(Courtesy John Bourne and the Walters Art Museum/ ) - Burial Urn K'iche, Maya, Southern Highlands, Guatemala, Late Classic Period, 550â850 CE, Earthenware, post-fire paint
There is something discomforting about summing up approximately 2,700 years of creativity in one exhibition. This is the challenge faced by the Walters Art Museum for the show “Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas: The John Bourne Collection Gift.”
And yet this dilemma is nothing new.
(Courtesy John Bourne and the Walters Art Museum) - Human Effigy Pendant, Diquis, Costa Rica, Late Period IV-Period VI, 400-1500 CE, Cast gold alloy
Art from a history of cultures that flourished between modern-day Mexico and South America has long been grouped together, and even classified, under the problematic designation “pre- Columbian” — a Western-centric term referring to all art and peoples in the Americas before Christopher Columbus’s arrival.
Haven’t we moved past such generalizations?
The Walters is taking a healthy step in that direction, as seen in this exhibition, which celebrates and informs of stylistic differences with a careful arrangement of material by period and region. Curated by Dorie Reents-Budet, the show marks the museum’s relationship with New Mexico-based collector John Bourne, who has promised about 300 works, including the 135 in the exhibition, and has set aside a $4 million bequest to create a center for research and conservation at the Walters.
Such unprecedented contributions for the museum will position it as a rival to Dumbarton Oaks and its stunning Robert Woods Bliss Collection — turning the region into a hotbed for the study of the ancient Americas.
With the collection, the Walters also acquires Bourne’s unusual history.
In 1946, Bourne — then 19 years old — traveled to the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, lived among the isolated Lacandon Indians, and was the first non-Mayan to see the ruins of the ancient city Bonampak, which was later discovered to boast murals that have been called the Mayan Sistine Chapel (reproductions are included in the Walters exhibition). While in Mexico, Bourne also studied the Indians’ traditional chants and flute music, recording them with a machine the size of a typewriter that ran on gasoline. This music now welcomes visitors entering the show’s galleries.
His travel account, included in the catalogue, reads like a modern version of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” filled with tales of sickness and difficult travel, discoveries of hidden ruins, and even sexual exploits. From this history, Bourne emerges enraptured with a region whose history he would later consume through his collection.
Bourne continued to break ground in his collecting, buying artifacts while living in Los Angeles at a time when there was only a small group of elite collectors with such an acquired taste.
There were Hollywood types gobbling up the stuff, including Natalie Wood, Kirk Douglas and John Huston (who reportedly smuggled in part of his collection while filming “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” in Mexico). There were the trailblazing galleries, notably Bourne’s dealer Earl Stendahl, and the heavyweight collectors they sold to, such as Bliss, Walter and Louise Arensberg, and William Randolph Hearst.
Of course, modern artists such as Paul Gauguin, Andre Derain and Constantin Brancusi had already found inspiration in such forms. Henry Moore even wrote in 1941 of ancient Mexican art’s “astonishing variety and fertility of form invention . . . [making] it unsurpassed, in my opinion, by any other period of stone sculpture.”
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