Word: chacmool
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...gift for forceful, enigmatic forms didn't entirely desert him even in the '60s. He was the opposite of a Baroque sculptor. No corkscrewing flights of form for him. His default mode was a block volume as static and weighty as a desert mesa, or as the reclining Chacmool figures of pre-Columbian art that were another of his early inspirations. But by dividing a figure into two or three separate parts, an approach he started taking as early as 1934, Moore could endow an otherwise inert mass with a tangled energy and a forbidding hint of bodily dismemberment that...
...especially when so much of the essential evidence consists of immovable buildings and their ornament. One silver altar frontal or a gilded retablo, no matter how impressive in itself, cannot possibly duplicate the devotional frenzy of incrustation that gives Mexican Baroque its special character, any more than a few Chacmool figures and feathered serpents can convey the impact of the step pyramids, ramps and avenues of Chichen Itza or El Tajin...
...sees premonitions of modernity, since 20th century sculptors drew on Mexican sources for inspiration -- Henry Moore's reclining women, for instance, derive partially from the powerful crankshaft rhythms of Yucatan Chacmool figures. But the best pieces here, such as the stone figure of a standard-bearer from Chichen Itza with its fierce gaze and crippled foot, are beyond such comparisons. From the delicately modeled stucco glyphs of Palenque, imbued with an almost rococo elegance, to the frightful severity of Aztec pieces such as the cuauhxicalli, or blood receptacle, in the form of a stone eagle, ancient Mexican sculpture...
...official war artist in World War II and was thus partly responsible for the sculptor's best-known early work, the underground-shelter drawings) was a great looker and rememberer. Certain works were fundamental to his art. A stone carving of the Mexican rain-god Chacmool gave him the crankshaft rhythm of shoulders, waist, pelvis and thighs that would surface in his own figures from the late '20s on. Cezanne's ponderous and sculptural Bathers spoke to his own obsessions with the reclining figure. Archaic sculpture of every kind, especially Mayan and Aegean, fortified his lifelong interest in totems...
...counterpoise to these exquisitely delicate objects is the 1,000-year-old, 1,200-lb. limestone Chacmool, the ceremonial figure that is the very emblem of Maya civilization in its later phases. Found at the most celebrated of all Maya sites, Chichen Itza in Yucatan, the semireclining statue is a splendid example of the Chacmools found guarding the entrances of temples. Typically, the male figure leans back on his elbows, pulls up his knees and turns a forbidding gaze on intruders at the sacred gates. A flat plate poised on his belly is believed to have been a receptacle...
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