For the better part of the last two centuries, few places have been as intriguingand forbiddingto the American imagination as Ancient Egypt.
Mummies and tombs, riddles and curses, a starkly spectacular desert landscape in which gigantic, hand-wrought, manmade works dominate the mere creations of nature, a society in which birds and cats were deities, yet thousands of human lives could be sacrificed to the labor of erecting a single pyramid–all this combined to make the Egypt of the pharaohs endlessly if morbidly fascinating to people as far removed from the subject as Milwaukee is from the Kingdom of Kush.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has opened a powerfully evocative exhibition of Egyptian art and relics that reveals this land of Akhenaten and Hatshepsut through American eyes–those of the American sailors, explorers, scientists and historians who have laid a scholarly claim to Egyptology as great as any other nation’s.
Egypt fascinated the Greeks and Romans, Napoleon and the Victorian-era archeologists of the British Museum. But travel books on Egypt were published in the United States as early as 1800 and mummies and kindred artifacts were put on display here even earlier than that, most of them brought back by America’s wide-ranging sea captains.
A mummified Egyptian bull displayed at New York’s Stuyvesant Institute in the 1850s included among its spectators a transfixed Walt Whitman.
Egyptian pyramids appear on our money. Ancient Egypt has come to loom large in a wide expanse of American culture, ranging from biblical studies to crass, and even salacious, movies–“Cleopatra,” “Land of the Pharaohs,” “The Ten Commandments.”
Serious scientific American involvement in Egypt got underway with the advent of Rockford-born James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), the University of Chicago ancient languages professor and monument excavator who founded the U. of C.’s famed Oriental Institute in 1919. He launched the Chicago House archeological surveys based in Luxor, Egypt, that have embarked on 66 seasonal digs and studies since 1924.
The fruits of these University of Chicago labors are amply represented in the exhibition’s vast haul of relics, objects, photographs, drawings and writing on display–more than 250 objects representing 4,500 years of early civilization.
Among them are a 12-ton Ptolemaic (Cleopatra’s family) gateway that’s been reassembled for public viewing for the first time, several images of the monotheist boy king Akhenaten, jewelry and precious belongings of the early Nubian kings, sculpture from the reign of Queen Hatshepsut and an elaborate coffin lid.
No longer reflective but a marvel to contemplate is a 2,700-year-old hand held mirror belonging to Shabako, one of the Nubian kings who ruled Egypt, and taken from his pyramid. Set around the base of the gilded silver handle are four sensuously slender female figures, one lion headed and three with human heads.
There’s a green glazed shawabti, or funeral statue, a human figure exquisite in its surviving detail, that was taken from the ancient cemetery at Thebes after being placed there 1,450 years before Christ. Also on view is a remarkable 3,500-year-old bronze dagger with circular handle.
The works depict Egyptians as a people capable of great violence in war, but also as a sensual, pleasure-seeking civilization without much modest restraint. The gods and an obsession with the hereafter and immortality are pervasive, but there’s an Ozymandian aspect to this.
In the centuries between the pharaohs and the archeologists, these works were repeatedly ransacked by grave robbers. History and science, if not the ancient Egyptian kings and queens, are fortunate so much has survived.
“The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt” will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles; 213-857-6000) through Jan. 21. It will then appear at the St. Louis Art Museum Feb. 29-May 27, and at the Indianapolis Museum of Art July 13-Sept. 29.
Ancient China
Cincinnati’s Taft Museum (316 Pike St.; 513-241-0343) reaches back only to 17th Century but to another ancient culture in transition with a new exhibition of Chinese porcelain art that chronicles the fall of the famous Ming dynasty and the rise of the less famous but more viable Qing dynasty.
The show, which runs through Feb. 11, has scroll paintings, prints, poetic illustrations and other art work showing an old society in upheaval. The landscapes are lavishly laden with mountains, which loom particularly large because the Chinese viewed them as dwelling places of their gods.
The Mings were a corrupt rulership by this time, and their successors a rather cruel set of invaders. The Chinese artists and scholars responded to the rough-handed shift from one to the other by turning reclusive. Sad and wistfully depicted flocks of geese and setting suns serve as symbols of the deep angst and angry passions they kept restrained.
Wild West towns
Anthropology and archeology of a more recent kind is on view in an exuberant exhibition of Americana at Ft. Worth’s Amon Carter Museum (3501 Camp Bowie Blvd.; 817-738-1933) called “The Ties That Bind: Views of Community on the American Frontier, 1850-1900.”
We like to think of the Wild West as wide open spaces, but its history is one of towns. This Texas show is unique in that its more 100 photographs, lithographs and drawings are of urban views of the frontier. Mountains and mesas may serve as background, as they do in one 1885 photograph that shows the full of extent of Leadville, Colo., but the focus is on the town, just as it almost always is in western movies.
In the face of so much hostile wilderness and danger, people liked to cluster together. Judging by one idyllic hand-colored lithograph showing Omaha, Neb., in 1867, they thought themselves in something approaching paradise. Even the few, proudly inserted (this was long before the Environmental Protection Agency) smokestacks seem inviting.
The show closes Feb. 11.
Burns bicentennial
Historic Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library (2010 Delancey Pl.; 215-732-1600) is reviving the works of the romantic and witty Scottish poet Robert Burns with an exhibition marking the 200th anniversary of his early death at age 37 in 1796.
The show, “Robert Burns: The Poet’s Progress,” has some 60 original manuscripts of his poems, including “Tam o’ Shanter,” “Bannockburn” and “For a’that and a’that” (or have you already memorized them?). There are also 55 letters and about a hundred early editions of his works, which were first published in America in Philadelphia in 1788.
White House Christmases
You may not be invited to the White House for Christmas (depending on your politics, you may not want to be), but Washington’s new White House Visitor Center (Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th Street, N.W.; 202-737-8292) has opened an exhibition of 27 paintings by Lily Spandorf that gives you a sumptuous view of the Executive Mansion decorated for Christmases recent and past: Barbara Bush-era “Carolers on the North Lawn” (1992), Nixonian “Poinsettias” (1973), Rosalynn Carter-period Chef Hans Raffert’s Gingerbread House (1979), Nancy Reagan’s “Mother Goose” (1986) and Hillary Clinton “Diplomatic Reception Room Tree” (1993) among others.
The show closes Jan. 26.
