Not just artifact, but art

In 1923, Rafael Larco Hoyle came home to Peru after nine years studying in the U.S. His father gave him a present: a 1,000-year-old piece of pottery, a startlingly realistic portrait bust from the Moche culture, a civilization that flowered hundreds of years before the much-better-known Incas. Larco was in love.

“The highest expression of sculptural art in pre-Columbian America,” Larco later wrote about Moche pottery. “Real portraits that only lack of a breath of life.”

Larco went on to amass the largest private collection of ancient Peruvian art in the world, which became the marvelous Rafael Larco Herrera Archaeological Museum in Lima -- about 45,000 objects, some of which he dug up himself and classified by style. Although Larco loved the sculpture for its undeniable beauty, his pioneering research and the sheer size of his collection ultimately overwhelmed his museum, making it less a temple dedicated to art than an archeological storehouse. Indeed, the museum prides itself on being one of the few in the world where visitors can wander around the storage areas, gazing at floor-to-ceiling displays of Larco’s treasures.

Now, the collector’s grandson has opened a new museum in this ancient city, dedicated to fulfilling Larco’s vision of recognizing ancient Peruvian artifacts as the aesthetic equal of any other art: the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art.

“I always liked the idea of just seeing the art as art,” says Andres Alvarez-Calderon, Larco’s grandson and the director of the Larco Museum. “But with all the archeological information in the museum you look at the information, not the art. The idea with the new museum is to appreciate the art.”

Alvarez-Calderon says he picked Cusco because the city is the gateway to the legendary Inca ruins at Machu Picchu, making it the tourist capital of Peru. South American pre-Columbian art, of course, is virtually synonymous with the Incas -- which galls Alvarez-Calderon because it ignores myriad cultures that thrived for thousands of years before the relatively brief florescence of the Inca empire. Of the Cusco museum’s 11 galleries, for instance, only the last one shows any Incan art.

“Even people in Cusco think that Inca is all pre-Columbian art,” Alvarez-Calderon says. “The Incas were just the synthesis of 3,000 years of development. It’s very important for the kids of Cusco to know that.”

Rafael built the original museum as a tribute to his father, Rafael Larco Herrera, who inspired his son with his love of his country’s artistic patrimony and donated to him his own sizable collection of pottery. Now Alvarez-Calderon has built the new museum as a homage to the grandfather who died before he was born. It’s a fitting tribute, scholars say.

“The collection is of very good quality, but I was really impressed by the installation design of the new museum,” says Jennifer Williams Moore, a curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who recently visited Cusco. “It focuses on the aesthetic experience, as opposed to a traditional ethnographic or anthropological display. The objects are beautifully lit and mounted so that you can really appreciate them as works of art.”

Joanne Pillsbury, a scholar at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and professor of pre-Columbian studies at the University of Maryland, says that the Larco is at the forefront of a new wave of Peruvian museums that until recently weren’t all that eager to welcome foreign scholars. “Under a number of incredibly energetic and brilliant young directors, several Peruvian museums have ushered in an exciting time for the visual arts in Peru,” she says. “They aren’t looking so much at U.S. or European museums for inspiration or leads; we’re looking at them. Andres has a strong sense of the importance of scholarship and research to a museum and understands that it is in part the lifeblood of an institution. In this sense, he hearkens back to Rafael Larco Hoyle, who had a deep and abiding interest in research. Not only did Larco himself make enormous contributions to scholarship, he was also keenly aware of the importance of scholarly exchange.”

Pre-Columbian passion

Rafael LARCO HOYLE was born in 1901 in Trujillo in northern Peru. His father was a sugar baron and an avid collector of pre-Columbian art. Larco took over the family business, founded a newspaper and served as mayor of Trujillo. But his real passion was ancient art. “Always,” archeologist Clifford Evans wrote in American Antiquity, “sooner or later the conversation would return to Peruvian archaeology.”

Scouring the country for artistic treasure, Larco bought collections en masse and led archeological expeditions. He was a prolific author of monographs and books. He was famed for his visual memory, and his scrutiny of the necks of vases found in tombs led him to devise a five-period typology for Moche art that remains the scholarly point of reference. Larco also theorized that the region’s culture developed along the coast and later spread to the Andean highlands -- a contrarian position that was subsequently embraced by the archeological profession.

“Larco’s work in archeology is still the backbone of the field,” his grandson says proudly.

“I never knew Larco,” he adds. “But I’ve heard a lot about him. He slept just four hours a night. He was not just an archeologist, he was also a businessman. He didn’t have many friends. Larco wasn’t a teacher, he wasn’t a communicator. He was a machine.”

In 1926, the collector opened the Museum Larco in a small house on the family hacienda in Chiclin. Soon the collection took over two more houses. Finally, in 1949, Larco moved the museum to Lima, where about 100,000 people a year visit the collection, housed in a villa on a small hill. A gallery that displays the museum’s famous collection of erotic art is in a separate building, on a lower level that school groups tend to bypass.

“It’s like the porn section of a video store,” says Mariana Watson, museum publicity director.

After Larco died in 1966, his daughter, Isabel Larco de Alvarez Calderon, took over as director. But her son, Alvarez-Calderon, elected to go to law school and become an attorney instead of joining the museum business.

“My passion is pre-Columbian art,” Alvarez-Calderon says. “I was tempted to study archeology but I said, ‘How am I going to make a living in Peru?’ ”

As director of the family museum, it turns out. Alvarez-Calderon took over from his mother in 1998 (although she remains the chairwoman of the family foundation) and decided to raise the museum’s profile, lending its treasures to other museums. In 1997 a large show from the Larco traveled to San Francisco and Knoxville, Tenn. The museum loaned objects to four museums in Spain and Germany this summer.

“To be a good museum you need good conservation, good research and good diffusion,” Alvarez-Calderon says.

In August, for example, the museum helped organize a three-day conference about Moche culture, cosponsored with Dumbarton Oaks, which attracted scholars from around the world.

Then there’s the new Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in Cusco, which opened in June 2003. The collection is housed in the Casa Cabrera, a mansion built in 1580 on the foundations of Inca ruins that once belonged to conquistador Alonso Diaz. The villa -- owned by the BBVA Banco Continental and previously used as a cultural center -- sits in a commanding position on a colonial plaza in the trendy San Blas neighborhood of Cusco.

“Cusco is the most important tourist place in Peru,” Alvarez-Calderon says, “but it didn’t have a good museum.”

Alvarez-Calderon picked two curators -- Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo and art historian Cecilia Bakula -- and told them to take anything they wanted from the Lima museum. The result is an aesthetic tour de force: 450 pieces spanning almost 3,000 years of artistic experimentation and a dozen civilizations.

The galleries flank a courtyard that includes a restaurant with haute interpretations of traditional Peruvian fare (such as guinea pig confit, which can be washed down with a $100 bottle of champagne) and upscale boutiques selling Incan-inspired gold jewelry and alpaca pashminas.

The aesthetics take over

Unlike the Lima museum, which features copious displays of artifacts and detailed technical information, the Cusco museum shows relatively few objects in dramatically lighted vitrines, focusing attention on the purely aesthetic aspects of the work. In a jewelry gallery, for example, the dim room and dark walls create a stark backdrop for pale, rose-hued breastplates made of bone and shell that seem to hang in space, glowing with light like egrets flying against the sun. Although the galleries follow Larco’s chronology of ancient Peruvian cultures, the captions offer little in the way of archeological information, concentrating instead on the formal aesthetics of the objects.

The art, simply put, is stunning. There is a splendid vase from Cupisnique, a perfect minimalist piece of sculpture, round body and slender neck covered by a gray-green glaze like a sea in stormy weather. There’s a room full of bowls from the Nazca, a culture that deserves to be as famous for its gorgeously decorated vessels -- somber colored geometric designs and lovingly portrayed animals -- as it does for the massive images it inscribed on the Peruvian desert. There’s a pair of Moche geese, acutely observed and magnificently rendered animals that must have sent Larco atremble when he first saw them.

“We had 45,000 pieces to choose from the Museum Larco,” Bakula says. “The main idea was to show that pre-Columbian art was not just about making common objects but that these were also extraordinarily creative works of art. Each culture created exceptional works, beautiful compositions, perfect in form and proportion. These were true artists.”

Although the Cusco museum can make a plausible claim to showing the finest collection of pre-Columbian art in South America, it’s certainly not the largest. That would be the National Museum in Lima, a hulking modern building that contains more than 220,000 objects, although relatively few are on display. And although the National Museum gets any objects newly discovered in Peru, the Larco museums don’t pursue collecting.

“This museum will never get a new piece,” Alvarez-Calderon says. “It’s the collection of Larco, the collection of a scholar. That is very rare. This museum is his archeological thesis. We decided to preserve it as it was.”