How Visitors Nearly Destroyed Lascaux: The Story of a Closure

The paradox fits in a single sentence: the horses, aurochs and deer of Lascaux survived seventeen thousand years in the dark, but a few decades of tourism nearly erased them. Discovered in September 1940 in the Vezere valley, in the Dordogne, the cave was hailed as the Sistine Chapel of prehistoryPrehistoryThe span of human history before the invention of writing, from the Palaeolithic to the Metal Ages, known mainly through material remains.→. Less than twenty-five years later, it was closed to the public, eaten away by ills no one had foreseen. This dossier retraces the story of that degradation, of the closure ordered by Andre Malraux in 1963, and of the replicas that today protect the original by receiving the crowds in its place.

September 1940: four teenagers and a hole in the hill

On 12 September 1940, four teenagers, Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agniel and Simon Coencas, went down into a cavity opened by an uprooted tree on the hill of Lascaux, near Montignac. Ravidat, who had spotted the hole a few days earlier, widened its entrance. At the end of a narrow passage, the light of their lamp revealed walls covered with painted and engraved animals.¹ They had just entered a sanctuary that had remained sealed since the end of the last ice age.

The small band had no idea of the scale of its find. Tradition has it that a dog named Robot vanished into the cavity and set the boys on the trail, a detail the witnesses have variously reported. What is certain is that Marcel Ravidat and Jacques Marsal took their role as discoverers very seriously: they mounted guard at the entrance to protect the cave from the curious and from looters, sometimes sleeping on the spot. Marsal, the youngest, bound his whole life to Lascaux and later became one of its official guardians, a privileged witness to its glory and then to its torments.

Abbe Henri Breuil, a leading specialist in cave artCave (parietal) artArt made on the walls of caves and shelters (paintings, engravings), as opposed to portable artPortable artTransportable art objects (figurines, engravings on bone or ivory), such as the Palaeolithic Venuses.→.→, quickly authenticated the ensemble. The walls bear close to two thousand figures, including about six hundred paintings and a multitude of engravings: horses, aurochs, deer, bison, ibex, a feline, a bear, a rhinoceros, together with enigmatic geometric signs. The Hall of the Bulls, a long entrance gallery, lines up immense black aurochs, one of which exceeds five metres. Attributed to the MagdalenianMagdalenianThe last great Upper PalaeolithicUpper PalaeolithicThe final phase of the Palaeolithic (c. 45,000 to 10,000 years ago), marked by Homo sapiens in Europe, art, ornaments and a succession of cultures (Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian).→ culture (c. 17,000–12,000 BC), the peak of cave art (Lascaux).→, these works are now dated to about 17,000 to 18,000 years ago. In the occupied France of 1940, the discovery took on a particular resonance: it swiftly became a source of national pride, and the idea of showing it to the public arose at once. From 1940, the landowner and the authorities grasped the potential of the site, and the question of opening it was not long in coming.

1948: opening to the public and the rush

After works designed to make the cave accessible, Lascaux officially opened its doors to visitors in July 1948. To ease the flow of people, the entrance floor had been lowered, doors, a staircase and electric lighting installed, and an airlock dug out. These seemingly harmless works upset the atmospheric balance of a cavity that had remained stable for millennia.²

The success was immediate and considerable. In the 1950s, Lascaux drew up to nearly one thousand two hundred people a day in high season. Over the whole period it was open, an estimated 1.2 million visitors crowded into the cave. Yet each human body is a small thermal and chemical machine: a visitor exhales carbon dioxide, water vapour and heat, and carries in on their shoes dust, pollen and spores. Multiplied by twelve hundred and repeated day after day, this presence injected into the cave a quantity of carbon dioxide, humidity and warmth far beyond what the natural balance could absorb. The electric lighting, for its part, brought light and heat, the two conditions that microscopic and plant life needed precisely in order to thrive.

One must picture what Lascaux was in the post-war years: a star attraction of a French tourism industry in full reconstruction, an economic windfall for Montignac and its region, an almost obligatory stop for art lovers from around the world. The cave became the very image of prehistoric genius, reproduced in textbooks, magazines and the first travel guides. This fame was both its consecration and its condemnation: the more it was shown, the more it was endangered. For about a decade, however, no one perceived the danger, for the degradation of a painted wall cannot be read in a day. The pigments, laid on the limestone, remained seemingly intact, and it was long believed that the stone would eternally protect what it had preserved since prehistory.

The green disease and the white disease

As early as the mid-1950s, the guides noticed green patches appearing on the walls. What was nicknamed the green disease was a colonisation by microscopic algae, encouraged by the carbon dioxide released by breathing, by the rise in temperature and humidity, and by the artificial light of the projectors.³ For the first time, living organisms were developing on pigments seventeen millennia old.

A second affliction followed close behind. The white disease refers to the deposit of a veil of calcitecalciteCrystalline form of calcium carbonate that makes up cave concretions (stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone).→, crystals of calcium carbonate that form when water laden with limestone evaporates or recondenses on the surface of the walls. This whitish veil threatened to cover and mask the paintings. Both ills had a single origin: the internal climatic disruption caused by attendance. Faced with the emergency, treatments were applied from the late 1950s, antibiotics against bacteria, then formol solutions and biocide foot baths to check the algae. A climateClimateThe long-term average atmospheric conditions of a region; its variations (glaciations, aridifications) shaped migrations, agriculture and the collapse of prehistoric societies.→-regulating machine was also installed to lower the temperature and capture the carbon dioxide. But it was becoming clear that the cave, as it was being exploited, was destroying itself before the eyes of those who had come to admire it. The remedy came down to a word no one wanted to utter: closure.

17 April 1963: Malraux closes Lascaux

On 17 April 1963, Andre Malraux, General de Gaulle's minister of cultural affairs, ordered the definitive closure of Lascaux to the public. The decision was painful for a man so attached to bringing art to the greatest number, but a scientific commission he had convened had concluded without ambiguity: the large groups, the prolonged stays that raised the temperature and altered the humidity, the pollen and spores carried in from outside were putting the paintings in mortal danger.⁴

In fifteen years of opening, Lascaux had received about 1.2 million visitors; in fifteen years, it had nearly lost what seventeen millennia of darkness had preserved. Once the doors were closed, scientists could intervene. The green disease was brought under control: deprived of light, heat and excess carbon dioxide, the algae ceased to proliferate. The calcite, by contrast, proved more stubborn, and some areas remained marked. The cave then entered a long phase of surveillance, visited only by a handful of specialists and for brief periods, so as never again to impose on it the pressure that had nearly killed it. The principle of a carrying capacity, that is, a threshold beyond which a site degrades, had just been written into the history of conservation.

Malraux's decision set a precedent. Until then, the protection of heritage had been thought of in terms of theft, vandalism or bad weather, rarely in terms of attendance. Lascaux imposed a new and unsettling idea: the visitor, by their mere physical presence, could be the agent of destruction. This lesson spread far beyond the Perigord. Other decorated caves, in France as in Spain, were in turn closed or placed under strict quotas, and the notion of mass tourism began to be weighed against its effects on the most fragile sites. Montignac, deprived of its main attraction, had to invent another way of keeping its treasure alive without touching it.

Fusarium and black stains: the crises of the twenty-first century

The closure did not put a definitive end to the threats. For some forty years, Lascaux remained relatively stable, but at the turn of the millennium a new crisis erupted. In 2000, the cave entrance was widened and a more powerful air-conditioning system was installed. Combined with heavy rains during the work, this intervention once again disturbed the fragile balance of the cavity.⁵ In 2001 an invasion of white moulds appeared, identified as the fungus Fusarium solani, which proved resistant to conventional treatments and spread across the floor and then the walls. Quantities of quicklime, biocides and antifungals were deployed in an attempt to contain it.

A few months after the first treatments, at the end of 2001, a second scourge emerged: black stains, of fungal origin, began to speckle the walls and the vault, associated with other micro-organisms. The intensive chemical fight, far from settling the problem for good, fed a cycle in which each treatment seemed to call forth a new contamination. In 2007, UNESCO and the French authorities recorded a further worsening, and an international scientific committee was set up to rethink the strategy. The lesson of these successive crises is that Lascaux is now an unstable microbial ecosystem, to be monitored and kept as close as possible to its original state rather than treated with blows of biocide. The cave remains sealed today and under permanent observation.

Replicas: the paradox of conservation

How do you show the world a masterpiece that must at all costs be withheld from the world? The answer was the facsimile. In 1979, the prehistoric sites and decorated caves of the Vezere valley, Lascaux foremost among them, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, enshrining their universal value. Four years later, in 1983, Lascaux II opened nearby, a faithful reproduction of the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery, painted according to the original pigments and techniques. For the first time, the public could admire the paintings without threatening the original.⁶

In the meantime, a travelling version, sometimes called Lascaux III, carried reconstructed panels to the great museums of the world, from Chicago to Tokyo, in order to make the cave known to those who would never come to the Dordogne. The techniques of moulding and pigment transfer were refined at each stage, to the point of reproducing the slightest accidents of the rock.

The venture culminated with Lascaux IV, the International Centre for Cave Art, unveiled at Montignac in December 2016. This time it was almost the entire cave that was reconstructed, using digital surveys of extreme precision and reproduction techniques combining art and technology. Designed by the architecture firm Snohetta, the centre welcomes on the order of 400,000 visitors a year, while the original, a few hundred metres away, stays closed and silent.⁷ The paradox is complete: the attendance that nearly killed Lascaux is now transferred to its copy, and it is at the price of this double that the true work survives. One may read this as a kind of admission, that of an art one can no longer contemplate except through its reproduction, but also as a success: thanks to the facsimile, the aesthetic emotion remains accessible to all without the original suffering for it.

The story of Lascaux is not only that of a prehistoric treasure, it is also that of a dawning awareness. It taught conservators the world over that a site is not an inexhaustible asset, that the gaze itself can be a threat, and that protecting a heritage sometimes means giving up the sight of it. The Magdalenian painters had entrusted their horses and their aurochs to the darkness of a cavern, which had kept them intact for seventeen thousand years. It took barely fifteen years of light and crowds to understand that the greatest danger to these images was not time, but the admiration of human beings.