Olmec Art of Ancient Mexico - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810963280 ISBN 13: 9780810963283

Publisher: National Gallery of Art / Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996

Synopsis

Three thousand years ago, in what is now southern Mexico, Olmec art and culture flourished. No written documents survive, but the exceptional beauty and technical brilliance of the sculpture and its seminal importance to other Mesoamerican cultures are evident in the outstanding objects examined in Olmec Art of Ancient Mexico.
Specially commissioned photographs illustrate 120 magnificent pieces, which include 17 monumental sculptures from archaeological sites or Mexican museums, among them a 13-ton colossal head from San Lorenzo and the dynamic "Wrestler" from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Also featured is an extraordinary array of beautiful small-scale objects, including a unique cache of stone figurines excavated at the site of La Venta, votive axes and other implements related to human sacrifice, a ferocious-looking jade jaguar mask, and serpentine shaman transformation figures.
Contributions by fourteen Olmec specialists reflect the latest Mesoamerican scholarship and represent a wide range of interpretive approaches of this fascinating subject. They discuss not only the works of art but also the many recent finds that provide remarkable insights into Mexico's most ancient culture, as well as its cultural history, cosmology, and daily life.

About this title

Review:

This beautiful book is the catalog of an exhibition of Olmec art that opened in 1996 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Anyone who ever traveled through Mexico and visited its archaeological sites will recognize the seminal imagery of Olmec sculpture and objects. Their significance to Mexico's most ancient culture, which prospered 3,000 years ago, is examined in detail. There are texts by 14 specialists, and all of the photographs were commissioned to illustrate the 120 pieces, which include monumental sculptures and smaller figurines excavated from archaeological sites, and axes and other objects related to human sacrifice. Since no written documents survive, these objects and works of art provide the sole insight into the mysteries of this culture's history, cosmology, and daily life.

From Publishers Weekly:

The Olmec art style, characterized by powerful, multi-ton basalt sculptures of figures and portrait heads in full-round and relief; smaller, finely cut and polished jade and serpentine figurines, masks, celts and ornaments; and fine ceramic representations of animal and human figures as well as pottery, flourished mainly in the Gulf Coast region of Mexico between 1200 and 600 B.C. One hundred and twenty of these extraordinary objects?all decorated with incised motifs constituting a symbolic language suggesting religion, cosmic beliefs and political statements?are well reproduced in this book, which doubles as the catalogue for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. For many years the Gulf Coast Olmec were considered the mother culture of Mesoamerica, transmitting their style and beliefs through widespread trade and conquest and setting the pattern for the architectural complexes, social organization, religion and artistic expression of the great, later civilizations of the Maya, Teotihuacan and Aztec. But it has never been clear whether the Olmec style represented an Olmec people, and recent archeological investigations, described in several essays here, cast doubt on this theory, suggesting instead that a significant number of regional sites offer a coherent set of early Mesoamerican architectural vestiges and Olmec style elements, and that there were multiple active partners in the elaboration of a common system of Mesoamerican beliefs and practices. However, casual readers will have to grapple with academic prose to extract the considerable information in this compilation of often repetitive essays. The authors are curators of pre-Columbian material. Illustrations.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: National Gallery of Art / Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0810963280
• ISBN 13: 9780810963283
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Elizabeth P. Benson, Beatriz De La Fuente