[Aztlan] BRUSSELS EXHIBITION ANNOUNCED

[michael ruggeri]

Masters of Pre-Columbian Art at Royal Museums of Art


BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.- The Royal Museums of Art and History present  
Masters of Pre-Columbian Art - The collection of Dora and Paul  
Janssen, on view through April 29, 2007. The Janssen collection is  
known worldwide. It was started in the 70s, and has become one of the  
most beautiful current private collections of pre-Columbian art. Dora  
Janssen regularly lends pieces, but this is the first time the  
public, in Belgium, will be able to discover the whole collection.  
With over 350 exceptional works from the American continent – stone  
and terracotta statues, masks and gold artefacts, materials and  
creations in colourful feathers, made by artists from the Olmeca,  
Maya, Inca, Aztec and other civilizations – it retraces 3000 years of  
pre-Colombian history, from 1500 B.C. until 1533 A.D., the year in  
which the powerful Inca Empire fell. The Royal Museums of Art and  
History (Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire) have integrated into this  
presentation some fifty major pre-Colombian pieces from their own  
collections.

The South American civilizations developed mainly along the Andes  
cordillera. This backbone that crosses the sub-continent from the  
North to the South witnessed the development of a variety of  
cultures, each contributing to pre-Columbian art. The jewellery is  
one of the major aspects of this exhibition. Rarely have so many  
precious costumes and fineries been brought together: Mixteca jewels,  
fantasy animals from Costa Rica and Panama, pendants, masks and  
miniatures from Colombia, ornaments from Peru…all demonstrate the  
know-how and creative spirit of the American jewellers. But vases,  
statues or materials remind us that jewellery was not the only means  
of artistic _expression, and the collector couple was intelligent not  
to limit their approach of the pre-Colombian world to this sole  
aspect of America. Amulets sculpted in ivory by the artists of the  
Arctic, pipes bearing the Hopewell effigy from the East and the  
statuettes and painted vases fr om the Southwest illustrate North  
America.

Meso-America, that groups together the major civilizations of Mexico,  
Guatemala and Honduras, includes the works from all the periods since  
the Pre-Classic (1500 B.C.) up to the end of the Post-Classic period  
(1521, the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan). The exceptional Olmeca  
masks, with their enigmatic expressions, introduce this panorama of  
civilizations. The figurines from Michoacan and Chupicuaro, the  
statuettes from Nayarit, Colima and Jalisco, the monumental works  
from Veracruz, the onyx Aztec recipients… this variety of objects  
illustrates the skill in all these forms of artistic _expression. The  
Maya artefacts: jade plates decorated with divinities in bas-relief,  
vases painted with elaborate decors, a large stele on which Lady  
Alligator appears, the realistic statuettes from the island of Jaïna,  
are proof of what was probably the most advanced civilization on the  
American continent.

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