Art: Good Medicine

The paintings were spread flat on the floor, surrounded by tiny fences. Gallerygoers threaded among them at Colorado Springs last week like children in a greenhouse, fascinated by things they never imagined before. At their feet, protected by painted rainbows and sacred animals, lay Mother Earth and Father Sky, Dawn Boy, Sun and Moon—all weirdly elongated figures, with plumed, square masks for the female powers and round masks for the male. Carrying medicine bundles and lightning, they paraded among cornstalks, bluebirds and a host of stranger Powers, including Dontso the Fly.

The watercolors were copies of sacred “sand paintings” made by the Navajo Indians. Other races paint in sand (notably the Australian aborigines), but none ever raised the ancient art to such heights.

For the Patient. With crushed flowers, powdered rock, pollen, charcoal and corn meal, the Navajos invented a highly abstract way of picturing their even more abstract ideas of the forces that move nature. Their paintings, which their underprivileged, impoverished descendants (TIME, Nov. 3) still produce in quantity, have nothing to do with art as civilization knows it. They are not merely for art’s sake, like most modern painting, nor are they done in a spirit of reverence, like early Greek and early Renaissance art; and they seldom vary with the individual artists—who are always medicine men. Navajo sand paintings are pure magic with one main purpose: to help heal the sick.

Like a doctor, the medicine man prescribes different ceremonials for different diseases. The ceremonials, lasting several days, are built around sacred chants and the making of sand pictures. The medicine man “paints” by trickling the pigments onto sand from his fist, with hairline precision; he lets the patient’s family help out with the easy parts. Chanting ecstatically, the medicine man touches the pictured powers and then touches the patient, transferring a little of their strength to him. To be healed internally as well, the patient swallows a little of the painting in herb tea. Leaving a sand painting intact overnight would be at least as dangerous, the Navajos believe, as leaving an X-ray machine running in a sickroom. So before sundown each day, the medicine man releases its magic force by obliterating the painting with a plumed wand.

For the Lobby. The watercolor copies shown at Colorado Springs were collected by the late John Frederick Huckel, son-in-law of Fred Harvey, the railroad restaurant man. Huckel got interested in sand paintings 26 years ago, when he was looking for an Indian motif to decorate a Harvey hotel lobby in Gallup, N.Mex. He asked a Navajo medicine man named Miguelito to put some on paper for him. Miguelito was hesitant, but after trying one and coming to no harm from the Powers, he and his fellow medicine men painted more.

At sundown, in Colorado Springs last week, the watercolor copies within the museum lay smooth and undisturbed, looking as if some squatting Navajo had just pinched out a last blue border on the sand, and then suddenly and silently vanished.