Word: lascaux
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the French government last month announced that a local official, Jean-Marie Chauvet, had discovered the stunning Paleolithic cave near Avignon, experts swiftly hailed the 20,000-year-old paintings as a trove rivaling-and perhaps surpassing-those of Lascaux and Altamira. "This is a virgin site-it's completely intact. It's great art," exulted Jean Clottes, an adviser to the French Culture Ministry and a leading authority on prehistoric art. It has also reopened some of the oldest and least settled of questions: When, how and above all why did Homo sapiens start making...
...caves. This expansion from the body to the inert surface was in itself a startling act of lateral thinking, an outward projection of huge cultural consequence, and Homo sapiens did not produce it quickly. As much time elapsed between the first recognizable art and the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, about 15 to 20 millenniums, as separates Lascaux (or Chauvet) from the first TV broadcasts. But now it was possible to see an objective image in shared space, one that was not the property of particular bodies and had a life of its own; and from this point...
...suppose that Cro-Magnon cave art was rare and exceptional. But wrongly; as New York University anthropologist Randall White points out, more than 200 late-Stone Age caves bearing wall paintings, engravings, bas-relief decorations and sculptures have been found in southwestern Europe alone. Since the discovery of Lascaux in 1940, French archaeologists have been finding an average of a cave a year-and, says professor Denis Vialou of Paris' Institute of Human Paleontology, "there are certainly many, many more to be discovered, and while many might not prove as spectacular as Lascaux or Chauvet, I'd bet that some...
Martin Edmund's poems in The High Road to Taos invite comparison to the celebrated prehistoric paintings of the Lascaux caves in France. Both include images on a huge scale, natural subjects, an undercurrent of strange spirituality, But they also leave the viewer with the sensation that the scenes and emotions they illustrate have long been dry. The reader is forced to wonder, "Has the passion, like the paint, faded with time, or is the artist receiving too much credit...
Edmunds plays it too safe, letting his emotions dry as if they were Lascaux's cave paintings, sensitive to light and life. He forgets that his work is contemporary, the worth of its preservation has yet to be proven. Hidden in distant caves it loses, its chance for glory...