Art: MEN FROM THE DARK

ARCHAEOLOGY holds no more compelling mystery than that of the Olmec Indians, who ruled the Gulf coast of Mexico even before the time of Christ. The well-known Mayan, Toltec and Aztec civilizations all stemmed from the Olmec culture, but their parent culture remains almost totally unknown. Practically all science has to go on is works of art dug from the jungle ground.

At The Hague Municipal Museum last week sat two Olmec ambassadors, lifesize, in clay. The largest Olmec ceramics yet found, they had been apparently smuggled out of Mexico and later bought by Los Angeles’ Oscar Mayer, a freewheeling dealer in antiquities. Mayer insured the pieces for $75,000; historically they are priceless—two splendid clues in a search back through the dark abyss of time. The sculptures have already caused great excitement in Paris, where Andre Malraux among others identified them as definitely “Olmequisant.” Next week they will move on to Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, and in December to London’s Tate Gallery—a busy schedule for such deliberate and quiet sculpture, made in a vanished bubble of history.

The early Olmecs were apparently inventive and cultivated people. They produced carved stone sarcophagi, colonnades of prismatic basalt, colossal basalt heads weighing up to 15 tons. Later Indians made no attempt to emulate these massive achievements. But Olmec stone bas-reliefs, ceramics and carved jades remained an influence, and the Olmec pantheon of jaguar gods appears to have lived on in different forms.

Far from being more primitive than its successors, Olmec art is on the whole subtler, gentler, freer and more naturalistic than they are. This naturally bothers archaeologists; it seems to go against reason. So does the presence of two distinct physical types side by side throughout Olmec art: one lean and aquiline, the other Negroid. Meyer’s two ambassadors from the lost Olmec world display both types. They are not gods, apparently, but men—alert and still, and perhaps forever strange.