Word: metalwork
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...COLUMBIAN ART OF SOUTH AMERICA by Alan Lapiner. 460 pages. Abrams. $50. The pottery, statuary, textiles and metalwork of the ancient Americas are no longer considered mere artifacts of forgotten peoples but art forms that reflect the sophistication of complex civilization. The late Alan Lapiner chose to illustrate his book with outstanding examples of ritual tomb furnishings and gold and silver mummy ornaments from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil. The result is a trove for collectors and browsers alike...
Decline of Taste. A quarter of the paintings in the show and most of the craft objects-porcelain, lacquer, carvings, metalwork-were made after 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Edo Bay like some astronaut landing on an unvisited planet. This marked the beginning of Japan's cultural infatuation with things Western and, by no coincidence, of the decline of traditional Japanese taste. The aesthetic slippage of the Meiji period could not be more vividly illustrated than by the objects chosen for this show. To take an English simile, if Queen Elizabeth II authorized an exhibition from the royal...
...which they persist, however faintly, is that of art. Given the collections of it in the U.S., not to mention the undying appetite for Oriental carpets, one could hardly say that Islamic art is unfamiliar to Americans. Yet the ceramics and glasswork, the architecture and mural decoration, the metalwork and (except for Mughal miniatures) the paintings that form the relics of this vast imperial culture are much less known to museumgoers than their equivalents from Japan or China...
...duke had an obsession with jewelry and opulent metalwork, and so one might expect all his court art to follow a pattern like that of the Limbourg brothers, who made him what must be the most famous set of miniatures in history-the Très Riches Heures du Due de Berry. A tiny portrait of the duke in the Limbourgs' lesser-known Belles Heures epitomizes their manner: the stiff figure, kneeling devoutly before a sumptuous Gothic ground of red and gold brocade, the flat silhouettes, the sharp, unatmospheric color and light. The painting is conceived as a precious...
Colors in the metalwork, enamel and stained glass imbue the rooms with rich tone: the people were not just surrounded with the gray gloom of the stone cathedrals. Large illuminated books also brighten the exhibition. But the works that insist on stopping you, that freeze their image on your mind, are the quiet sculptures of stone and wood. One large majestic figure of Christ on the cross stares straight ahead, alive but unaware of the nails in his hands: his strong body, as stiff as the shape of the cross, seems beyond the ability to feel physical pain...