Ancient Peru: A World of Complexity and Richness

A British Museum exhibition offers a sterling chance for education and aesthetic enchantment, but ditch the climate-change rants in the catalogue.

E nough already with the Morozovs, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Vuitton. “What’s happening in Peru,” you might be thinking. That’s ancient Peru. Sprinting textually from Paris to the British Museum, I can report that I found Peru: A Journey in Time to be an engrossing, sometimes enchanting survey of the art and culture of Peru from about 2500 b.c. to the Spanish conquest 4,000 years later.

Surrounded by mountains and oceans, what we now call Peru evolved over this span with some but not much outside influence — until, that is, the conquistadores arrived. The exhibition and catalogue present not only aesthetically stunning art but the Andean worldview, a pantheon of gods, topography, and history. I knew nothing about Andean art except where Peru is on the map, so the exhibition was a sterling chance for self-improvement.

Aside from an awkward moment in the catalogue suggesting child sacrifice was a reasonable response to climate change, I enjoyed it. More on this below.

The project was a collaboration between the British Museum, which has a significant Andean collection, and about a dozen museums in Peru, chief among them the Museo de Arte de Lima. It’s the 200th anniversary of Peru’s independence from Spain, so the show’s a big deal. Like Vladimir Putin, who wrote an introduction to the Morozov show, the president of Peru welcomed readers to the exhibition catalogue. I doubt, however, that he’s planning to send the Peruvian army to nab La Paz anytime soon.

The exhibition first deftly addresses challenges that come with material spanning 4,000 years from a place and culture that people outside of South America barely know. The first gallery has good maps and projections of Peru’s landscape from the Amazon to the mountains, a coastal desert, and the Pacific. This defines “where.”

“Who,” “when,” and “where’s the art” are questions meant for quick answers, too. The core groups are the Chavín people, living in the highlands, and the desert’s Paracas, both with cultures lasting about a thousand years from around 1200 b.c. Later cultures like the Moche, Chimú, and Wari developed and dispersed from around a.d. 100 to 1400. The Nasca culture succeeded the Paracas and made some of the most arresting art. The Inca Empire, I was surprised to learn, lasted only from 1400 to 1532. For Americans at least, the Inca define that part of the world. What a loss not to know about the complexity and richness of the place.

The curators created a satisfyingly immersive exhibition, with Andean music in the background, a relevant rather than solely mood-making feature given the centrality of sound effects in old rituals. Today’s Andean music, scholars think, descends far more directly from these old cultures than, say, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” owes its lineage to anything Ancient Greek.

Then there’s the art. The art’s familiar, and some of it feels modern, only because American art and architecture had a hefty Mesoamerican style revival.

Pottery with bold, abstract shapes, pottery shaped as animals and birds, and textiles and gold jewelry with the same motifs are looks we know, but seeing the art from antiquity, learning what it meant, and understanding the design genius is another story.

A Nasca ceremonial pottery drum from 100 b.c. to a.d. 650 is packed with the bulbous, totemic mask figures, most with cat whiskers since in Andean religion the feline represented the Earth and world power. A thick, sinuous band — the snake was the medium to the afterlife — courses through a scene punctuated by small human figures. One figure holds the snake like an acrobat, another has a rope around his neck. There are lots of random legs and heads. Feather motifs signal the bird, representing the sky, nighttime, and war and, with the snake and the cat, the three stars of the Andean pantheon of gods.

The figures are flat. The artist isn’t concerned with depth, modeling, or shadow. The Andean palette is mostly earth colors and red. As circuitous as the drum looks, there’s a clear theme. Human figures are sliced, akimbo, and hanging for dear life, but the bird, feline, and snake anchor and link them. There’s order to the chaos.

A vessel in the form of a contortionist from 1250 to 500 b.c. is about 15 inches tall so has presence; visually it’s riveting since it’s so weird. It’s very early Andean figural art and tells us that twisting the body into unnatural shapes was one way to access the divine world. A pot depicting a human head isn’t just a standard form with a head painted on it. The vessel itself is head shaped, or corn-cob shaped or boat shaped or cat shaped. The object seems franker, which we like, but it also turns the humble pot into clay sculpture. A gold headdress with feline features and ear plates with dangling fangs came from a Chavín tomb and dates to 800 to 550 b.c. Putting paganism aside, I look at these old Andeans as superlative designers.

I expected textiles because these and pottery are the two South American media I think we gringos all recognize. I couldn’t believe how well preserved the textiles in the show were. One, a big funerary mantle, is 2,000 years old. It was once wrapped around the dead. It’s embroidered with 74 images, most of a human figure holding a severed head. This and other textiles on display are with us still because they were protected from the elements in underground tombs along the desert coast.

There wasn’t a lot of romance in the exhibition. A vessel of a man and a woman copulating doesn’t recall Maurice Denis’s Story of Psyche in the Morozov exhibition. There’s plenty of gore, though. I chuckled when I read a label crediting the growth of the Inca Empire to “negotiation and alliances.” Turns out “pretty please” might have been tried, but clubs and axes were always handy and not saved for last resort.

Warrior figures are frequent subjects in art. Cultures that we know incompletely disappeared, and they didn’t go into a witness protection program or retire to Sun City. Some battles seem to have been ritualistic and waged not by armies or involving civilian slaughter but among a warrior class, with the losers killed afterward and ceremoniously.

A complex Moche pottery sculpture from between a.d. 100 and 600 depicts a boat in the shape of a demon fish taking prisoners to an island for sacrifice. Three Nasca pots owned by the British Museum depict severed heads, both in stylized form and realistically with eyes and mouth sealed shut by thorns. These heads didn’t just fall off on their own.

The exhibition itself didn’t consider child sacrifice. Not surprising. Given the number of young-learner labels, this topic’s a downer, off-message, and, I think, for some children positively triggering. I don’t know whether there is no art depicting child sacrifice or there is known art that wasn’t included, but the book illustrates excavated, blood-splattered grave sites with skeletons of children.

As regular readers know, I’m open to all kinds of ideas and tend to have a live-and-let-live attitude to blatantly dumb, wrongheaded opinions. The curators in the catalogue embrace changes in the world climate as a cause for deep concern. We learn that what we call “climate change,” served with Jaws music, affected ancient Andean peoples and probably led to some cultures’ dying. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say. “How could that be? There were no fossil fuels.” Of course, the planet is 4 billion years old. The climate’s always changing. To think we know why, based on a hundred years of weather statistics, doctored models, and the blather of a multibillion-dollar climate industry, is hubristic and callow.

In some old Andean cultures, child sacrifice was meant to assuage the gods in times when severe changes in the weather caused droughts. In a passage devoted to a mass grave of sacrificed children near the Moche city Chan Chan, the curators tell us:

There is a shared belief that human actions and activity today will directly influence the likelihood of climate change and the frequency of extreme weather events. There is also a shared understanding that actions as individuals will not be enough to effect change and therefore we are forced to rely on those in power to take the necessary steps to remedy the situation. This deferment of decision-making responsibility is done with the knowledge that some actions will adversely affect the quality of life of individuals within society.

I saw where this was heading. Child sacrifice to fight climate change “didn’t mean that life itself wasn’t valued — in fact, sacrifice can sometimes be a cultural statement of just how highly valued life is.” Talk about going native.

“Around the world today,” I read, “people can often distance themselves and their leaders from personal responsibility when it comes to climate change and extreme weather events.” We’re in this climate pickle because of the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the combustion engine, both in the past, while “even though people know that inaction now will lead to the deaths of people in the future, those deaths are culturally envisioned as indirect and abstract.”

The ancient Andeans took the bull by the horns, or the child by his designer flashlight sneakers. Hasn’t anyone in the British Museum heard about the Enlightenment or the Renaissance or the triumph of science over superstition?

Isn’t there a Master of the Red Pencil at the British Museum empowered to decree “Cut the climate-change crapola”? I don’t expect a thumping denunciation of Andean human sacrifice or even a tsk-tsk, but “they meant well” isn’t right, either.

Back to art and archaeology, which is where I think the curators should have remained since that is their expertise. Some art can be exhibited only via photographs. The Nasca culture left us gigantic geoglyphs, some simply spirals or inscrutable lines but others in the shape of birds, cats, or fish. They were made from shallow incisions in the desert floor between 200 b.c. and a.d. 650. The largest is a tenth of a mile. One complex of geoglyphs covers 90 square miles. No one in the academic world paid much attention to them until the 1940s. Scholars think they might have been signals to deities in the sky, charts for ancient irrigation systems, or astrological symbols.

Coming from a place of ignorance, I can’t fault the scholarship of the show or the acumen of the curators. It’s the British Museum, so I assume the curators not only know their subjects but have a priestly calling to steward the Andean art in the collection and the heritage it expresses. The exhibition is in the rotunda built about 20 years ago, when the museum reimagined the British Library’s vast, round Victorian reading room. I’ve never liked it, since I loathe the sacrifice of historic spaces devoted to the intellect to the gods of people-processing, which is mostly what the new courtyard serves. The new rotunda was pelted with garbage when it opened for consisting of “inferior stone,” which is one way the English say “French stone,” and I have to say it looks like linoleum.

The gallery in the rotunda, I thought, was too small for a show this intense, with fantastic though aesthetically new forms, styles, and materials.

A feline-shaped cape made from cotton, copper, feathers, and semi-precious stones is so startling that it’s going to rule its space, but some of the objects displayed were gold amulets, nose rings, a mother-of-pearl ear plug that’s exquisite, the gold llama on the catalogue’s front cover, and many other objects that are three or four inches tall. Toward the end, some of the cases seemed too packed, leaving these things without the elbow room they needed. The gold llama figure, for instance, dating from the Inca period, is both gorgeous and tiny.

The arrangement of art felt generous and spacious as visitors moved from the most ancient cultures to pre-Inca ones. There’s a section on the Inca period and Machu Picchu, not a capital city but a citadel or administrative center, and a final section on the Andean legacy. Both felt rushed. The Inca period was short, I know, and imperial, and I don’t think the colonial period much engaged the curators, which I understand. Dropping the colonial era would have freed space for objects that now seem crowded.

There were so many other wonderful aspects of Peru: A Journey in Time. Ancient Andean roads, some 10,000 miles remaining and still used, crossed ravines and clung to cliffs. Terraced farming made a distinctive landscape but served to tailor space for hundreds of fruit and vegetable varietals, with the land for each sculpted to create micro-climates. It’s not as though everything from the old cultures disappeared. Chunks of ancient practice live on today. The exhibition offered a vital history lesson, a primer on art I didn’t know, and a tribute to continuity.