Word: maori
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ritual was not a photo opportunity staged for the occasion. It was required, said Maori leaders, to lift the tapu, or religious restrictions, from the exhibit's 174 pieces, which the New Zealanders believe are imbued with the living spirits of their ancestors. After the Metropolitan show closes Jan. 6, Maori leaders will travel abroad once more to conduct tapu-lifting rites when the exhibit opens at the St. Louis Art Museum in February and the M.H, de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in July...
Until the Metropolitan's epochal show, the religious art could be viewed only in widely scattered New Zealand museums that hold individual pieces in trust for their Maori owners. The decade-long effort by the museum's chairman of primitive art, Douglas Newton, to bring the work to the U.S. was conspicuously worthwhile. For Americans, a walk through the Metropolitan's exhibit is a voyage of discovery, as astonishing as the sight of Maori art must have been in 1769, when Captain James Cook's Endeavour first touched New Zealand's shore. When the ship...
Besides decorating utilitarian objects of all kinds with the characteristic Maori spiral, the master sculptors devoted themselves to carving monumental male figures that represented their ancestors. These wooden sculptures, often colored in red ocher, topped the gables and lintels of Maori houses. Others served as posts in palisades or as rods holding up the ridge-poles of roofs. The most impressive figures straddled the narrow gateways leading to storage houses or fortified villages...
Even for the uninitiated viewer, the ancestral figures truly project the qualities the Maoris attribute to them: ihi (power), wehi (fear) and wana (authority). Often as grotesque as gargoyles, the heads are covered with the distinctive Maori designs used as tattoos. The slanty, abalone-shell eyes are as impenetrable as mirrors. Sometimes a broad-based tongue juts out in the Maori gesture of raging self-assertion. The broad, lumpy body may be scrunched down in the warrior's crouch, or, ready to spring, the fighter may hold a paddle-shaped club designed to strike a blow at an enemy...
Dominating the show by its size (16 ft. 5½ in.) and superabundance of ihi, wehi and wana is the figure that once served as the gateway of Pukeroa pa, a fortified village. Though it is difficult to date most Maori sculpture precisely, this piece was made in the mid-19th century. Less fierce than similar gateway figures, the figure still casts a gaze threatening enough to intimidate any potential thief prowling through the Maori show...