Word: aztecs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Idea Was Fun: Visitors to the gallery found themselves in a world as whimsically engaging as first-rate Disney. The pre-Columbian art of the Indians of Western Mexico had a freshness of its own; none of the stern beauty of Aztec forms or the glum formality of Mayan relics. When the Indians were not laughing at themselves, they were good-naturedly caricaturing someone else. The dominant note was exaggeration: humpbacks had overpowering humps; in erotic figures phallus outweighed...
...regret to find that in its Dec. 31 issue TIME has fallen into the somewhat common error of referring to Montezuma as "Aztec Emperor of Mexico." Montezuma II was not an "emperor" and did not rule over an "empire. . . ." Montezuma was only one of the two chiefs of Tenochtitlan, the ancient Mexico City. Both these chiefs had but limited powers. . . . The "Aztec Empire" was only a loose confederation of nations tributary to Tenochtitlan but not integrated into a single, or even several large, governmental systems...
Montezuma, Aztec Emperor of Mexico, is said to have sighed: "The Christians must have a strange disease which only gold can cure." Most jewelry from the era before Columbus went to cure that disease-nearly all of it melted down for shipment to Spain as bullion. The few surviving objects were mostly buried deep in ancient tombs. Last week Mexico's Institute of Anthropology and History announced the discovery of 200 prehistoric gold ornaments in Oaxaca. In Brooklyn, the museum of art opened a small, comprehensive show of pre-Columbian gold, silver and jade from the Americas...
Diego Rivera, famed artist and theorizer, blamed it all on the dry season, in Aztec times a period devoted to human sacrifice...
What the archeologists don't know about pre-Spanish America dims about 20 centuries of history. Much of what they do know has been dug up with scraps of Mayan, Toltec and Aztec sculpture. Last week a few of the existing clues to the Western Hemisphere's rich, mysterious cultural past were on display in Mexico City...