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Description: Pre-Columbian Art of Mexico and Central America
THE TEXT OF THIS CATALOGUE is the work of people at Yale, including the editor. Many were graduate students in both Anthropology and the History of Art, as well as several undergraduates. Some are now colleagues at various universities. Their contributions to this work began in 1972, in a series of seminars. These were designed to meet the need of the...
PublisherYale University Art Gallery
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00095.003
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Preface
The text of this catalogue is the work of people at Yale, including the editor. Many were graduate students in both Anthropology and the History of Art, as well as several undergraduates. Some are now colleagues at various universities. Their contributions to this work began in 1972, in a series of seminars. These were designed to meet the need of the Yale Art Gallery to study what it already owned, before continuing to enlarge the collections.
The pre-Columbian objects assembled by Fred Olsen and presented to Yale over several decades were the focus of our studies. The collection began to come to our Art Gallery in 1958 when Lamont Moore was director. Our work was also encouraged by the subsequent directors of the Art Gallery, Andrew C. Ritchie and Alan Shestack, who recognized that ancient American art holds an important place in the history of world art, and who wished to make public the substantial holdings of the Art Gallery in this field.
The nature of pre-Columbian studies is such that unviable interpretations abound, while exact description is lacking. The many contributors will recognize their own words as edited here. The full texts of their reports are filed in the Registrar’s office of the Yale University Art Gallery, including reports on the condition of individual pieces, for which there was not room in this volume. This published catalogue aims to describe the irreducible individuality of each object.
The historian of Yale University, Professor George W. Pierson, once told me he had found it almost impossible to discover what went on in the classrooms by using existing archives. Notes by students on lectures rarely survive; student papers written in courses usually disappear with them, together with examination books. These pages, however, represent the principal record of the results achieved by graduate seminars over ten years. One of the great values of collections in a university setting is the opportunity they provide for student involvement with original objects, the primary data of art historical research.
George Kubler
Senior Research Scholar, History of Art
Honorary Curator, Pre-Columbian and Primitive Art