Thursday 13 October 2011A remarkable celebration of a world-renowned collection
Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas
To be published in February 2012 by D Giles Limited, in association with the Walters Art Museum, Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas: The John Bourne Collection is a stunning new volume that presents full-colour plates, details, and comparative images of 148 Pre- Columbian works from the collection assembled by John G. Bourne of Santa Fe, N.M., in the 1950s and 1960s.
When the collection was donated, Gary Vikan, Director of the Walters, said: “More than a century ago, museum founder Henry Walters pioneered the collecting of the arts of the Ancient Americas. Now, his small collection will be greatly augmented by this generous gift from John Bourne. It has long been my dream to be able to tell the story of art and culture in the western hemisphere in a way that complements the story we tell through our extraordinary holdings of ancient and medieval art of the Mediterranean and Europe.”
The Collection features fine examples of painted earthenware vessels and figures, carved basalt effigies, pendants and vessels, and jewellery in jadeite, crystal and gold from Mesoamerica, Central America and Andean America covering a host of civilizations, including Teotihuacán, Olmec, Maya, Andean, Aztec and Mixtec. Of particular importance are several vibrantly coloured ceramic sculptures from south-central Veracruz, dating from the Late Classic period (600–900CE); fine examples of the renowned hollow figural art from Colim, Mexico, (100 BCE–300 CE); an exquisite Late Classic Period figurine of an elderly warrior from the Jaina Island burial grounds in Mexico, which were only properly excavated in the 1940s; and an earthenware female figure from Valdivia, Ecuador, dating from 2,700–1400 BCE, one of the earliest pieces of figural art from South America.
In addition to John Bourne’s fascinating account of his first expedition to Chiapas in 1945–1946, which started his passion for collecting, there is an extensive essay on authentication. As a significant part of the study of pre-Columbian art, this essay will be especially important to the scholarly and collector markets. Each of the three geographical sections of the main catalogue opens with an introductory text on the art, culture and ceremonial features of that region, followed by discursive entries accompanying each work, and a checklist of the entire collection.
The exhibition Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas: The John Bourne Collection Gift will be on show at the Walters Art Museum from February 12 - May 20, 2012.
The Authors
Dorie Reents-Budet is a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a Smithsonian Institution research associate. Jessica Arista is a graduate intern at the Winterthur/University of Delaware program in art conservation. She has previously held internships at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Worcester Art Museum department of object conservation. Julie Lauffenburger is senior object conservator, the Walters Art Museum, co-editor of A Lost Art Rediscovered: The Architectural Ceramics of Byzantium (2001) and a contributor to Untamed: The Art of Antoine-Louis Barye (2006). Marc Zender is a professor at Harvard University and works at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. A Mayan anthropologist, he is known for his contributions to the study of Mayan society and language and for decoding and translating several Mayan hieroglyphs. He is the coauthor of Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture (2011).
EXPLORING ART OF THE ANCIENT AMERICAS
The John Bourne Collection
264 pages, 280 x 235mm (9¼ x 11 in), portrait
380 colour and 43 b & w illustrations, hardback
ISBN: 978-1-907804-05-2
Price: US$60.00/UK£39.95
Publication date: February 2012
Publisher: D Giles Limited, London
Distributed in the UK and Rest of World (excluding US and Canada) by ACC
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