e.* ). Before that, back to the Greek letter, delta (in the alphabet developed between 13th c. b.c.e. and 9th c. b.c.e.). And before that, the humble, yet resilient letter D can be traced to the Semitic Phoenician symbol (14th c.b.c.e.) for a doorway or entrance. The writing system of the Egyptians was based on pictures, today the Chinese and Japanese, to name just two, continue to use a writing system based on pictograms. We still depend on pictograms on our traffic signals, rest rooms and even on highway signs. The rise of a written alphabet came late, late in our history. Before that, and to this day, were the pictures, always the pictures.

The first time I saw a depiction of the cave paintings, I had to be about 10 or 11. I happened to stumble on The Picture History of Painting: From Cave Art to Modern Times*. On the introductory page was a picture -- small, grainy and in black and white -- of one of the horses from the caves at Altamira, Spain. The next pages hold pictures of buffalo and a wild boar, and a abstract hunter, bow in hand. And at the top of the next page, the kneeling bison. This was the image that gripped me hard. Wounded? Sleeping? Praying to the bison god? I was captivated and enthralled by these powerful images. There was something in these representations, some recognition of a narrative symbol, a commonality with that ancient artist, that went straight to the emotional center of my brain and burned itself there.

That first chapter is titled: The Magic Pictures of the Cavemen. ** The authors are quite straightforward in their assertions that these are the pictures or representations of a primitive and uneducated people who wanted nothing more than to get the gods – in whatever form they understood them – to send them more food.

But I have to disagree. There is nothing at all “primitive” about any cave paintings. They are not the stumbling, awkward, first efforts of children. Where that Art is -- our first untutored efforts at creating pictures -- is still a mystery. They may be buried or lost forever. But they won't be found in the cave paintings. Although many images are layered one over the other, they are perfect. They are as representational, as proportionate, as beautiful – if not more so -- as any Renaissance painting or Greek statue. They are as expressive as anything by Hockney or Picasso.**** They are as fresh as any work by any artist starting today who will be the next Klimt or Rembrandt or Pollack. They are fully formed Art.

So then, what was their purpose? Were they religious representations, magical charms to bring a good hunting season as the authors aver? Some sort of adulthood rite of passage, as Joseph Campbell has speculated? Stories about the tribe’s past hunting season? Speculation on future ones? A description of history? A sort of drawing contest? There’s even a book by a leading cave expert claiming it was the work of young graffiti artists. Or were they, in actuality, simply, fully, gloriously Art? No religious significance, no mystical attachments. Only an expression of human creativity. Art for art's sake.

The debate over their meaning has raged since their first modern discovery, and we will most likely never have the complete answer. In light of the vast time period over which they were painted (approximately 20,000 years overall), the physical distance they cover (to date, in Europe alone, England , France, Spain, Portugal and Italy with more being found all the time) and the sophistication of the colors and tools the artists used, there is currently an intense re-evaluation of cave paintings and their meanings.

Such early and sophisticated paintings are found all over the world. On every continent (except Antartica, and there may be some spelunker right now, carving pictures of penguins into the rock base beneath the ice) there are drawings, etchings, scratchings, carvings and paintings in caves. Where there are no caves, Art appears on the bare rocks.

In Australia:

In Thailand:

In Baja California:

In India:

And, of course, cave paintings are still speaking to us today. Loud and clear. Their messages and beauty travel down the vast corridor of years to find us, the artist. To speak to us, the ordinary every day person. But we are not so “ordinary” as all that. Something in a cave painting connects us to our ancestors, who were extraordinary in themselves. Google “cave painting” and you’ll get a lot of sites referring to each of the caves and places I’ve mentioned. But you’ll also get this at the DeLorean Mailing News Site:

“Cave Painting”: aka Writing done inside the doors at the Factory . With samples like this:

Or you’ll find artists like James Seibert, bringing old images to new life.

Or the images of young artists at the Eastchester Middle School:

Today, most of the great caves and their paintings are closed to the general public. There is a bitter reason for this. When a cave is 'opened', and the conditions which enabled paintings to survive are altered, deterioration can be rapid. The paintings described as "superb" that were found at Bédeilhac in the Pyrenees during the First World War disappeared completely within six months of the cave's discovery. Today only the unique molded clay reliefs are still visible, there are no known photographs of the paintings. At cave sites, visitors are shuffled off to “reproductions” and “cave historical sites.” Even scholars have a difficult time getting into places like Altamira or Lascaux. The caves and their beautiful works have been loved nearly to death.

The loss of even a portion of these great paintings should upset and sicken everyone of us who counts themselves as human beings. Yet, who can blame us for wanting to see these paintings? They represent creative humankind at its flowering – the best and brightest evidence we have of when the idea of Art first burst forth and had real expression. No matter what destruction we’ve wrought as a species, what great monuments have fallen, what things of beauty we blow up, these paintings represent something about human creativity that still speaks to us down the centuries. Something that touches the common human core in all of us.

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Footnotes:

*Period designations are “b.c.e.” – Before the Common Era and “c.e.” – the Common Era.

**I will be writng a great deal more about this book – a major artistic influence -- at another time.

***Please keep in mind this book was published in 1957. There has been a great deal more research since then. Now, at least, researchers can mostly agree that they don't know.

****Upon exiting from the caves at Lascaux, Picasso is reported to have said, "We invented nothing."