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Pre-Columbian Art and Art History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Pál Kelemen
Pál Kelemen*
Affiliation:
Norfolk, Connecticut
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Extract

The acceptance of pre-Columbian art as true and great art did not come speedily. In fact, it has not yet been as generally accepted as has the art of the great civilizations of the Near East and the Far East. An attempt is made here to trace the slow progress toward its general acknowledgment and to examine some of the problems now confronting those concerned with the subject.

When, in the second half of the eighteenth century, humanistic studies gained a wider interest, there already existed a predilection for the art of Greece and Rome and what was built, developed, and permuted on these styles. Neither the Near East nor the Far East was then sufficiently known to be given serious esthetic consideration, and their artistic products were appreciated mainly as rarities and curios; the arts that throve or lay in ruins elsewhere over the globe were glimpsed only occasionally in the travel descriptions of intrepid voyagers.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , January 1946 , pp. 145 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1946 

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References

1 Influential to the neoclassic trend were also: the discovery of Pompeii [1748], Soufflot's visit to Paestum [1750], and that of Stuart and Revett to Athens [1751].

2 William M. Ivins, Jr., “Ignorance, the End,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bulletin, No. 1, Summer, 1943, pp. 3–10.

3 British Museum, Guide to the Maudslay Collection, London, 1923, p. 71.Google Scholar

4 Hough, Walter, “William Henry Holmes,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 752-764.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Fry, Roger, “Ancient American Art,” Burlington Magazine, November, 1918, pp. 155-157.Google Scholar

6 Fry, Roger, Last Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 1939, pp. 85-96.Google Scholar

7 Hentze, Carl, Objets Riluels, Croyances el Diem de la Chine Antique et de l'Amé rique, Anvers, 1936.Google Scholar

8 Kubler, George, “Periodical Literature on Latin American Archaeology 1940–1942,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 181-185.Google Scholar

9 Gazette des Beaux-Arts, May, 1943, pp. 257–268.

10 J. Eric S. Thompson calls my attention to the fact that sculpture in Tula style was recently excavated in Mexico City.

11 College Art Journal, May, 1944, pp. 148–152.

12 Mention should be made also of the publications brought out and the exhibitions arranged in Spain, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, where the presentation of rich material from public and private collections started relatively early the movement toward the appreciation of the art of pre-Columbian America.

13 At the University of Seville, Spain, a department of history of Hispano-American art was founded in 1930 and has since been maintained in growing volume.

14 See footnote 8.