Saving Beauty

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"There's been a tradition of intervention at Lascaux from the very beginning," says François Bourges, an independent hydrogeologist and expert on France's caves. South by 230 km, the Tuc 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 caves 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."

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.

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 millenniums 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 water-based vacuum cleaner. Pallot-Frossard has no regrets. "There's 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 all 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 problem," 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.