Word: tutankhamun
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...puts on the complete Wagnerian Ring cycle in German and English every summer. In a burst of civic pride, voters last month approved a $19 million bond issue to build a second theater, a rehearsal wing for the opera and symphony and another art center that will house the Tutankhamun exhibition of Egyptian art in 1978. Now about the urban problems...
With its 100 full-color plates, Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Its Treasures by I.E.S. Edwards, with photographs by Harry Burton and Lee Boltin (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Knopf; 256 pages; $35), is the finest popular book on the subject. It depicts objects that were not included in the Metropolitan Museum-Egyptian government exhibition now touring several U.S. cities, as well as black-and-white photos from the 1922-28 excavation under Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. These old pictures reflect the excitement of the unsealing when Tutankhamun's treasures lay in disarray, as if at some pharaonic garage sale...
...Indeed, Tutankhamun lived during a blaze of pharaonic wealth and power. Besides their use of gold, his artists worked in silver, alabaster, obsidian, lapis lazuli, wood, glass and gems, handling each material as masterfully as if it were clay. They had turned from much of the rigid formality that marks artworks of earlier periods to more natural poses and more intimate scenes...
...most famous object, of course, is the golden mask that covered Tutankhamun's mummified head. Though every bit as cool and haughty as one would expect of an art that above all aimed to celebrate majesty and death, it is far from a resplendent cliché. The mask's burnished golden gleam and shadow evoke a bursting inner vitality that emphatically defies mortality...
...that, the treasures retain the grandeur of mystery too. A wooden head of Tutankhamun, shown as the sun-god emerging from a lotus plant in daily rebirth, stares outward with a gaze that is as candid, guileless-and impenetrably secretive-as a cat's. Nearly every one of the 55 artworks seems a confident invocation of the idea of permanence. "To speak the names of the dead is to make them live again," said the ancient Egyptians. This superb show eloquently illustrates that point...