An odyssey into art of the Americas

Unlikely as it may sound, a 1930s romance between a debonair ex-Hungarian hussar and a well-to-do American opera singer had an impact on the study of pre-Columbian art.

In 1933, a year after Pal Kelemen and Elisabeth Zulauf were married, they took the first of many trips through the Americas. While Elisabeth, as diarist and photographer, documented their travels, historian and author Pal sought out the art of Mesoamerican civilizations.

Aided by his wife, who gave up her career to work in his shadow, Kelemen helped broaden the field of art history beyond the Eurocentric. Among his written works, his two-volume “Medieval American Art” became a landmark art history text of the 1940s and ‘50s.

The couple’s memoirs and letters and Elisabeth’s photographs have been published in “The Kelemen Journals: Incidents of Discovery of Art in the Americas, 1932-1964,” from Sunbelt Publications. The focus, says editor Judith Hancock Sandoval, is Pal Kelemen’s “original and important contributions” to the study of the aesthetics of colonial and pre-Columbian art, made at a time when few art historians were interested.

“Today, young explorers with packs on their backs are scaling ruins everywhere, but in the 1930s and ‘40s, for an elegant, wealthy couple to venture into these places was still a remarkable enterprise,” she says.

Diane Halasz, whose late husband, Nicholas, was Kelemen’s great-nephew and executor of the Kelemens’ estate, compiled the material for a book that is as much travelogue and observation of early-to-mid-20th century culture as it is a history of the New World and its art. The volume is personalized, Halasz says, by “the story of two people who worked side by side all their lives.”

Excerpts

“The night we were there, the gracefulness of the building and its decorative details were dramatized by the light of the full moon. The delicate structure, fantastic as a fairy tale, seemed to hover above the wall of the Ball Court. Europeans, in the same epoch, raised only gloomy and unwieldy piles of masonry.”

-- The Temple of Jaguars, Chichen Itza, Yucatan, 1933

“The whole place, including the Indian pueblo, was overly self-conscious and set out for the admiring tourist. After all the beauty that we had seen elsewhere, we did not need that pueblo presented to us on a platter with a vain smirk.”

-- Taos, N.M., 1936

“It was not one sculptor’s interpretation of some religious tenet, but the articulation of a complete, collective imagination, expressed with such clarity that even a twentieth-century Christian could not help but be struck by the physical power and fantasy of this alien world.”

-- Mayan ruins at Copan, Honduras, 1940

“Many small cities in Latin American countries boasted more elaborate exteriors, but the lavish use of red and gold in Tunja’s church interiors preserved an opulence [that] remained almost undisturbed by modernization. There were abundant examples of the beginnings of the translation of Spanish architecture, life and art into the exigencies of the New World, with its special landscapes, light, climates and the extraordinary artistic ingenuity of its native people.”

-- Tunja, Colombia, 1945

“Reflecting on the murals, we could not free ourselves from their spell ... their total impact almost overwhelmed our aesthetic capacity. During the Classic period, Maya artists did not have the implements and materials used to decorate the monuments of Europe. They utilized colors, tools and methods that originated in the region, all beyond the limits of our experience.”

-- Bonampak, Mexico, 1949