Of these four recent publications presented for review, three deal exclusively with ceramics. The variety of treatments given this so-called minor art ranges from an exhaustive scientific study by Séjourné to a presentation by Sawyer of the artistic and cultural significance which pottery can communicate.
The catalogue by Alan Sawyer is for the exhibition of the handsome Cummings Collection, still “temporarily” on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which thereby makes its debut in the field of pre-Columbian art. Sawyer’s handsome publication is the finest complement to the exhibit since it uses the material flexibly to probe into the meaning of these ceramics from the north and south coasts of Peru. While the author provides brief but pithy characterizations of the cultural periods and their typical art forms, he also examines common motifs to reveal the dominant interests of the societies through the iconography of their themes. His book will interest the layman because of its concise descriptions and the high quality of its photographs and drawings. Since Sawyer is a scholar who has kept up with the latest developments in Peru, his comments should also interest the specialist. This book is a must for any collection on pre-Colombian cultures, and it is a bargain at the price.
The second book, a monographic study of the sculptured ceramic urns from Oaxaca, is less successful. Its text provides a fairly good introduction to the uses of the burial urns but a poor analysis of each iconographic type. The photographs, which form the bulk of the book, were taken under the author’s supervision in American and European collections. They are useful inasmuch as reproductions of many urns had never been published before, but they have been blown up much too large considering their original quality, and they are not arranged in chronological order. The author, Frank Boos, a retired businessman who has become interested in Oaxacan antiquities, has ignored outside relations with Oaxaca, except for a title stating the influence of Teotihuacán, which is then not explained in the text. In updating the classic 1952 study by Caso and Bernal, which categorized Oaxacan “funerary” urns by subject matter (with neutral names like “Goddess 8 Z”), Boos has retained their categories, added a few new ones, and to his credit humanized the names into descriptive titles. Unfortunately the whole book has an amateur quality because of its numerous proof-reading errors and the low quality of its illustrations; it is certainly not worth its inflated price.
Laurette Séjourné’s book on Teotihuacan ceramics makes the least pretense of emphasizing the aesthetic aspects; yet the handsome angular style of the Teotihuacán material achieves more artistic success than do the art pieces in the Boos volume. The text, unfortunately, does not come up to the quality of the illustrations. The author emphasizes at the end that she is not interested in the ceramics for their own sake but rather for what they can tell about the human beings who made them. However, her arrangement of the material by clay types (wares) rather than by vessel forms or decoration defeats her purpose, for any continuity of iconography is destroyed by dividing the same forms among several different wares. Since Séjourné rarely comments on the iconography, her text is only a dull listing of ceramic types. Her stated goal is better achieved by Sawyer’s approach, which, however, makes no attempt to be comprehensive, as does her archaeological study. Her book also desperately needs a table of contents, since the text is broken up by many pages of illustrations. This volume is suited mainly for the specialist, since it provides an exhaustive compilation of the entire range of one Classic Teotihuacán site.
The final publication under consideration is a physically and intellectually lightweight Swiss booklet. Its introduction by the director of the Neuchâtel Museum of Ethnology provides a marvelous example of the rhapsodic philosophizing so characteristic of French art criticism—one hesitates to call it art history. The main text, while good in its choice and characterization of important art forms of each period, also suffers from a compulsion to overdramatize the doomed cultures. The few illustrations, of very poor quality for an art book, do have some interest as showing previously unpublished objects from unidentified collections, but their artistic value is only average. The labeling of the photographs is often erroneous or misleading; not only are many of the dates too early, but also the objects are unjustifiably associated with historic linguistic groups (e.g. “Chontal-Guerrero” or “Maya-Totonac”). A similar error also appears in the text, where, for example, the Mixtecs are said to have physically populated Cholula, whereas they merely shared a similar culture. Of all the books reviewed here, this popularization by d’Arquian and Stolper adds the least to our knowledge of preColombian cultures, although its low price might recommend it for a beginning collection.
