maandag 21 februari 2011

Amazonian ornaments without information


Regarding art from the Amazon and ways to present it. Earlier & earlier

Hjalmar Stolpe (1841-1905) was a Swedish archaeologist and ethnographer. From his book "Studies in American Ornamentation — a Contribution to the Biology of Ornament", a fascinating title but unknown to google books and other reference sites, Dover collected 190 rubbing of wood carvings in a book called "Amazon Indian designs from Brazilian and Guianan wood carvings" in 1974. What anybody would get from this book is a mystery: this book that lacks all information regarding the makers, the circumstances and the date of production, a good foreword would have redeemed it but no. 



2 opmerkingen:

  1. thats dover press for you. they publish a lot of public domain material for use as clip art.

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  2. Exactly, Dover is no source for information - they just reprint image stuff, I'm sure there's a similar "celtic knots" book, or Native America petroglyphs, etc. They're basically children's books, I used to have one about pirates.

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