Georges Bataille, or, The Birth of Art: Excess and Experience Inside the Cave of Lascaux

In 1955, Georges Bataille’s Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art was published. It was the first comprehensive survey of the Lascaux cave, with lavish color photographs, and immediately translated into English for the international market. Bataille’s text drew on concepts he had developed over the past thirty years, creating in the process one of the strangest publications on prehistoric art to ever be printed. This book is the first thorough contextualization of Bataille’s w...