The Past at Play

Where have all the handcrafted toys gone? Nancy Romero, curator of the “Toy Mechanics” exhibition at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum, warns that toys lovingly crafted everywhere in the world throughout the centuries are in danger of disappearing as people rely more and more on mass-produced playthings.

“Nobody knows how to make toys anymore,” Romero says. “They buy something ready-made, and they assume it’s going to work, and it does. They don’t question how or why it works. People need to know how to make toys again; it used to be a family craft--you found something lying around, like paper or string, and made a toy out of it. Or you whittled a piece of wood. We’re losing that creative ability.”

“Toy Mechanics” elucidates the tradition of handcrafting through 220 international toys--antique and modern--categorizing them by whether they amuse by moving, making noise or other special attributes. “Toys are universal. In fact, the same toys can be found in every single country, like wooden pecking chickens or balls,” Romero continues. “Each has a different ethnic slant, but they’re basically all the same toy.”

Toys have probably been around as long as humans have been civilized. The earliest known moving toy dates from Egypt, circa 1000 BC. Ancient Greeks and Romans had toy chariots and jointed dolls. Two of the oldest toys in the show are a pull-toy dog and centaur from 18th century Sicily.

Anyone who’s ever laughed at a jack-in-the-box or a dancing marionette, or marveled at the beauty of an airborne dragon kite knows the pleasure of movable toys. The toys here were made to be spun, pulled, pushed, cranked, dropped and squeezed. A video shows a brightly painted jazz quintet from Brazil included in the show playing drums and strings, an American palomino rearing up smiling, and a French 19th century bulldog growling.

Even though the toys sit inert in their display cases, the musical video shows how the toys move. Examples of similar toys that visitors can try for themselves also are on hand. Visitors can pick up simple instructions on how to craft each type of toy at home.

Spinning toys in a variety of sizes, colors and materials open the exhibition. “See this top made from a piece of cane and an acorn? It’s so simple, but so elegant in design,” says Romero about a rudimentary Mexican toy.

She explains that the earliest tops were found in ancient Egypt, Rome and China. They all revolve on a point, which can hold weight that’s equally distributed and kept in balance by motion.

Along one entrance wall are colorful wheeled toys from Africa, South America, Japan and Mexico, some of them quite humorous, such as the African lion nipping at the heels of a fleeing man wearing a bottle-cap hat. “These toys use gears, and you can load as many movements onto them as you want,” says Romero. “There’s an entire wooden Mexican rodeo with everything moving that’s based on simple gears.”

Some of the most spectacular objects are the windup toys, which include whirligigs, sailboats, balloons and kites, which originated in Asia. On the wall is a surprising picture of a boy with a helicopter-type toy that was made in about 1584.The puppets, too, are fascinating, with their expressive faces and fluid movements. An especially unusual kind is the Vietnamese water puppet. “These are 20th century papier-mache toys of the actual puppets,” explains Romero. “The real puppets are much larger, with the puppeteers standing in the chest-deep water with all the mechanisms under water. The puppets then move, float and splash.” Hinged toys are designed on the same principles--using flexible joints--as human bodies. The simplest toys in the exhibition use string to link joints, while the more complicated ones use a tongue-and-groove method. Look for whimsical, colorful little snakes.

Noisemaker toys originally were made to make people laugh and also to scare off evil spirits. Rattles, whistles and other noisemakers were crafted to transport Australian aborigines into dreamland. “It’s through toys like horns, drums, flutes and rattles that the young were introduced to music,” says Romero.

Romero devoted one section to the toys of Francisco Hipolito (1935-1988). Paralyzed from the waist down from age 17, he sat on his porch in the Mexican village of La Cienega and crafted wooden toys that could be pulled, pushed or cranked, like the small Ferris wheel. “I loved the tender quality of his toys, so I featured him here,” says Romero.

“The toys are microcosms of what the people making them believe in. So, for example, if you show five different tops or pull toys from around the world, you see both the commonality and the diversity,” says Patrick Ela, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees.

“Toy Mechanics” continues at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Blvd., through Jan. 27. A workshop on how to make climbing toys will be held Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. For more information, call (323) 937-4230.