In his ambitious introduction to the mammoth catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's current exhibition, Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, the distinguished poet and essayist Octavio Paz writes that "Mexico has been and is a boundary between people and civilizations.” For more than a century and a half, a crucial literal boundary for Mexico has been the Ro Grande, separating the country from its northern, powerful neighbor, the United States. One clear hope for the exhibition at the Metropolitan is that the cultural boundary between Mexico and the United States, symbolized by the dividing river, may be crossed by those visiting the exhibition during its three-city American tour.
Paz establishes the theme of the Met's exhibition as being, "the persistence of a single will through an incredible verity of forms, manners and styles. There is no apparent commonality among the stylized jaguars of the Olmecs, the gilded angels of the seventeenth century, and the richly colored violence of a Tomayo oil-nothing, save the will to survive through and in form…. an attentive and loving eye will perceive, in this diversity of works and epochs a certain continuity. Not the continuity of a style and idea, but something more pound and less definable: a sensibility."
Pre-Columbain Popularity
Tracing that sensibility from 1000 B.C. to the arrival of the Spaniards may well be the greatest challenge of the Met's show. Despite the great popularity of pre-Columbain objects in the United States since the 1960s, Julie Jones, curator in the museum's department of primitive art, who organized the entire pre-conquest section of the exhibition, notes that the ordinary American museumgoer knows very little about Mexico's native civilizations. It is unlikely that its will be the case after a visit to the exhibition.
Nearly one-third of the show is devoted to pre-Columbian art and archaeology covering a period of more than 2,500 years, with works in stone, jade, ceramic, bone, shell, obsidian, stucco, wood, and gold recording the civilizations of eight ancient cities of Mexico. Each of the sites represented in the exhibition has its own special history and individual artistic character.
The Olmecs, who were the earliest master sculptors, open the exhibition. Their massive stone sculptures, along with the first large, pyramidal structure in Mexico, are found in La Venta, in the humid lowlands of the Mexican Gulf Coast. La Venta is one of several sites where Olmec civilization, the earliest complex society in the American flourished form 1000 B.C. for some 600 years.
Mythological Stories
Izapa, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Mountains in the Chiapas province not far form the Pacific Coast, is the second site featured in the exhibition. Their sculptors depicted mythological stories in relief on tall, slab like stone stelae and on altars. At first glance the stela on display at the metropolitan appears to be a simple portrayal of a "god a fishing,” but on examination actually turns out to be a detailed depiction of everything related to water. The Izapan sculptor's dynamic natural and fantastic forms, metamorphosizing within a single image, are considered to have influence the work of early Maya relief's that appeared many
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