Word: lascaux
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite the abundance of these ancient works, the contemporary world has seen little of them. Many of the originals are carefully locked away in the vaults of various European cities, and some have never been publicly displayed. Nor are the caverns always accessible. France's celebrated Lascaux cave with its paintings of running bison and horses is now closed to all but a few selected scholars; contamination and changes in humidity and temperature caused by sightseers in the few decades after the cave was discovered in 1940 caused more damage to the fragile paintings than had occurred during...
Most of the others are skillfully rendered copies in realistic settings. Captured on film by Frenchman Jean Vertut, who specializes in photographing cave art, a Lascaux mural of horses, bulls and stags covers an entire wall of the show. Designer Henry Gardiner's theatrical lighting suggests the flickering oil lamps by which the cave artists must have worked. The exhibit also includes elegant silk-screen reproductions crafted by Douglas Mazonowicz, an artist and writer who has studied rock art around the world. Perhaps most impressive of all are the full-size replicas of Cro-Magnon man's sculptures...
...moment the character of a mystery." Photography isolates: it cannot narrate. "Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph .. . Only that which narrates can make us understand." Here, one may feel. Sontag exaggerates too sweepingly. If only narration gives cognition, every static visual image, from the bulls of Lascaux to the horse in Guernica, is condemned, by implication, to muteness. Goya's Third of May is an instant that epitomizes a massacre, not a narrative of the whole event. It shares that with photography, but who could say it does not enlarge our understanding of what it meant...
...Robot" (pronounced ru-bow) Davenport tells the story of the discovery of the Lascaux cave in southern France, the site of some of the earliest prehistoric paintings. According to this version a dog named Robot chasing a rabbit actually discovered the cave. Henri Breuil, a French Jesuit anthropologist provides Davenport with a voice to describe the caves as brains for the earth. Breuil talks about his discoveries in China, Africa, the Altamira caves in Spain where Picasso studied the ancient bull drawings for the bull he painted in "Geurnica." Everything becomes interconnected in Davenport's stories; history isn't simply...
...feeble attempt to become godlike, to master the world around him. It is, in short, magic, the earliest of man's religious responses. The world's oldest art works, the primitive animal paintings in the cave at Lascaux in southwestern France, for example, were Stone Age man's magical invocation of success in the hunt. The astrology so many millions follow today is a direct legacy from the astronomer priests of Babylonia. Even when Christianity spread through Europe, many in the countryside kept their rustic rites along with the new religion. ("Pagan" stems from the Latin paganus meaning "country dweller...