Saving Beauty
Adapted from an article in Time Magazine, 2006/5/29 by James Graff
Photo: Norbert Aujolat - CNP/MCC
For more than 17 000 years, the bestiary of the Lascaux cave in southwestern France has survived the ravages of human history. Anyone entering this time capsule is confronted by four metre long bulls that appear to float across the massive vaults like religious apparitions. An enigmatic spotted beast with a round snout and straight, forward-pointing horns, plump horses in brilliant yellow and deer with treelike antlers-all seem in equal part intimates of the present and missives from some distant world. Which they are. Though the draftsmanship is strikingly Modernist - on exiting the cave in 1940, Pablo Picasso said, "We have invented nothing" - these creatures were painted and inscribed on the limestone walls during the Upper Paleolithic age, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer, and Homo sapiens coexisted with Neanderthal man. They are evidence of the quantum leap in neural connections that gave birth to the uniquely human attribute of consciousness. Lascaux is the most fundamental example anywhere of what the iconoclastic 20th century writer and anthropologist Georges Bataille called "the basic desire of all men, of whatever period or region, to be amazed." Like few other creations of the human hand, it is a patrimony not of any one country or culture, but of humankind as a whole.
Yet Lascaux's robust longevity belies a frightening fragility. Five years ago, after the ill-conceived installation of new climatic equipment, Lascaux suffered an outbreak of fungal infection that threatened to destroy in a few years what thousands of years had left largely unscathed. The cave's custodians are still struggling to eradicate this scourge.
Last month French officials admitted to Time that the Fusarium solani fungus has on occasion spread from the floor to the paintings, and that separate fusarium strains have now been identified in the various arms of the 235 metre long cave complex. Time was allowed to visit the cave because its keepers feel they finally have the outbreak under control. But to keep the fungus in retreat, a team of restorers comes into the cave every two weeks - dressed, as everyone who enters now must be, in hooded biohazard suits, booties and face masks - to remove filaments from the walls. Another team visits regularly to audit the cave's sanitary condition using laser imaging.
When art restorer Rosalie Godin was urgently called to Lascaux in August 2001, she couldn't believe her eyes. "It was as if it had snowed in the cave. Everything was covered in white" she says. Two of the caves caretakers, Bruno Desplat and Sandrine van Solinge, had raised the alarm when the white filaments, spotted in isolated parts of the cave months before, spread like wild fire over a matter of days. Desplat, who lives next to Lascaux and has devoted over 15 years to its care, says he became physically ill upon seeing the luxuriant bloom.
That's not to say that he or the cave's curator, the prehistorian jean-Michel Geneste, could have been entirely surprised. That spring, workers had finished installing a €23 000 air-conditioning system beneath the stairs leading down to the cave.
Caretakers monitor the cave in 2003; every
two weeks, restorers come to remove mold.
Photo: MCC/DRAC Aquitane/Grotte de Lascaux
Note: If the reader clicks on this image and looks at the larger photo, it will be apparent that there are blue spots on the wall of the cave. I am not sure what these blue spots are, and would be glad if someone could identify them for me. The best guess I have is that they are antibiotic patches. - Don
The new machine was a major departure from the way Lascaux's delicate balance of temperature and humidity had been regulated for the preceding 30 years. The old system, installed in 1968 after years of minute studies of the cave's climate, relied on Lascaux's natural currents to pass air over a cold point and make sure that water condensed there, like it does on a beer can, rather than on the walls of the cave. This passive system was only necessary during the wettest periods of the year, when it worked as a functional replacement for the earth that for millennia had absorbed excess water from the saturated air of the cave, but that had been removed since the cave's discovery in 1940.
The new system was designed to automate the process, but also sought to improve it by using two massive high-powered fans to pull the air toward the cold point. Such an intrusive approach scandalized those who had worked so hard to figure out a more modest solution to earlier problems in the cave. "Our idea was always to be as parsimonious as possible" says Pierre Vidal, a retired researcher who worked in Lascaux for decades. "This thing seemed more like a central air-conditioning system."
In most organizations, an individual or board will have the last word on decisions, especially one this controversial. Yet nobody claims authorship of the decision to install the new machine. Geneste, who as Lascaux's curator since 1992 is effectively the cave's top manager, says that he was always opposed to switching to a new principle for regulating the cave, "but following on our decision to restore a machine that could maintain the caves parameters, a chain of administrative decisions led to the selection of a dynamic system."
Philippe Oudin, the chief architect of historic monuments forthe department of Dordogne, who was responsible for planning and overseeing the work, did not respond to a request for comment. Technical advice for the project was provided by Ingéni, an air-systems consultancy firm based near Paris, which had designed systems for supermarkets and museums, but which, like Oudin himself, had no experience with caves. "We proposed a system and that's what they chose" says the firm's managing director, Michel de la Giraudière. "I don't know why they favored an active system over a passive one, but I do know not everyone was of the same opinion. They wanted a certain efficacy, and the discussion was somewhat political"
The fusarium fungus, inset, has spread from the floors to some paintings, such as this horse in the Main Gallery, pictured in 2005; restorers now remove the growths by hand.
Photo: CG Dordogne; LRMH (inset)
The appearance of the mold soon after the new apparatus was put in place in April 2001 suggests it was unequal to the task of maintaining Lascaux's equilibrium. By the end of that year, Geneste ordered the fans taken out altogether. "If we knew then what we learned later, we wouldn't have installed that machine" says Alain Rieu, the director of conservation for the region of Aquitaine, which ultimately signed off on - and paid for - the work. "But the old machinery was in a bad state of repair, and we all decided unanimously that we couldn't take the risk of doing nothing. It seemed like the least bad solution."
If so, it was pursued at arguably the worst time. While a roof over the entrance was removed for the installation of the new system in early 2001, drenching rains poured directly into the cave's entrance, bringing with them dirt and, some suspect, fusarium spores. The danger that spores or other biological agents might contaminate the cave had been foreseen. Jean-Franqois Nicolas, director of contractor Forclim Sud-Ouest Alary Vimard, says his workers were under instructions to wash their feet, limit their working hours, and stay out of the painted chambers of the cave; Desplat himself installed a padlock to insure they did so. "We worked under the rules we were given" says Nicolas. Geneste, responsible for monitoring the work once a week With Oudin's representative, contends that wasn't always the case. "The workers often ignored us and the architect's representative and didn't disinfect their feet" says Geneste. "They didn't keep the door closed all the time; they wanted to get the job done quickly." What's more, France's Research Laboratory of Historical Monuments (LRMH), responsible for monitoring the cave's biological condition, made no inspections during the construction work.
Codin was shocked by what she found when she was first dispatched to Lascaux by the LRMH. "The construction site was run like someone redoing a bathroom" she says. "The entrance to the cave was like a swamp, and there was construction waste all over the place. It was an apocalyptic vision." Contractor Nicolas counters that: "It was not a disordered work site as long as we were there" but says masons and carpenters may have followed. When she first arrived, Godin says, she was flying blind: "I was like a fireman, with no documents, no instructions, nothing" she says. In September, the LRMH identified the fungus as Fusarium solani, a virulent mold that commonly infects soil and crops and often proves so drug-resistant that whole crop fields must be dug up and burned.
Restorers shrouded the mold with bandages soaked in a mix of fungicide and antibiotics.
Photo: Dominique Bouchardon-LRMH
Not everyone is convinced that the fungus entered the cave on the thick soles of contractors' boots. Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, director of the LRMH, says that a long-term, low-level presence of formaldehyde in the cave - ironically used as a foot wash for decades to prevent such infections - may have killed off many of the other organisms that might have prevented such an explosion of fusarium. "The fusarium strains we found in the cave are extremely resistant to formaldehyde, unlike strains from elsewhere" says Pallot Frossard. "It didn't come from outside, but had been there all along. All it needed was a slight modification in climate to take off."
And take off it did. At first Godin's team sprayed the mold with an alcohol solution of Vitalub, a common ammonium disinfectant. But the fusarium appeared oblivious: scientists learned that it lived in diabolical symbiosis with a bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens, which was degrading the fungicide, so the restorers added antibiotics to the mix in which they soaked bandages to plaster the lower walls of the cave. Tons of quicklime, which kills the fungus but also temporarily raised the cave's ambient temperature, was spread on the floor. Since the worst of the infection has been brought under control, "mechanical removal" continues - that is, carefully plucking the filaments from the wall by hand.
An ancient menagerie gallops across the Great Hall of the Bulls
Photo: Norbert Aujolat - CNP/MCC
Getting into a hole
Lascaux discoverers Marsal, at left, and Marcel Ravidat sit as Bégouën, Breuil and
others inspect their find.
Photo: AFP
Lascaux would have escaped history and its indignities if four boys rambling on a hillside just east of the Vézère River in southwestern France in 1940 hadn't decided to investigate an opening revealed by a fallen tree. Soon Abbé Henri Breuil, a pioneer in the study of Paleolithic cave art who had been examining cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain for almost 40 years, arrived to inspect their extraordinary find. He theorized that Lascaux's broad galleries of compositions suggested a magical or religious function for the drawings; Lascaux became known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory" and people clamored to see it. After the war the La Rochefoucauld family, which owned the property, authorized work to enlarge the entrance, shunt off the water that had once cascaded through the cave, and install steps and concrete flooring through much of the underground complex. As many as 1 700 visitors traipsed through Lascaux every day, but by the late 1950s, the presence of so many carbon dioxide-exhaling, warm-blooded bodies had altered the cave's climate to the point where calcite deposits and lichen were threatening the paintings.
"There's been a tradition of intervention at Lascaux from the very beginning" says Frangois Bourges, an independent hydrogeologist and expert on France's eaves. South by 230 km, the D'Audoubert and Grotte des Trois Frères, caves of a similar vintage and impact as Lascaux, have never been open to the public. Count Robert Bégouën, whose father and uncles found the eaves on the family's Pyrenean estate in the years just before World War I, continues a family tradition that decrees no one enters either cave without a Bégouën at their side. Not even Jean Clottes, who wrote an extensive monograph on Tuc, was allowed to venture off a narrow path along the center of the cave. "My grandfather said that a cave opened to the public is lost to science:' says Bégouën. "Since nature conserved it for 17 000 years, we do absolutely nothing: no new plantings on the surface, no sealing it off with doors, and for each generation, just one chief responsible for studies and conservation. Everything we did is the opposite of Lascaux."
After the cave opened to the public in 1940, up to 1 700 visitors traipsed through each day.
Photo: René Burri - Magnum Photos
The era and the circumstances of Lascaux's discovery prevented such a pristine approach. After the war, France - and the community of Montignac - needed a boost, and as a phenomenal tourist attraction, Lascaux was there to provide one. Moreover, Breuil, unlike his friend Bégouën, believed that the wonders of Lascaux ought to be shared as an educational experience with as many people as possible. But by 1963, the threat of permanent damage had grown so acute that André Malraux, France's first and most famous Minister of Culture, ordered the cave closed.
That courageous decision ushered in an era of innovative study of the world's most iconic painted cave. A team led by Paul-Marie Guyon, a young physical chemist, and including Jacques Marsal, one of the boys who discovered Lascaux and who grew up to become its guardian and most practical connoisseur, worked to model the air flows and monitor the carbon dioxide content and temperature in the cave. At the same time, the meaning of the prehistoric cave paintings, like those discovered earlier in southern France and northern Spain, became a topic of fertile interdisciplinary discussion. Some saw in these beasts primary evidence that from the beginning art was wrought for the sake of art. Others contended that the images were purely utilitarian, drawn solely to marshal magic that would help hunters succeed. Yet archaeological evidence is strong that while humans were painting in Lascaux, they could count for sustenance on massive herds of reindeer, an animal that is only rarely depicted.
By the beginning of the 1970s, Lascaux had found a kind of stability. The crowds were gone, the lichens banished, and Marsal was in the cave almost every day, alert to even the slightest changes. The studies of Guyon and others had determined that the cave could handle about five visitors a day for 35 minutes each, five days a week. With some variation, that protocol was never exceeded for the next 30 years. Since 1983, even the crowds were back, in manageable numbers, to visit Lascaux II, a facsimile that gives visitors an inkling of the cave paintings' power. And anyone determined and patient enough could successfully petition the authorities for permission to visit the real cave. The only precaution was to walk through a trough of formaldehyde solution - the regimen which Pallot-Frossard of the LRMH suggests may have inadvertently enabled the fusarium fungus to flourish.
Future Tense
Pallot-Frossard contends that the fungus has not caused irreversible damage to the paintings, but others disagree. Laurence Léauté-Beasley, a Franco-American who led art tours into Lascaux from 1982 to 2001 and formed the International Committee for the Preservation of Lascaux in 2004, says one knowledgeable visitor to the cave last month not only saw fusarium on the paintings, but noticed a grayish tinge to formerly black surfaces where growths had been removed. And the treatment itself may have taken a toll. When the quicklime that did the most to bring the outbreak under control was removed from the cave over the course of last year, so too was what was left of the soil - with possible ramifications for the cave's climate and humidity. Desplat, the Lascaux caretaker who first discovered the outbreak, says that in the course of restoration work, a large stone flake painted with a horse's head that many millennia ago had fallen from the Great Hall of the Bulls - the first and most voluminous chamber of the cave - sustained three cracks; Geneste says the cracks aren't new. Some believe that a ridge around part of the Great Hall bears the marks of the restorers' ladders, and that the lower parts of the walls have been changed through the use of a Gregomatic, a kind of powerful waterbased vacuum cleaner. Pallot-Frossard has no regrets. "Theres nothing more complicated than a cave" she says. "We had to intervene fast and we did the best we could"
What doesn't exist is an independent judgment of what went wrong at Lascaux and whether it is being put right. The committee the Ministry of Culture created to perform that task includes Oudin, the architect who installed the disastrous climate system; Geneste, the curator, who accepted the plans and oversaw the installation project; Pallot-Frossard, the lab director; and the responsible bureaucrats. How a committee so constituted can arrive at unbiased answers is "a good question" admits Marc Gauthier, an expert on the Gallo-Roman era and the committee's chairman. But he says it's working. "Too often we've reacted to the symptoms of the problern" he says. "But for the last three years we've been reflecting and acting on the reasons." Léauté-Beasley is unconvinced. "We feel that big mistakes have happened and may still be happening" she says. "The French are dealing with them like it's their backyard, but they need to feel accountable to the rest of the world. After all, who does the past belong to?"
Lascaux's keepers are no longer using chemicals to eradicate fusarium from Lascaux: no more antibiotic patches or quicklime. But no one can be content that restorers still have to go in to pick fusarium filaments off irreplaceable paintings and run the Gregomatic on the lower walls. Geneste sees a few tiny insect colonies as evidence that a new ecological balance is slowly taking shape in the cave. "My goal is to reopen Lascaux in 2007," says Rieu, the regional director of conservation. "If the scientists' hopes are realized, that could happen, though for very restrained numbers of visitors." Business as usual may come as a relief to the ranks of bureaucrats taught a lesson in humility by Lascaux. Whether that lesson sticks will be determined by future generations. It will be a terrible indictment of this one if it does not.
This page last modified Monday 16 July 2007
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Photo: Norbert Aujolat - CNP/MCC
