The Sun-Colored Metal

To the sun-worshiping Indians of the Americas before Columbus, gold was not so much precious as sacred. The Incas of Peru used it freely in wall coverings, in breastplates, in artificial flowers, in provision for tombs--never thinking of it as rare, always stressing the religious emotion they felt from gold's sunlike luster.

To the avaricious Spaniards, gold was simply rare and therefore of monetary value; when a nation had enough, it became rich. The Indians were astonished at this attitude, and surmised that the white men had some physical disease that could only be cured by gold. The Inca Emperor Atahualpa had to ransom himself from the swinish Spanish Adventurer Pizarro with a roomful of the stuff--13,000 lbs., all told. (For his pains, Atahualpa was strangled.) Indifferently, the Spaniards melted art into bullion; their pillage increased Europe's gold supply by 20%, part of which went to finance the ill-fated Armada. To the modern world, pre-Columbian gold again has great value apart from its content as metal: its artistic worth.

For much gold remains in tombs and other archaeological sites, and every new find becomes an artistic Klondike. Laws in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama that attempt to curb the export of the "national patrimony" are by and large circumvented; if the gold is no longer exported in galleons, it nonetheless gets out. Last week a superb new collection of pre-Columbian art, "The World of Ancient Gold," opened at the Travel and Transportation Pavilion at the New York World's Fair (see opposite page).

One of the top art exhibits at the fair, it shows how pre-Columbian goldsmiths of America beat, hammered and cast little miracles of design. For motifs they used the swamp and sea creatures that they knew best--the frog, snake, shark, turtle, crab and crocodile. These ancient masters also made the malleable metal wriggle with curvilinear life: 2-in.-thick ear plugs, nose pendants, golden mustachios that covered the mouth. They drank from gold goblets and spangled themselves with baubles that were hinged to bounce in the light. They abstracted condors into broadtailed triangles and sought symmetry in two-headed animals.

The show is the work of John Wise, a scholarly, self-effacing New York dealer and collector, and Peter Pollack, former director of the American Federation of Arts. For 75-c- admission, the viewer sees 500 pieces of gold worth $3,000,000 on the art market, stunningly shown in window-cases designed by Gene Moore, display director for Fifth Avenue's Tiffany & Co. Through it all shines the innocence of the pre-Columbian artist, who comes out vindicated in his greatness, as predicted by an early Spanish chronicler: "Thus the Sun taught his people how to be kings and lords over all."

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