Everywhere the Glint of Gold

By Philip Herrera

It was luck that the tomb of Tutankhamun, pharaoh of Egypt from 1334 to 1325 B.C., escaped the predations of grave robbers over the millenniums. Largely luck too that British Archaeologist Howard Carter found the royal tomb in 1922 after 15 years of fruitless searching through the sere Valley of the Kings. Perhaps the timing was also lucky when J. Carter Brown, director of Washington's National Gallery of Art, began negotiating with Egyptian authorities in 1974 for a U.S. showing of the tomb's contents: a wave of pro-American feeling was just sweeping Cairo. In any case, millions of Americans will be the beneficiaries. This week a stunning show presenting 55 "Treasures of Tutankhamun" starts a six-museum tour of the U.S. at the National Gallery.*

Extra Tingle. The works are arranged in the order in which Howard Carter found them, lending an extra tingle to the exhibit. First comes selected contents of the tomb's antechamber. "Wonderful things," Carter had gasped when his candle flickered upon the objects that the 18-year-old pharaoh might need in the afterlife: alabaster cups for his wine, bejeweled amulets to ward off evil spirits, even an ivory-inlaid wooden throne to make him feel at home. But greater treasures lay ahead, as Carter discovered when he delved further into the tomb. What he saw (and what the exhibit visitor will see) was "strange animals, statues and gold--everywhere the glint of gold."

Indeed, Tutankhamun lived during a blaze of pharaonic wealth and power. Besides their use of gold, his artists worked in silver, alabaster, obsidian, lapis lazuli, wood, glass and gems, handling each material as masterfully as if it were clay. They had turned from much of the rigid formality that marks artworks of earlier periods to more natural poses and more intimate scenes.

The most famous object, of course, is the golden mask that covered Tutankhamun's mummified head. Though every bit as cool and haughty as one would expect of an art that above all aimed to celebrate majesty and death, it is far from a resplendent cliche. The mask's burnished golden gleam and shadow evoke a bursting inner vitality that emphatically defies mortality.

Despite the art's remoteness in time, today's audience will find in it the first stirrings of familiar Western styles. There is nothing alien about the playfulness of unguent jars shaped like animals with lolling tongues, or the alert grace of a gilded wooden statue of the goddess Selket, or the art nouveau traceries of floral patterns on a lamp and vase. A wooden seat is decorated with a leopard-spot design that has the startling freedom and bounce of Matisse's late cutouts.

For all that, the treasures retain the grandeur of mystery too. A wooden head of Tutankhamun, shown as the sun-god emerging from a lotus plant in daily rebirth, stares outward with a gaze that is as candid, guileless--and impenetrably secretive--as a cat's. Nearly every one of the 55 artworks seems a confident invocation of the idea of permanence. "To speak the names of the dead is to make them live again," said the ancient Egyptians. This superb show eloquently illustrates that point.

* Future stops: Chicago's Field Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum and New York's Metropolitan Museum.

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