Philippe-Alain Michaud Photography and prehistory (EN)
2020 | Published in Chauvet, Inner Space RVB Books |
Perhaps I better go back to that valley,
To that rock that was home,
And start scratching all over again.
Scratching out everything backward,
The world in reverse. 1
I
In the early days of photography, before its realist or reflective purpose became clear, the image fleetingly took on a mirroring dimension, with the photographed subject serving as the touchstone for the photographer or camera operator to sum up the medium whose power they had just begun to explore. This nascent experience resurfaces in the images taken by Philippe Durand in the Chauvet cave, where photography finds itself face to face with some of the earliest pictorial representations by humans. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin sets up a polar opposition between cult value and exhibition value, which for him prevail at the dawn and twilight of artistic production, respectively. At the beginning, there were the cave paintings left by prehistory: “What is solely important for these constructs is that they are present, not that they are seen. The elk depicted by Stone Age man on the walls of his cave is an instrument of magic and is exhibited to others only coincidentally; what matters is that the spirits see it.” 2
At the other end of the spectrum, in the age of technological reproducibility, thus with the advent of photography followed by that of cinema, “exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts.” 3 Thus, over several millennia, the modus operandi of art undergoes a fundamental shift or reversal: “Just as the work of art in prehistoric times, through the exclusive emphasis placed on its cult value, became first and foremost an instrument of magic—which only later came to be recognized as a work of art—so today, through the exclusive emphasis placed on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a construct with quite new functions. Among these, the one we are conscious of—the ‘artistic function’—may subsequently be seen as rudimentary.” 4 The displacement of the work of art’s magical dimension is accompanied by the gradual disappearance of what Benjamin calls its aura, this effect still perceptible in early photographic portraits that enveloped the sitter during the very long posing time required. It was most likely the looming threat of this dissipation that prompted Leo Frobenius to favor painting over photography for his assiduous undertaking to copy Paleolithic rock paintings. The nearly 5,000 precise facsimiles of these prehistoric works, reproduced in watercolors on huge sheets by Frobenius’s teams between 1920 and 1938 during the many expeditions he led in Europe and Africa, stand in defiance of photography, revealing coincidentally the ways in which the latter, by mechanizing the process of reproduction, could dispel the illusory neo-Romantic vision spread by the repetition of the “first” gesture: as Maria Stravinaki writes, “[Frobenius] no doubt thought, like Baudelaire, that photography flattened, leveled out, and equalized its subjects. As an intrinsically modern instrument, he found it unsuited to prehistoric art, whereas painting could still be seen as a medium conducive to empathy, encouraging an immersive engagement and appealing to the artist’s sensibilities regarding a time now long gone.” 5
Perhaps also the copying technique allowed the team to mimetically recreate the processual logic of pictorial expression that photographic instantaneity would have brutally destroyed.
But conversely, photography—literally the writing of light—empathically aligns with the earliest figurative representations found in caves, a form of writing before the invention of writing as such. And if we accept that the aura beckons from photographs for the last time through the fleeting expression of a human face, the absence of the latter in the prehistoric paintings takes on a special meaning in their photographic reproduction: it would appear as the emblem of the shift, in practice, from cult value to exhibition value.6 It is in this way that photography finds at the same time its other and its double in the prehistoric cave paintings. For, as Benjamin suggests, these paintings not only served a magical purpose, they also had a metadiscursive function, to the same extent as photography considered from the perspective of its reproducibility: “[Prehistoric art] made use of certain fixed notations in the service of magical practice. These notations, to be sure, probably served not just as the execution of magical procedures, or as instructions for them, but also as objects for contemplative observation to which were ascribed magical effects. The subjects for these notations were humans and their environment, which were depicted according to the demands of a society whose technology existed only in fusion with ritual.
” It is in this way that photography, liberated from the auratic and magical presence of the artifact whose appearance it captures, forms a second nature. When facing the latter, which “humans of course invented, but no longer by any means master,” they are “just as compelled to undertake an apprenticeship as they once were when confronted with first nature.” 7
This apprenticeship is in the end what Henri Matisse described as a movement of renunciation that causes us to discover the thing itself prior to what our visual habits have taught us to represent: “Everything that we see in our daily life is more or less distorted by acquired habits,” Matisse said in a 1953 interview, “and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images that are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort needed to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time: he has to look at life as he did when he was a child and, if he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way. To take an example, I think nothing is more difficult for a true painter than to paint a rose, since before he can do so, he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted. I have often asked visitors who came to see me at Vence, ‘Have you seen the acanthus thistles by the side of the road?’. No one had seen them; they would all have recognized the leaf of an acanthus on a Corinthian capital, but the memory of the capital prevented them from seeing the thistle in nature. The first step towards creation is to see everything as it really is, and that demands a constant effort.” 8
Perhaps this constant effort, this movement of renunciation that teaches us to see something new began with the recognition of the cataclysm ascribed by André Leroi-Gourhan as the origin of any study of prehistory. “To understand how the archives of the earth were compiled,” he writes, “one must have a mental picture . . . of a great stream of water, for erosion is the most important force.” 9
Added to the ravages of time, leaving only a series of indecipherable traces of the antediluvian world, is the unavoidably devastating nature of archaeology itself. Also in the words of Leroi-Gourhan, prehistory is a book “whose pages are destroyed as they are turned.” 10 In full recognition of this insight, Philippe Durand’s photographs take on the process of inventing images conceived as destruction. Through a movement that might be described as an about-face, which must be understood as both repetition and reversal, the “second nature” created by the process of reproducibility joins up with this first, prehistorical nature to which it is opposed and in which it ultimately sees its own characteristics mirrored, to the point of mistaking the one for the other.
II
Durand’s images were produced over four two-hour sessions (the maximum time allowed for visits to the cave), with no photographs taken during the first of these sessions. To illuminate the space, Durand used a front-facing lamp installed in a helmet, glaring like a Cyclops’ eye. Equipped with this lighting mechanism that transformed the synthetic perception of the space into an analytical exploration conditioned by the direction and reach of the luminous beam, the photographer found himself reliving the experience of prehistoric man, who moved around caves by means of rudimentary yet powerful oil lamps, thus reactivating the feeling of anamnesia that Gaston Bachelard associates with a candle’s flame: “The flame intensifies the pleasure of seeing beyond what is usually seen. It compels us to look. The flame summons us to see for the first time. We have a thousand memories of it; we dream of it. It takes on the character of a very old memory, and yet we dream as everyone dreams, we remember as everyone else remembers. Then, obeying one of the most consistent laws of this reverie that happens before a flame, the dreamer dwells in a past which is no longer his alone, the past of the world’s first fires.” 11
The photographs were taken using a flash (Metz Mecablitz 45 CT-1) that produces a very intense burst of light, whose instantaneity (1/10,000ths of a second) contrasts with geological temporality but also allows an image abruptly wrenched from darkness to be fixed, so that in the instant of the shot the time immemorial link to the cave’s formation is brought to mind and simultaneously, explodes. The photographic equipment used (the Mamiya RB 67, a non-digital medium format SLR camera), mounted on a tripod, was able to swivel side to side and on a vertical axis. Occasionally, Durand used a double-exposure system, often in shot/reverse shot, bringing the cave wall surfaces up against each other. By closing on itself, the space of the cave, in keeping with Benjamin’s hypothesis, finds itself reconstituted in the realm of reproducibility. The chamber thus becomes the artificial counterpart of the cavity where it absorbs and recomposes itself, turned inside out like a glove, whereas the passage of time is made clear via the different layers whose trace is recorded in the photographs as they are in sediment and whose confusion leads the image into chaos. Each time the camera swivels, the body movement accompanying this gesture registers once again the circular space accessible to the artist having created the paintings without changing its position, thus the manual field, corresponding to an average diameter of 80 cm, and transforms it into a visual field. 12
The superimposing of images brings into close contact—and erases at the same time—the types of spatial distribution that circumscribe this field. The isolated figures at a distance from one another greater than the radius of a manual field and the juxtaposed figures separated by a distance smaller than this radius merge into each other: they thus are transformed as a set of erratic figures with incomplete outlines requiring at least a partial overlap to be included within the same space. 13
By way of this double exposure technique, Durand rediscovers the occupation of surfaces at the time of prehistoric man, an occupation that Meyer Schapiro, in his investigation of the non-semiotic elements of painting and the function of the frame describes as follows: “The student of prehistoric art knows that the regular field is an advanced artifact presupposing a long development of art. The cave paintings of the Old Stone Age are on an unprepared ground, the rough wall of a cave; the irregularities of earth and rock show through the image. The artist worked then on a field with no set boundaries and thought so little of the surface as a distinct ground that he often painted his animal figure over a previously painted image without erasing the latter, as if it were invisible to the viewer.” 14- As a result of the superimposition, the photographs reveal that the visual characteristics of the wall paintings, as suggested this time by Jean Louis Schefer, relate less to description than to deformation. 15
- Form is replaced by combinations of lines that lose their descriptive quality: “In a formal way, we have here a system of interpretation (of the ‘world,’ reality, relations of power) applying the most economical means to restricted combinations of limited figures, sufficiently readable where it is necessary, leaving free rein elsewhere to the interlacing of figures at the limit of readability and referential pertinence.”16
By breaking the documentary objectivity of reproduction, the double exposure activates a formal regression phenomenon that destructures less the image, which is still complete, than its subject. The photograph becomes the vehicle for compositional effects that call into question the conventional perspective on prehistory that became entrenched in the 19th century: portrait or landscape painting can no longer serve today as the prism through which Paleolithic artistic production is to be understood and appreciated. As Schefer also notes, “The primary function of the figures is not to restore or present reality (to offer a representation of it)—this point of view is that of a consumer of 19th-century art (or of the dominant ideology concerning the art of that period). It would be absurd to imagine that the Magdalenians depicted a sampling of their ‘reality’ because they loved, desired, feared or revered it.” 17 Photography thus becomes a critical meditation less on Paleolithic artistic production than on the manner in which these works have been interpreted: it produces meta-images as silent commentaries on a corpus itself silent, constituted, as distinct from historical artistic traditions, uniquely of images.- By tearing down the atmospheric conventions of spatial construction, superimposition replaces field depth with a material depth and restitutes the tactile complementarity of surfaces. Superimposition allows, as opposed to the atmospheric restitution of the field, for the combination of iconic representation systems with index-based systems: the double exposure can thus bring together traces of bear paw prints in the soil with the representation of a bear drawn on the wall or a finger drawing of a deer with dispersed skeletal remains. Tracing backward, in a stratigraphic movement, the horizontal axis of inquiry asserted by Leroi-Gourhan as the condition for his planographic approach to excavation, and thus by working on surfaces, alone allows, apart from reaping an abundant harvest of artifacts, the interpretation of the objects found in terms of the relationships between them. 18
Durand thus supplements an analog photographic process from a technical standpoint with a structural analogy that steers photography away from its reproducibility function and assimilates it to the inventive exploration characterizing an archaeological dig. Borrowing the figuration of space from processes other than those of perspective representation inherited from the Quattrocento, to which photography continues to owe a technical debt, the image returns, by way of superimposition, to a stage of visual expression that enters into dialogue with Paleolithic graphic expression. A temporal regression is thus added to the formal regression, one that is neither causal nor successive, but instead illogical and simultaneous 19- in the same way as archaeology, photography is the materialized trace of an action entering into resonance with a lost sequence of gestures. 20
Both the photographer and the structuralist prehistorian must contend with the fact that the hypothetical meaning of the figures is fading away: the shift in the point of view and the sedimentation of images absolves photography of the constraint on appearances, which thus finds itself brought back to the unintelligible. By recapitulating the temps long of archaeology within instantaneity, photography becomes a technique for recognizing not the visible, but the invisible.
Both outside and within the cave as reconstituted in the photographs, there is no specific directional orientation. At the site, it is impossible to perceive, as an architectonic system, an entry or exit, rooms, passages, corridors, alcoves or impasses. These points of reference that would determine physical displacements are replaced by a helter-skelter world of images without focus, born of the interactions of the cave walls with the figures and the pictographic signs, for which the notions of right, left, up and down have no purchase. “The cave is ‘lived’. It is a place inhabited by sensations. It accepts, receives and preserves figurative constructs; each of them is more or less conducive to these figurative adjustments. The formal modifications made in the animal depictions result from a sympathetic interplay with the space itself—the surface relief of the walls, framed grounds, niches, drawn-out passages, hearths. ‘Dead’, static spaces are never used. The frequently observed use of relief (projections, fissures, crests, edges, pillars, etc.), as the support or outline for figures or overall silhouettes, is precisely in keeping with this idea: figuration is an adaptation of lines and figures to the characteristics of the space.”21
Thus, the arrangement of decoration in caves is, if not reconstituted, at least commented upon in an intuitive and deconstructed way, one resistant to any kind of systematicity.22
Various forms of spatial restitution coexist, from the abstract apprehension of the subject relying on a multiplicity of viewpoints to its partial optic structuration. The figures shown pell mell in the cycles, a fact underscored by Leroi-Gourhan, which has very few equivalents in the other arts, finds in the superimposition of fields a form of activation creating morphological encounters and accidental compositions, an interplay of condensations and distensions that simultaneously shift and reactivate the constructs developed by the Paleolithic artists.23
The first impression left by the photographs is that of a complete absence of symmetry: the figures seem to be brought together by chance, with their presence or absence merely incidental; they bear no perceptible relation to where they are found and seem to be floating in space. The interaction of natural elements and figures creates a new spatial structure: the process of superimposition repeats, but without redoubling it, the gesture of the “man who painted two blots behind a stalagmite or on the outer edges of a crevice, [and] who had done so after due consideration and as the result of a choice.”24
The overlapping of images that end up forming a single one reveals the entanglement of figures in the natural forms of the support, whose surface serves as the frame while also generating volumes, giving rise to fractures and oblique lines from the folds in the rock, curves and axes of symmetry freed from the viewer’s perspective, unavoidably prescriptive.
The strong dissociation between foregrounds and backgrounds generates a stereoscopic effect: the use of oblique lighting and lenticular lenses creates projections that are both fictive and complex, whereas in the darker areas, the natural reliefs are incorporated within the work bringing the cave within the symbolic apparatus of representation. In the cave paintings, the interest in depicting a ground surface is reflected in the positioning of the limbs of animals, whose extremities meet a fictive line, constituted by the linear arrangement of several successive figures. This line is observed either implicitly due to the alignment of the legs of a single group of animals or explicitly by the positioning of figures on a fortuitous natural support, whether a ledge, projection or fissure in the rock. This arrangement becomes particularly notable when animal figures are arrayed on oblique reliefs. Owing to the double exposures, the ground line becomes clear: the covering of the shot by the reverse shot produces an architectonic effect, with the transposed stratification fissures or joints standing in for the ground line at the same time that, thanks to the tilting of the frame, the animals are perceived as either climbing or descending a slope. Reoriented by the position of the camera and the shooting angle, they appear in unusual positions, whereas the surfaces at the top of the images, the rock-hewn canopies, the detached wall pieces, even the clay of the earth, offer surfaces whose relationship with verticality takes on an enigmatic and fictive quality.
III
To photograph the cave, Durand used six filters—red, green, blue, yellow, violet and orange—combined in pairs. But as always in his work, this rule is not set in stone: sometimes he used no filter at all, or a single filter producing a monochrome image. By replacing subtractive with additive synthesis, allowing the intermediate hues produced at random to peek through, his photography frees itself of painting, but also of its own referential dimension. In the manner of a cartographer, Durand uses artificial, non-descriptive colors, corresponding to thermal values: cold blue tones and warm red or yellow ones. As Goethe suggests, 25
if yellow is always accompanied by light, blue brings with it a principle of darkness.26
And whereas when we stare at a perfectly yellow-red surface, the color seems to penetrate our eyes, blue seems to be moving away from us. For this reason, we enjoy contemplating blue because we are drawn to it.27 . Durand’s compositions thus reconstitute a phenomenological or mental spatiality that combines depth and surface effects with our own perception of them. The reduction in the chromatic spectrum obtained by using filters effectively echoes the limited range of coloring materials used by the Paleolithic artists, for the most part derived from iron oxides, and most often limonite or manganese, producing monochromes, reds or blackish browns without fill, or with a uniform fill.
Leroi-Gourhan, following Henri Breuil, interprets the application of blots with blurred, conjoined or distanced edges as the result of a “spray painting” process, by blowing powdered pigment or splattering pigment in paste form on the wall: “It seems that the procedure employed was simply opaquing using a round ‘brush’ laden with colored powder on the damp wall. It also seems that for certain shapes painted by applying this technique, the artists would have used stencils, allowing to close off the contiguous areas of color to create a sharp edge, in order to draw the line of a neck, for example.” 28
The use of filters produces an effect similar to that of the stencils. The flat fields of color they generate inverse the respective positions of the backgrounds and the figures: the backgrounds pass into the foreground under which the dissociated figures appear transparently. Mimicking the action of water, the patina-like colored crusts covering the surfaces point up the sinuous veins and halos of the rocky mass. The distinct nuances of the horizontal layers bring transparent fissures and debris to the fore, which lay claim to space within the image. The coalescence of the different grounds contaminates the composition: the figures seem to emerge from the colored gangues that fragment the surface, covering and tearing it in the manner of paper stuck to a surface, generating marbling, stains and drips that seem to be replicating a geological process.
The use of non-natural colors gives the effect of a somewhat flashy decorativism. As in the mannerist caves, the natural space becomes ambiguous, taking on a state halfway between stone and flesh, solid and liquid, congelation and petrification. 29
In this naturalization of the artifice, the paintings are as if covered in heaps of semi-transparent minerals, like Michelangelo’s Prisoners statues which, originally housed in the grotto designed by Bernardo Buontalenti in the Boboli Gardens, had gradually become covered in lime deposits causing them to blend into the rock. Thus we observe an oscillation, also favored by the rustic style, between grotesque and sublime, two ways of calling into question the canon of ideal beauty founded on symmetry and proportion. But the use of filters also gives the images a psychedelic dimension and transforms view into vision. This reference to psychotropic drugs relates to a deliberate loss of control, put forward as a line of action: Durand thus rediscovers, through photography, the shamanic dimension that thinkers like Salomon Reinach, Henri Breuil and Georges Bataille perceived in the Paleolithic paintings—a hypothesis nevertheless deemed by Leroi-Gourhan, in several of his writings, as without foundation.30
The interaction of filters and double exposures aggravates the expressive power of a world that is both strange and familiar, unheimlig, in which Leroi-Gourhan had spotted, in his time, “a Christmas tree, a Virgin and Child, beets seen from underneath, deposits in the shape of cauliflowers, . . . .” 31
But also intestines, entrails, uterine cavities, reflecting the assimilation of the cave to a body, both sacrificial and sexual. Photography transforms the painting and the place where it was painted into organic matter. Viewing the mineral surfaces where the powdered red pigment produces bloody halos swathed in paradoxical hues by the filters brings to mind the haunting description given by Victor Hugo of the white cliffs of Dover in The Toilers of the Sea: “Here and there the oxides in the rock had created blotches of red, like patches of congealed blood. They resembled the bloody exudations on the walls of a slaughterhouse. There was something of the air of a charnel house about the reef. The rough marine stone, in many shades of color—produced here by the decomposition of metallic compounds in the rock, there by molds—had patches of hideous purple, sinister greens, and splashes of vermilion, calling up ideas of murder and extermination. It was like the walls of an execution chamber, left unwashed, as if men crushed to death here had left their traces. The sheer rock walls seemed to bear the imprint of accumulated death agonies. Certain spots looked as if they were still dripping from the carnage; the rock was wet, and it seemed that if you touched it your fingers would be covered with blood. The rust of massacre was to be seen everywhere. At the foot of the parallel walls, scattered about under the water or just above it, or in hollows in the rocks, were monstrous round boulders—scarlet, black, purple—that looked like human organs; fresh lungs, rotting livers. It was as if giants had been disemboweled here. From top to bottom of the granite ran long veins of red, like blood oozing from a corpse. All these features are common in sea caves.”32
IV
Exterior, day : following the same methodology combining double exposures and colored filters, Durand also photographed areas outdoors by daylight, such as the approach to the cave. He used a red filter on the stone and a blue one on the air: the sky becomes yellow and the mountain magenta pink. The sky and the earth change positions; the surface of the image, littered with gravel, tufts of grass, and sandbanks carried away by colors, is stratified into thin, transparent layers that liquefy the surface, as if it were being continually washed by the tide. The landscape seems animated by a static flickering, brilliant spots that are, to borrow Nietzsche’s metaphor from The Birth of Tragedy, the reflexes of an eye having gazed into the night. 33
Philippe-Alain Michaud is an exhibition curator, curator at the National Museum of Modern Art – Center Pompidou, teacher of history and cinema theory at the University of Geneva
- Nicanor Parra, Poems and Antipoems, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti et al. (London: Cape, 1968), 59. ↩
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (First Version), trans. Michael W. Jennings, in “Walter Benjamin’s Media Tactics: Optics, Perception, and the Work of Art,” Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010): 17–18. ↩
- Ibid., 19. ↩
- Ibid., 18. ↩
- Maria Stavrinaki, Saisis par la préhistoire. Enquête sur l’art et le temps des modernes (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2019), 262–63. ↩
- Ibid., 18. ↩
- Ibid., 18–19. ↩
- Henri Matisse, “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child,” interview with Régine Pernoud originally published in Le Courrier de l’UNESCO VI, 10 (October 1953) and in translation in Art News and Review (February 6, 1954). In Henri Matisse and Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 218. ↩
- André Leroi-Gourhan, Prehistoric Man (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), 17. ↩
- Ibid., 10. ↩
- Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle, trans. Joni Caldwell (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1989), 2. ↩
- André Leroi-Gourhan, L’art pariétal. Langage de la préhistoire (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992), 232. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Meyer Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of the Visual Arts: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” in Robert E. Innis, ed., Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 209. ↩
- Jean-Michel Durafour, “Jean Louis Schefer, Italo Calvino : le cinéma des âges de la terre,” http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/40-archive/lfu-18/49 ↩
- Jean Louis Schefer, Questions d’art paléolithique (Paris: POL, 1999), 17. ↩
- Ibid., 24. ↩
- André Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, tome II : La mémoire et les rythmes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1965), 35. ↩
- Siegfried Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art (New York: Bollingen Foundation, distr. Pantheon Books, 1962). ↩
- Marc Groenen, “André Leroi-Gourhan et la pratique des fouilles ethnologiques,” in Leroi-Gourhan, L’art pariétal, 52. ↩
- Schefer, Questions d’art paléolithique, 168. ↩
- Leroi-Gourhan, L’art pariétal, 197–98. ↩
- Ibid., 233. ↩
- “The grouping of animals or symbols in an alcove or byway . . . implies the existence of a certain spatial model that could hardly be considered incoherent.” Ibid., 198. ↩
- “In looking steadfastly at a perfectly yellow-red surface, the colour seems actually to penetrate the organ. It produces an extreme excitement, and still acts thus when somewhat darkened.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1970), §776 (310). ↩
- “The colours on the minus side are blue, red-blue, and blue-red. They produce a restless, susceptible, anxious impression.” Ibid., §777 (310). ↩
- “But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.” Ibid., §781 (311) ↩
- Leroi-Gourhan, L’art pariétal, 210–12. ↩
- Philippe Morel, Les grottes maniéristes en Italie au XVIe siècle (Paris: Macula, 1998). ↩
- Leroi-Gourhan, Les religions de la préhistoire (Paris: PUF, 1964). See also Sophie A. de Beaune, “Chamanisme et préhistoire, un feuilleton à épisodes,” L’Homme 38, no. 147 (1998): 203–19. ↩
- Leroi-Gourhan, L’art pariétal , 197. ↩
- Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 461–62. ↩
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. William Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 2010), §19. ↩