Art market

Art of Australia

The Art of Australia includes Australian Aboriginal art and Colonial, Landscape, Atelier, Modernist and Contemporary art. Australia has produced notable artists from both Western traditions and Indigenous Australian traditions. The importance and sacredness of the land is a uniting theme to be found in both histories of Australian Art.

Rock art can be found all over Australia. The Sydney rock engravings are just one example. Murujuga in Western Australia has the Friends of Australian Rock Art have advocated its preservation, and the numerous engravings there were heritage listed in 2007.

The first descriptions of Australia by European artists were mainly "natural-history art", depicting the distinctive flora and fauna for scientific purposes. Sydney Parkinson, the Botanical illustrator on James Cook's 1770 voyage that first charted the eastern coastline of Australia, made a large number of such drawings under the direction of naturalist Joseph Banks. Many of these drawings were met with skepticism when taken back to Europe, for example claims that the platypus was a hoax. Despite Banks' suggestions, no professional natural-history artist sailed on the First Fleet in 1788, so until the turn of the century all drawings made in the colony were by soldiers, including British naval officers George Raper and John Hunter, and convict artists, including Thomas Watling. However, many of these drawings are by unknown artists. Most are in the style of naval draughtsmanship. Most of these drawings were of Natural history topics, specifically birds, and a few depict the infant colony itself.

Several professional natural-history illustrators accompanied expeditions in the early 19th century, including Ferdinand Bauer (who travelled with Matthew Flinders), and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who travelled with a French expedition led by Nicolas Baudin. The first resident professional artist was John Lewin, who arrived in 1800 and published two volumes of natural-history art.

Ornothologist John Gould was renowned for painting many pictures of birds.

As well as natural history, there were some ethnographic portraiture of Aboriginals, particularly in the 1830s. Artists included Augustus Earle in New South Wales and in Tasmania.

Art in Australia from 1788 onward is often narrated as the gradual shift from a European sense of light to an Australian one. The lighting in Australia is notably different to that of Europe, and early attempts at landscapes attempted to reflect this.

Conrad Martens worked from 1835 to 1878 as a professional artist, painting many landscapes and was commercially successful. His work, though, is regarded as softening the landscape to fit European sensibilities. Another significant landscape artist of this era was John Glover.

S. T. Gill documented life on the Australian gold fields.

A few attempts at art exhibitions were made in the 1840s, which attracted a number of artists but were commercial failures. By the 1850s however, regular exhibitions became popular, with a huge variety of art types represented. The first such was in 1854 in Melbourne. An art museum, which eventually became the National Gallery of Victoria, was founded in 1861, and began to collect Australian works as well as gathering a collection of European masters. Some of the artists of note included Eugene von Guerard, William Strutt, and Louis Buvelot.

William Piguenit's "Flood in the Darling" was collected by the National Gallery of New South Wales in 1895.

Walter Withers won the inaugural Wynne Prize in 1896.

The beginnings of Australian art are often popularly associated with the Heidelberg School in the 1880s. The Heidelberg school focused on achieving a truer account of Australian lighting conditions than had been achieved before. Some see strong connections between the art of the school and the wider Impressionist movement, while others point to earlier traditions of plain air painting elsewhere in Europe. Sayers states that "there remains something excitingly original and indisputably important in the art of the 1880s and 1890s", and that by this time "something which could be described as an Australian tradition began to be recognized".

Some of the key figures in the School were Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton (1867-1943), Frederick McCubbin, and Charles Conder. Their most recognised work involves scenes of pastoral and wild Australia, featuring the vibrant, even harsh colours of Australian summers. The name itself comes from a camp Roberts and Streeton set up at a property near Heidelberg, at the time on the rural outskirts of Melbourne. Some of their paintings received international recognition, and many remain embedded in Australia's popular consciousness both inside and outside the art world.

In Australia, Edwardian architecture is known as Federation architecture.

Hans Heysen, an artist known for his luminous watercolours of River Red Gums, won the Wynne Prize nine times from 1904 to 1932.

John Peter Russell (1858-1930), an Impressionist of this era was not closely associated with the Heidelberg School.

Bertram Mackennal, (1863-1931) was the greatest Australian sculptor of the early 20th century.

George Washington Lambert was a wartime artist (World War I).

Leading up to World War I, the decorative arts, including miniature, watercolour painting, and functional objects such as vases, became more prominent in the Australian arts scene. Norman Lindsay's works caused considerable scandal around the turn of the century. One famous drawing, Pollice Verso, caused his first scandal, as it depicted Romans giving the thumbs down to Christ on the Cross. In 2003, Robert Hughes described Lindsay's work as mediocre in his book "Goya". Lindsay's children's book The Magic Pudding was very successful in Australia. Norman Lindsay and landscape painter Ernest Buckmaster were critical of the influence of moderninsm in Australia. Other popular illustrators of children's books around this time were May Gibbs, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and Dorothy Wall (1894-1942).

The painter Arthur Streeton remained a successful artist throughout his lifetime.

Lloyd Rees (1895-1988) moved from Brisbane to Sydney. His drawings and paintings of Sydney Harbour featured a sinuous line that would be repeated in the work of Brett Whiteley. By this time, women's artworks started to attract wider attention, such as the modernist oil paintings of Clarice Beckett and pastels of Florence Rodway, the watercolours of Thea Proctor or the paintings of Grace Cossington Smith, who painted the Sydney Harbour Bridge as it was being constructed.

After World War I, modernist art began to make its presence felt in the Australian art community, causing considerable controversy between its practitioners and detractors (though this is probably an oversimplification). 1921 saw the founding of the Archibald Prize, Australia's most famous art prize, for portraiture, though defining portraiture has always caused controversy - most notably in 1943 when William Dobell's highly figurative portrait of an artist friend won the prize and was challenged in court on the basis that it was a caricature, not a portrait. Also notable in the 1930s period was the photography of Max Dupain, whose images of bronzed (often nude) Australians on dazzlingly lit beaches added to the mythological connection of white Australia to its coastline. Harold Cazneaux created memorable photographs of Sydney in the 1930s. In the 2000s, George Caddy's 30s and 40s photographs of beachobatics have been rediscovered.

In the 1930s and 1940s, with the opening up of Australia's interior, mutual influence between Western and Aboriginal culture extended to the most prominent artists. The most famous of these are the watercolourist Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) and the oil painter and printmaker Margaret Preston (1875-1963). Namatjira is associated with the Hermannsburg School. Preston was taken seriously as a key innovator of an "Australian" art of her time and still is. Namatjira's art was seen as Australiana until it was rediscovered in the 90s and celebrated as a cogent artistic vision.

The watercolorist Kenneth Macqueen (1897-1960) was a contemporary of Namatjira. Macqueen mostly painted pictures of his farm in Queensland.

In 1934 the ANZAC Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park was built and featured the sculpture "The Sacrifice" by Rayner Hoff (1894-1937).

Australia's most iconic Art Deco painting, Australian Beach Pattern was painted by Charles Meere (1890-1961) in 1940.

The abstract artist John Passmore (1904-1984) was part of the inspiration for the artist Hurtle Duffield in Patrick White's novel The Vivisector. In 2003, Passmore's friends Elinor and Fred Wrobel converted a pub into the Passmore Museum. It is one of the few museums in Australia dedicated solely to one artist's life and work. Passmore was a teacher of John Olsen (1928-), an innovative and original landscape painter.

Painter Godfrey Miller (1893-1964) was influenced by the writings of Rudolf Steiner.

In the 1940s a new generation of artists began experimenting with styles such as surrealism and other techniques. James Gleeson (1915-2008) eventually became recognised as Australia's most significant surrealist painter. Robert Klippel a surrealist influenced sculptor who was influenced by industrial settings. Klippel also collaborated with Gleeson. In Melbourne Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker were prominent, and a number of artists spent time at Heide, a house in Heidelberg - the site of the Heidelberg school several decades before. Amongst the artists that spent time there are Joy Hester (1920-1960) and, most prominently Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), the best artist of the immediate postwar period, whose iconic Ned Kelly images are probably better known than the artist himself. The effect of the Ern Malley poetry case, its cover illustrated by Nolan, also reflected around the art world.

Some of the artists who migrated from Europe in the first half of the 20th century were: Danila Vassilieff, Sali Herman and Desiderius Orban, Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Inge King, Judy Cassab, Henry Salkauskas, and Eva Kubbos. They brought with them influential ideas about art.

In 1946, Helmut Newton established himself as a fashion photographer in Melbourne. Eileen Mayo spent a decade in Australia before moving to New Zealand in 1962.

An art centre was established at Ernabella in 1948.

In the 1950s Scottish expatriate Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) settled on Bribie Island, South-East Queensland, and produced calligraphic paintings influenced by the arts of China and Indonesia.

Russell Drysdale, a painter of outback scenes, represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1954. Drysdale, William Dobell, Eric Thake and the cartoonist Paul Rigby helped to shape the visual archetype of the plain, hearty Australian.

George Johnson, a paragon of the Melbourne geometric abstractionist joked about in David Williamson's Emerald City, held his first exhibition in 1956.

Bob Woodward's El Alamein Fountain (1961) showed the public that small scale modernist public sculpture could enhance the appeal of inner city areas. The public sculptures of Tom Bass and Bert Flugelman had mixed reactions.

The aspects of Australia's landscape depicted by artists continued to widen, with the suburban landscape brought to attention by such artists as John Brack (1920-1999). Bohemian-minded artists were attracted to cities like New York, London and Paris. Vali Myers (1930-2003) appeared in Ed van der Elsken's book of photography, "Love on the Left Bank". Brett Whiteley (1939-1992). Twice winner of the Archibald Prize, he returned to Australia in the 1970s after spending time in London, Italy and New York and, amongst many other subjects, pushed the horizon to the top of the canvas and produced an array of landscapes of Sydney and particularly its inspirational harbourside. Currently Whiteley is critically ranked alongside artists such as Michael Johnson, Ken Unsworth, Colin Lancely and Gareth Sansom.

Richard Larter arrived in Australia in 1962 and started a long career in pop painting. Many of his paintings were of the female nude. Mike Brown was another of Australia's first pop artists.

Psychedelia in 1960s Australian art was not common, a famous example is the cover of the Cream album Disraeli Gears, created by Martin Sharp. Vernon Treweeke was briefly a star of psychedelic painting.

Charlie Numbulmoore painted his famous Wandjina spirit figures in the late 1960s.

In 1971-2 art teacher Geoffrey Bardon encouraged the Aboriginal people of Papunya to paint their Dreamtime stories on canvas, leading to the development of the Papunya Tula school, or 'dot art' which has become possibly Australia's most recognisable style of art worldwide. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri was one of the best-known of Papunya's artists.

The 1970s saw the introduction of the government funding of Australian arts. Artists from socially diverse backgrounds continued to establish themselves. In the same decade a multicultural broadcaster (Special Broadcasting Service) was established and University degrees were fee free. The Sydney Opera House was opened in 1973. The National Gallery of Australia (opened in 1982) acquisition of the Jackson Pollock work Blue Poles (1952) was controversial due to the expense.

Performance artists of the 70s included Ken Unsworth, Mike Parr, Mike Kitching, Ken Reinhard and Jill Orr. Figurative artists of the 70s were Jeffrey Smart and George Baldessin. Jeffrey Smart is the best known of these artists, for his oil paintings of modern urban alienation.

David Aspden (1936-2005) and Sydney Ball were stars of the local color field painting scene.

The Fred Williams exhibition "Fred Williams - Landscapes of a Continent" was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1977. Williams is now regarded as one of the best painters of the Australian landscape.

Oliffe Richmond, a very talented mid-career sculptor and colleague of Henry Moore died in 1977.

Abstractionists who can be identified with the 60s, 70s and 80s are John Coburn, Peter Powditch, Brian Blanchflower, Dawn Sime, Elisabeth Cummings, Howard Taylor, Lesley Dumbrell, John Nixon, Tony Tuckson, Yvonne Audette, Peter Upward, Allan Mitelman, John Firth Smith, Ann Thomson, Paul Partos and Stanislaus Rapotec. Rapotec's work was collected by Patrick White. Central Street Gallery in Sydney was a focal point for newer abstract art.

Neo-Expressionists of the 80s were Peter Booth, Jenny Watson, Davida Allen, Jan Senbergs, Ian Smith, Salvatore Zofrea, Pasquale Giardino and Peter Walsh.

The 1980s saw an art market boom of colonial and now mostly forgotten contemporary artists. Some flourished without the need the for government funding. Some artist's careers survived the art market crash of the early 90s, and most who did not were relatively young. Elderly folk artist Pro Hart (1928-2006) was embraced by the general public. He established a gallery in Broken Hill and sold works to HRH Prince Phillip and to the White house in the United States.

Ken Done's work has featured on the cover of the weekly Japanese magazine Hanako for over ten years, and in recent times Done has also become involved in the movement toward a new Australian flag. In 1999, Done was asked to create a series of works for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies programs of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Done and Hart became role models for artists who aspired to commercial success. Done's success is primarily as a designer of mass market goods, which is similar in many ways to artists who produce a large volume of affordable work. Accomplished senior artists Sidney Nolan, Charles Blackman, Robert Dickerson and Donald Friend were at the time perceived as relatively "highbrow" (derog.) makers of affordable art when they were making it.

Mambo Graphics was famous for the surfwear screenprint designs of Richard Allen and Chris O'Doherty.

Redback Graphix produced some striking didactic poster art in the 80s and 90s.

The proliferation of Australia's big things developed an ironical cult following, and Maria Kozic took the joke a step further with her schlock billboard "Maria Kozic is BITCH" (1989). On the serious side, cultural historians in Australia joined the global vogue of writing about Car culture and roadside memorials.

Macquarie University Sculpture Park was established in 1992, featuring over 100 sculptures.

Ian Burn, the leading conceptual artist, died in 1993.

Sculpture by the Sea began in 1996 and became a major sculpture show in Sydney's eastern beachside suburbs. An antecedent to this was Christo's wrapping of Little Bay in 1969.

Some contemporary artists working with the shapes and patterns of nature include John Wolseley, Geoffrey Bartlett, Brett Whiteley, Hossein Valamanesh, Fiona Hall, Marion Borgelt, Janet Laurence, Bronwyn Oliver, Guy Warren and Andrew Rogers. Nature loving artists of previous generations are numerous, however some of the more idiosyncratic examples are Merric Boyd and Sydney Long.

Some depictions of human suffering in the late 20th century were: Peter Booth's distopian expressionist paintings. George Gittoes drawing and painting the anguish of the Rwandan Genocide. Steve Cox's Criminological paintings of youths and men lapsed into and out of True crime. David McDiarmid, Peter Tully and society photographer William Yang used their art to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic. (Epidemic levels within Australia). Figurative painters Nigel Thomson, Stewart MacFarlane and Fred Cress explored the seamy side of urban Australian life. Their styles were akin to cinematic Black comedy. Tracey Moffatt's series "Scarred for Life" treated psychological suffering in a camp but heartfelt way. Bill Henson's unsettling depictions of teenager's suburbia were grim and perhaps slyly comedic. A grunge art movement occurred in Sydney in the 90s. It included Hany Armanious and Adam Cullen, amongst others. Cullen's works evolved out of a unfortunate place he calls "Loserville". Gordon Bennett's paintings of white Australia's mistreatment of aboriginals. Many artists chose distinctly more cheerful subject matter but they did not earn the esteemed reputation of Margaret Olley, a painter of still life floral arrangements and domestic interiors.

Building on the innovations of photomontage and artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter and Richard Hamilton, urban Australian artists were fascinated by the creative nexus of photography and painting. Painters combined painterliness with the look of photography (Richard Larter, James Clifford, Ivan Durrant, Tim Maguire, Susan Norrie, Annette Bezor, Robert Boynes, Kristin Headlam, Louise Hearman, John Young, Lindy Lee, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, Philip Wolfhagen, Leah King-Smith, David Wadelton). Those artists found limited but enthusiastic audiences. Experimental film and video was documented from the 1970s by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, and they were interested in surrealist films. Two decades later contemporary Australian artists such as Patricia Piccinini, Tracey Moffat and Bill Henson were artistic leaders primarily using photography, using techniques of drawing, Scenic painting and Chiarascuro respectively. Julia Ciccarone circumvented the trend with her Trompe-l'œil paintings. In the world of Rock music, Richard Lowenstein was creating similar graphic effects using grainy overlays, as he did for the Hunters & Collectors video "Talking to a Stranger" (1982).

Aboriginal artists using western medium such as Emily Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas and Freddy Timms have become known internationally and Emily Kngwarreye is regarded as one of the greatest painters of recent decades. Ron Mueck and Leigh Bowery are among Australia's finest contemporary art exports. Marc Newson is a particularly successful industrial designer.

In the 90s, one of the most iconic experiments with form in Australian visual culture was the La traviata scene from the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in which a drag queen wearing a long train of billowing silver fabric rides atop a bus. In the 2000 Sydney Olympic Opening Ceremony, there was a focus on kitsch imagery including foam kangaroos riding bicycles.

Stelarc is one of the country's most prominent performance artists and was known for his transhuman pieces in the 1990s. Sculptor Rosalie Gascoigne and painters Howard Arkley, Juan Dávila, Jan Senbergs, Garry Shead, Imants Tillers and Guan Wei, an artist of the post-Tianamen Square Massacre era, were well known in the 90s and into the new century. Tracey Moffatt was arguably the most celebrated Australian contemporary artist of the 1990s.

The late Arthur Boyd donated the Shoalhaven River property Bundanon to the Australian people, and this property became a new focal point for artists in residence. Artist residencies began there in 1998. Michael Leunig the cartoonist followed Arthur Boyd's prolific lyricism.

A number of Australian artists have recently been official war artists for the Australian War Memorial such as Wendy Sharpe and Rick Amor for the East Timor peacekeeping mission; George Gittoes in Somalia; Peter Churcher in the War on Terrorism, and Lewis Miller in the 2003 Iraq War. Gittoes is also a documentary maker.

In the first several years of the 2000s there was a flurry of interest in the work of William Robinson, an established artist whose work has been a favourite with collectors since the 1980s. Like Margaret Olley and Cressida Campbell he is influenced by Pierre Bonnard. Cressida Campbell is a promising mid-career artist, also influenced by Margaret Preston, but not to the extent that Criss Canning is.

Realism (for example: Julie Dowling, Eugenie Lee, Anwen Keeling, Peter Simpson, Tim Storrier, Brian Dunlop, Cherry Hood, Kate Bergin, Zai Kuang, Graeme Drendel, David Keeling, Vincent Fantauzzo, Elizabeth Kruger, Anne Wallace, Ross Watson, Tom Alberts, Bill Leak, Steve Lopes, Lucy Culliton) and expressionism (William Robinson, McLean Edwards, Margaret Woodward, Adam Cullen, Kevin Connor, Euan MacLeod, Nicholas Harding, Ben Quilty, Wendy Sharpe, Del Kathryn Barton) are staples of Australian commercial galleries and art prizes.

Abstraction is still widely practiced, with painters Sally Gabori, Karl Wiebke and Dale Frank and sculptors John Nicholson and James Rogers being among the most accomplished. Sydney Non Objective space is a stronghold of non-objective art.

Joe Furlonger and Robert Juniper were praised for their landscape paintings. Richard Woldendorp became more widely known for his aerial photographs of estuaries.

Some Archibald Prize winners have been controversial, such as Adam Cullen (too conceptual for some) and Craig Ruddy who won the prize with a drawing, not a painting, and survived a legal challenge. Recently the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and the Sulman Prize have become formidable rivals to the Archibald Prize. Examples of impressive artists winning alternate awards are Dennis Nona in 2007 winning best visual artist at the convergent The Deadlys Award, and Gareth Sansom winning the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery Works on Paper Award.

The tradition in drawing is and always has been strong, evidenced in the work of Maria Kontis, Alexander McKenzie, David Warren, Del Kathryn Barton, Vernon Ah Kee and Shane Gehlert. The Jacaranda Drawing Award and The Kedumba School Drawing award are two of the most respected prizes for drawing.

Ricky Swallow represented Australia in Venice in 2005. Artists making lifelike models has been a growing trend, and Patricia Piccinini's biotech showstopper The Young Family was publicised in 2003. A counterpoint to this is artists making crude models, wallowing in the materials used for their construction. Soft sculpture in Australian art may be traced back to Jutta Feddersen in the 1970s.

In 2006, the newly updated McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art featured an extensive section on Aboriginal Art. Inclusion in the encyclopedia is dependent on the artist being included in a public gallery and or having won an art prize of note. The practice of carpetbagging has damaged the reputation of the Aboriginal art market and recently there has been the introduction of a royalty system for all Australian artists. Previously, the Australian Commercial Galleries Association was formed to promote ethical standards across the art industry. Aboriginal art has also suffered from critics tending to compare it unfavourably to western ideals and standards. The art buying public has generally ignored these critiques. Kathleen Petyarre, Gloria Petyarre, Paddy Bedford (aka Goowoomji) (circa 1922 - 2007), John Mawurndjul, Minnie Pwerle and Dorothy Napangardi Robinson are some of the most eminent Aboriginal artists. Abie Loy Kemarre, Sarita King, Ian Abdulla and Brook Andrew are also quite popular. Central desert artist, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye's work sold for a record A$1.056 million in 2007.

Leading potters and glass artists include Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Merran Esson, Thancoupie, Noel Hart, Klaus Moje, Peter Rushforth and Cedar Prest. The ceramics scene in Australia is generally scholarly, restrained and less parochical than in other categories of Australian contemporary art. Studio glass artists tend to be more individualistic in comparison to potters.

Artists who could be loosely defined as working within the goth mindset are Dean Home, Warren Breninger, Godwin Bradbeer, Bill Henson, Ricky Swallow, Amanda Marburg, David Noonan, Irene Hanenbergh and Brook Andrew.

Digital media artist Linda Dement challenged the entrenched tradition of the bad-boy artist. Tina Fiveash continued to satirise gender stereotypes. Juno Gemes brought a sleek look to contemporary social documentary, rather than the established gritty style.

She's one of the great Australian artists doing amazing things and recognised internationally but somehow overlooked back home.

In the realm of the most ephemeral visual art, major Pyrotechnics displays have steadily become more sophisticated since the Bicentennial celebrations of 1988.

Cultural exchange between Australia and its neighbours has been facilitated by political leaders. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono commented on the importance of this at the 2007 APEC summit. For a number of years, Dadang Christano has made art about his Chinese Indonesian experience, while a younger cohort of Australian and Indonesian artists held the GANG festival in 2006-2007. Painter and printmaker Dean Bowen has won art prizes in Japan.

Pop Surrealists of recent years are Ben Frost, Steve Smith, Emily Hasselhoof and Shane Gehlert. Taring Padi artist Aris Prabawa has become a significant player in the local pop surrealist scene, exhibiting in Australia and Indonesia. In the 1980s, "lowbrow" (derog.) artist Ed Roth's illustration had been used for the cover of The Birthday Party's album Junkyard and Western Australian pop surrealist John Paul was treated as a fine art painter.

Like the larger art markets in the northern hemisphere, fraud is a problem in Australian art. There is no public database of known fraudsters to date, although they are known to come from Australia and China. In addition to the growing number of faked paintings of artists including Minnie Pwerle, Charles Blackman and Robert Dickerson, sometimes galleries and art dealers are impersonated over the internet. The major commercial art magazines have websites with the correct links to their client's websites.

Fiona Hall, Tony Trembath, Guan Wei, Zanny Begg, Fiona Foley, Scott Redford, Asher Bilu.

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Horatio Holzbein

Horatio Holzbein is an ex-financial market specialist turned artist, originally from the South West of England. He has campaigned for greater financial transparency in the art market and has also led campaigns to try to limit the factors which are believed help to create art market investment bubbles.

Born in 1963, he started painting at an early age but switched career to become a full time artist only at the age of 33. He is an advocate and practitioner of what he describes as pre-impressionist painting techniques (rather than Old Master). He won first prize at the Lantilly meeting in France in February 2008, an event which promotes the work of contemporary painters working in traditional techniques.

Holzbein has also published several books which address various aspects of the visual artist's world. These include a practical treatise on old painting techniques, a philosophical manifesto for anachronistic artists (see: Peak civilization anachronism) as well as acerbically humorous short texts.

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Neo-expressionism

Neo-expressionism was a style of modern painting that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. Related to American Lyrical Abstraction it developed in Europe as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic art of the 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in a virtually abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way using vivid colours and banal colour harmonies. Overtly inspired by the so-called German Expressionist painters--Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, George Grosz--and other emotive artist such as James Ensor and Edvard Munch. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called Neue Wilde ('The new wild ones'; 'New Fauves' would better meet the meaning of the term).

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Giacomo Medici (art dealer)

Giacomo Medici is an Italian art dealer convicted in 2004 of dealing in stolen ancient artifacts. His operation was thought to be "one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market".

In 1995, the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (or TCP), the unit of the Italian Carabinieri (military police) specializing in protecting that country's cultural heritage, determined that a company named Editions Services, owned by Medici, had sold three ancient marble sculptures previously stolen from an Italian collection. On September 13, 1995, Italian and Swiss police raided the Editions Services offices in Geneva, Switzerland which were located in Port Franc, "the special commercial zone near the airport where international goods can be stored, bought, and sold, discreetly and tax-free".

Authorities found "hundreds of pieces of ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art — including a set of Etruscan dinner plates valued at $2 million ... voluminous sales records and correspondence between Medici and dealers in London and New York; and finally, binders and boxes containing thousands of photographs ... of ancient objects ... the archive included sequential photographs of single pieces from the moment they came out of the ground ... to their finished, reconstructed appearance at the time they entered the art market and were sold for tens of thousands, and occasionally millions, of dollars. In a few cases there were even subsequent photos of the same objects inside the display cases of well-known museums".

Medici was formally arrested in 1997, and in 2004 was sentenced by a Rome court to ten years in prison and a fine of 10 million Euros, "the largest penalty ever meted out for antiquities crime in Italy".

In 2005, evidence from the Geneva raid was used by the Italian government to indict American antiquities dealer Robert Hecht Jr. and former J. Paul Getty Museum curator of antiquities Marion True for conspiracy to traffic in illegal antiquities. The court hearings for this case continue.

Medici's operation is detailed in Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini's 2006 book The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums.

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Mary Boone

Mary Boone (born October 29, 1951) is the owner and director of the Mary Boone Gallery and was instrumental in the New York art market of the 1980's. Her first two artists, Julian Schnabel and David Salle became internationally known and, by 1982 she had earned a cover story on New York magazine tagged "The New Queen of the Art Scene." The Mary Boone Gallery has represented notable artists including Jean Michel Basquiat, Barbara Kruger, Eric Fischl, and Brice Marden. Originally based in SoHo, Boone currently has two galleries, one in midtown on Fifth Avenue, the other in Chelsea.

Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, Mary Boone studied Art History at Rhode Island School of Design and received her BFA in 1973. Deciding she did not have the skill to make it as a painter, Boone moved to New York City to study art history at Hunter College. After working as a secretary at the influential Bykert Gallery, she opened her own gallery in SoHo in 1977 to a positive reception. Her first two artists, Julian Schnabel and David Salle rapidly became popular in the Neo-expressionism movement. While Schnabel became a celebrity artist, Boone was recognized as a new breed of dealer; young and aggressive. Boone was able to expand her gallery across the street in 1981 and, in 1982, secured emerging artist Eric Fischl. Boone had earned a reputation for hype and media frenzy around herself and her artists when she was featured on the cover of New York magazine that same year. The rising artist Jean-Michel Basquiat joined the Mary Boone Gallery after his well received solo show there in 1984. Established artist Barbara Kruger was the first female artist to join Boone in 1987.

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Art & Auction

Art+Auction is a monthly art magazine published in New York City by Louise Blouin Media. The magazine is published 12 times per year; it includes special features & art news stories, art & collector profiles, reviews & auction reports, calendar of art events, art market trends & insider market information, and art transaction prices.

Art+Auction is the leading international authority on investing in fine art, antiques and other collectible objects and an independent source of knowledge and analysis. Written for the serious collector, the magazine provides the latest news and insider intelligence on the art market, investigates key trends and showcases the artists who drive the industry. The editorial team and contributors identify the issues that affect collectors’ acquisitions and arts-related choices.

Louise Blouin Media is an art magazine publishing company which was founded in 2001 by Louise Blouin MacBain. Other Louise Blouin Media's titles include Modern Painters, Gallery Guide, and Culture+Travel magazines. ARTINFO (www.artinfo.com) is the online destination of Louise Blouin Media, which also owns Somogy, the global art book publisher.

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Olmec

The Olmec were an ancient Pre-Columbian people living in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico, in what are roughly the modern-day states of Veracruz and Tabasco.

The Olmec flourished during Mesoamerica's Formative period, dating roughly from 1400 BCE to about 400 BCE. They were the first Mesoamerican civilization and laid many of the foundations for the civilizations that followed. Among other "firsts", there is evidence that the Olmec practiced ritual bloodletting and played the Mesoamerican ballgame, hallmarks of nearly all subsequent Mesoamerican societies.

The most familiar aspect of the Olmecs is their artwork, particularly the aptly-named colossal heads. In fact, the Olmec civilization was first defined through artifacts purchased on the pre-Columbian art market in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Olmec artworks are considered among ancient America's most striking and beautiful, and among the world's masterpieces.

The "Olmec heartland" is an archaeological term used to describe an area in the Gulf lowlands that is generally considered the birthplace of the Olmec culture. This area is characterized by swampy lowlands punctuated by low hills, ridges, and volcanoes. The Tuxtlas Mountains rise sharply in the north, along the Gulf of Mexico's Bay of Campeche. Here the Olmecs constructed permanent city-temple complexes at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, La Venta, Tres Zapotes, and Laguna de los Cerros. In this region, the first Mesoamerican civilization would emerge and reign from 1400–400 BCE.

What we today call Olmec first appears within the city of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, where distinctive Olmec features appear around 1400 BCE. The rise of civilization here was assisted by the local ecology of well-watered alluvial soil, as well as by the transportation network that the Coatzacoalcos river basin provided. This environment may be compared to that of other ancient centers of civilization: the Nile, Indus, and Yellow River valleys, and Mesopotamia. This highly productive environment encouraged a dense concentrated population which in turn triggered the rise of an elite class. It was this elite class that provided the social basis for the production of the symbolic and sophisticated luxury artifacts that define Olmec culture. Many of these luxury artifacts, such as jade, obsidian and magnetite, came from distant locations and suggest that early Olmec elites had access to an extensive trading network in Mesoamerica. The source of the most valued jade, for example, is found in the Motagua River valley in eastern Guatemala, and Olmec obsidian has been traced to sources in the Guatemala highlands, such as El Chayal and San Martín Jilotepeque, or in Puebla, distances ranging from 200 to 400 km away (120 - 250 miles away) respectively.

The first Olmec center, San Lorenzo, was all but abandoned around 900 BCE at about the same time that La Venta rose to prominence. A wholesale destruction of many San Lorenzo monuments also occurred circa 950 BCE, which may point to an internal uprising or, less likely, an invasion. The latest thinking, however, is that environmental changes may have been responsible for this shift in Olmec centers, with certain important rivers changing course.

In any case, following the decline of San Lorenzo, La Venta became the most prominent Olmec center, lasting from 900 BCE until its abandonment around 400 BCE. La Venta sustained the Olmec cultural traditions, but with spectacular displays of power and wealth. The Great Pyramid was the largest Mesoamerican structure of its time. Even today, after 2500 years of erosion, it rises 34 meters above the naturally flat landscape. Buried deep within La Venta, lay opulent, labor-intensive "Offerings": 1000 tons of smooth serpentine blocks, large mosaic pavements, and at least 48 separate deposits of polished jade celts, pottery, figurines, and hematite mirrors.

It is not known with any clarity what caused the eventual extinction of the Olmec culture. It is known that between 400 and 350 BCE, population in the eastern half of the Olmec heartland dropped precipitously, and the area would remain sparsely inhabited until the 19th century. This depopulation was likely the result of "very serious environmental changes that rendered the region unsuited for large groups of farmers", in particular changes to the riverine environment that the Olmec depended upon for agriculture, for hunting and gathering, and for transportation. Archaeologists propose that these changes were triggered by tectonic upheavals or subsidence, or the silting up of rivers due to agricultural practices.

Whatever the cause, within a few hundred years of the abandonment of the last Olmec cities, successor cultures had become firmly established. The Tres Zapotes site, on the western edge of the Olmec heartland, continued to be occupied well past 400 BCE, but without the hallmarks of the Olmec culture. This post-Olmec culture, often labeled Epi-Olmec, has features similar to those found at Izapa, some 330 miles (550 km) to the southeast.

The Olmec culture was first defined as an art style, and this continues to be the hallmark of the culture. Wrought in a large number of mediums – jade, clay, basalt, and greenstone among others – much Olmec art, such as the Wrestler, is surprisingly naturalistic. Other art, however, reveals fantastic anthropomorphic creatures, often highly stylized, using an iconography reflective of a religious meaning. Common motifs include downturned mouths and a cleft head, both of which are seen in representations of were-jaguars.

In addition to human and human-like subjects, Olmec artisans were adept at animal portrayals, for example, the fish vessel to the right or the bird vessel in the gallery below.

The most recognized aspect of the Olmec civilization are the enormous helmeted heads. As no known pre-Columbian text explains them, these impressive monuments have been the subject of much speculation. Once theorized to be ballplayers, it is now generally accepted that these heads are portraits of rulers, perhaps dressed as ballplayers. Infused with individuality, no two heads are alike and the helmet-like headdresses are adorned with distinctive elements, suggesting to some personal or group symbols.

There have been 17 colossal heads unearthed to date.

The heads range in size from the Rancho La Cobata head, at 3.4 m high, to the pair at Tres Zapotes, at 1.47 m. It has been calculated that the largest heads weigh between 25 and 55 short tons (50 t)..

The heads were carved from single blocks or boulders of volcanic basalt, found in the Tuxtlas Mountains. The Tres Zapotes heads, for example, were sculpted from basalt found at the summit of Cerro el Vigía, at the western end of the Tuxtlas. The San Lorenzo and La Venta heads, on the other hand, were likely carved from the basalt of Cerro Cintepec, on the southeastern side, perhaps at the nearby Llano del Jicaro workshop, and dragged or floated to their final destination dozens of miles away. It has been estimated that moving a colossal head required the efforts of 1,500 people for three to four months.

Some of the heads, and many other monuments, have been variously mutilated, buried and disinterred, reset in new locations and/or reburied. It is known that some monuments, and at least two heads, were recycled or recarved, but it is not known whether this was simply due to the scarcity of stone or whether these actions had ritual or other connotations. It is also suspected that some mutilation had significance beyond mere destruction, but some scholars still do not rule out internal conflicts or, less likely, invasion as a factor.

The flat-faced, thick-lipped characteristics of the heads have caused some debate due to their apparent resemblance to African facial characteristics. Based on this comparison, some have insisted that the Olmecs were Africans who had emigrated to the New World. However, claims of pre-Columbian contacts with Africa are rejected by the vast majority of archeologists and other Mesoamerican scholars. Explanations for the facial features of the colossal heads include the possibility that the heads were carved in this manner due to the shallow space allowed on the basalt boulders. Others note that in addition to the broad noses and thick lips, the heads have the Asian eye-fold, and that all these characteristics can still be found in modern Mesoamerican Indians. To support this, in the 1940s artist/art historian Miguel Covarrubias published a series of photos of Olmec artworks and of the faces of modern Mexican Indians with very similar facial characteristics.. In addition, the African origin hypothesis assumes that Olmec carving was intended to be realistic, an asssumption that is hard to justify given the full corpus of representation in Olmec carving.

Other sites showing probable Olmec influence include Takalik Abaj and La Democracia in Guatemala and Zazacatla in Morelos. The Juxtlahuaca and Oxtotitlan cave paintings feature Olmec designs and motifs.

Many theories have been advanced to account for the occurrence of Olmec influence far outside the heartland, including long-range trade by Olmec merchants, Olmec colonization of other regions, Olmec artisans travelling to other cities, conscious imitation of Olmec artistical styles by developing towns – some even suggest the prospect of Olmec military domination or that the Olmec iconography was actually developed outside the heartland.

The generally accepted, but by no means unanimous, interpretation is that the Olmec-style artifacts, in all sizes, became associated with elite status and were adopted by non-Olmec Formative Period chieftains in an effort to bolster their status.

In addition to their influence with contemporaneous Mesoamerican cultures, as the first civilization in Mesoamerica, the Olmecs are credited, or speculatively credited, with many "firsts", including the bloodletting and perhaps human sacrifice, writing and epigraphy, and the invention of zero and the Mesoamerican calendar, and the Mesoamerican ballgame, as well as perhaps the compass. Some researchers, including artist and art historian Miguel Covarrubias, even postulate that the Olmecs formulated the forerunners of many of the later Mesoamerican deities.

There is a strong case that the Olmecs practiced bloodletting. Numerous natural and ceramic stingray spikes and maguey thorns have been found in the Olmec archaeological record.

The argument that the Olmecs instituted human sacrifice is significantly more speculative. No Olmec or Olmec-influenced sacrificial artifacts have yet been discovered and there is no Olmec or Olmec-influenced artwork that unambiguously shows sacrificial victims (similar, for example, to the danzante figures of Monte Albán) or scenes of human sacrifice (such as can be seen in the famous ballcourt mural from El Tajin).

However, at the El Manatí site, disarticulated skulls and femurs as well as complete skeletons of newborn or unborn children have been discovered amidst the other offerings, leading to speculation concerning infant sacrifice. It is not yet known, though, how the infants met their deaths. Some authors have also associated infant sacrifice with Olmec ritual art showing limp were-jaguar babies, most famously in La Venta's Altar 5 (to the left) or Las Limas figure. Any definitive answer will need to await further findings.

The Olmec may have been the first civilization in the Western Hemisphere to develop a writing system. Symbols found in 2002 and 2006 date to 650 BCE and 900 BCE respectively, preceding the oldest Zapotec writing dated to about 500 BCE.

The 2002 find at the San Andrés site shows a bird, speech scrolls, and glyphs that are similar to the later Mayan hieroglyphs.

Known as the Cascajal Block, the 2006 find from a site near San Lorenzo, shows a set of 62 symbols, 28 of which are unique, carved on a serpentine block. A large number of prominent archaeologists have hailed this find as the "earliest pre-Columbian writing". Others are skeptical because of the stone's singularity, the fact that it had been removed from any archaeological context, and because it bears no apparent resemblance to any other Mesoamerican writing system.

There are also well-documented later hieroglyphs known as "Epi-Olmec," and while there are some who believe that Epi-Olmec may represent a transitional script between an earlier Olmec writing system and Maya writing, the matter remains unsettled.

The Long Count calendar used by many subsequent Mesoamerican civilizations, as well as the concept of zero, may have been devised by the Olmecs. Because the six artifacts with the earliest Long Count calendar dates were all discovered outside the immediate Maya homeland, it is likely that this calendar predated the Maya and was possibly the invention of the Olmecs. Indeed, three of these six artifacts were found within the Olmec heartland. But an argument against an Olmec origin is the fact that the Olmec civilization had ended by the 4th century BCE, several centuries before the earliest known Long Count date artifact.

The Long Count calendar required the use of zero as a place-holder within its vigesimal (base-20) positional numeral system. A shell glyph — — was used as a zero symbol for these Long Count dates, the second oldest of which, on Stela C at Tres Zapotes, has a date of 32 BCE. This is one of the earliest uses of the zero concept in history.

The Olmec, whose name means "rubber people" in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, are strong candidates for originating the Mesoamerican ballgame so prevalent among later cultures of the region and used for recreational and religious purposes. A dozen rubber balls dating to 1600 BCE or earlier have been found in El Manatí, an Olmec sacrificial bog 10 kilometres east of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan. These balls predate the earliest ballcourt yet discovered at Paso de la Amada, circa 1400 BCE, although there is no certainty that they were used in the ballgame.

While the actual ethno-linguistic affiliation of the Olmec remain unknown, various hypotheses have been put forward. For example, in 1968 Michael D. Coe speculated that the Olmec were Mayan.

In 1976 linguists Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman published a paper in which they argued a core number of loanwords had apparently spread from a Mixe-Zoquean language into many other Mesoamerican languages. Campbell and Kaufman proposed that the presence of these core loanwords indicated that the Olmec—generally regarded as the first "highly civilized" Mesoamerican society—spoke a language ancestral to Mixe-Zoquean. The spread of this vocabulary particular to their culture accompanied the diffusion of other Olmec cultural and artistic traits that appears in the archaeological record of other Mesoamerican societies.

Mixe-Zoque specialist Søren Wichmann first critiqued this theory on the basis that most of the Mixe-Zoquean loans seemed to originate from the Zoquean branch of the family only. This implied the loanword transmission occurred in the period after the two branches of the language family split, placing the time of the borrowings outside of the Olmec period. However new evidence has pushed back the proposed date for the split of Mixean and Zoquean languages to a period within the Olmec era. Based on this dating, the architectural and archaeological patterns and the particulars of the vocabulary loaned to other Mesoamerican languages from Mixe-Zoquean, Wichmann now suggests that the Olmecs of San Lorenzo spoke proto-Mixe and the Olmecs of La Venta spoke proto-Zoque.

At least the fact that the Mixe-Zoquean languages still are, and are historically known to have been, spoken in an area corresponding roughly to the Olmec heartland, leads most scholars to assume that the Olmec spoke one or more Mixe-Zoquean languages.

Olmec religious activities were performed by a combination of rulers, full-time priests, and shamans. The rulers seem to have been the most important religious figures, with their links to the Olmec deities or supernaturals providing legitimacy for their rule. There is also considerable evidence for shamans in the Olmec archaeological record, particularly in the so-called "transformation figures".

Olmec mythology has left no documents comparable to the Popul Vuh from Maya mythology, and therefore any exposition of Olmec mythology must rely on interpretations of surviving monumental and portable art (such as the Las Limas figure at right), and comparisons with other Mesoamerican mythologies. Olmec art shows that such deities as the Feathered Serpent and a rain supernatural were already in the Mesoamerican pantheon in Olmec times.

Little is directly known about the societal or political structure of Olmec society. Although it is assumed by most researchers that the colossal heads and several other sculptures represent rulers, nothing has been found like the Maya stelae (see drawing) which name specific rulers and provide the dates of their rule.

Instead, archaeologists relied on the data that they had, such as large- and small-scale site surveys. These provided evidence of considerable centralization within the Olmec region, first at San Lorenzo and then at La Venta – no other Olmec sites come close to these in terms of area or in the quantity and quality of architecture and sculpture.

This evidence of geographic and demographic centralization leads archaeologists to propose that Olmec society itself was hierarchial, concentrated first at San Lorenzo and then at La Venta, with an elite that was able to use their control over materials such as water and monumental stone to exert command and legitimize their regime.

Nonetheless, Olmec society is thought to lack many of the institutions of later civilizations, such as a standing army or priestly caste. And there is no evidence that San Lorenzo or La Venta controlled, even during their heyday, all of the Olmec heartland. There is some doubt, for example, that La Venta controlled even Arroyo Sonso, only some 35 km away. Studies of the Tuxtla Mountain settlements, some 60 km away, indicate that this area was composed of more or less egalitarian communities outside the control of lowland centers.

Despite their size, San Lorenzo and La Venta were largely ceremonial centers, and the majority of the Olmec lived in villages similar to present-day villages and hamlets in Tabasco and Veracruz.

These villages were located on higher ground and consisted of several scattered houses. A modest temple may have been associated with the larger villages. The individual dwellings would consist of a house, an associated lean-to, and one or more storage pits (similar in function to a root cellar). A nearby garden was used for medicinal and cooking herbs and for smaller crops such as the domesticated sunflower. Fruit trees, such as avocado or cacao, were likely available nearby.

Although the river banks were used to plant crops between flooding periods, the Olmecs also likely practiced swidden (or slash-and-burn) agriculture to clear the forests and shrubs, and to provide new fields once the old fields were exhausted. Fields were located outside the village, and were used for maize, beans, squash, manioc, sweet potato, as well as cotton. Based on archaeological studies of two villages in the Tuxtlas Mountains, it is known that maize cultivation became increasingly important to the Olmec over time, although the diet remained fairly diverse.

The fruits and vegetables were supplemented with fish, turtle, snake, and mollusks from the nearby rivers, and crabs and shellfish in the coastal areas. Birds were available as food sources, as were game including peccary, oppossum, raccoon, rabbit, and in particular deer. Despite the wide range of hunting and fishing available, midden surveys in San Lorenzo have found that the domesticated dog was the single most plentiful source of animal protein.

Olmec culture was unknown to historians until the mid-19th century. In 1869 the Mexican antiquarian traveller José Melgar y Serrano published a description of the first Olmec monument to have been found in situ. This monument—the colossal head now labelled Tres Zapotes Monument A—had been discovered in the late 1850s by a farm worker clearing forested land on a hacienda in Veracruz. Hearing about the curious find while travelling through the region, Melgar y Serrano first visited the site in 1862 to see for himself and complete partially exposed sculpture's excavation. His description of the object, published several years later after further visits to the site, represents the earliest documented report of an artifact of what is now known as the Olmec culture.

In the latter half of the 19th century, Olmec artifacts such as the Kunz Axe (right) came to light and were subsequently recognized as belonging to a unique artistic tradition.

Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge made the first detailed descriptions of La Venta and San Martin Pajapan Monument 1 during their 1925 expedition. However, at this time most archaeologists assumed the Olmec were contemporaneous with the Maya – even Blom and La Farge were, in their own words, "inclined to ascribe them to the Maya culture"..

Matthew Stirling of the Smithsonian Institution conducted the first detailed scientific excavations of Olmec sites in the 1930s and 1940s. Stirling, along with art historian Miguel Covarrubias, became convinced that the Olmec predated most other known Mesoamerican civilizations.

In counterpoint to Stirling, Covarrubias, and Alfonso Caso, however, Mayanists Eric Thompson and Sylvanus Morley argued for Classic-era dates for the Olmec artifacts. The question of Olmec chronology came to a head at a 1942 Tuxtla Gutierrez conference, where Alfonso Caso declared that the Olmecs were the "mother culture" ("cultura madre") of Mesoamerica.

Shortly after the conference, radiocarbon dating proved the antiquity of the Olmec civilization, although the "mother culture" question generates much debate even 60 years later.

The name "Olmec" means "rubber people" in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec, and was the Aztec name for the people who lived in the Gulf Lowlands in the 15th and 16th centuries, some 2000 years after the Olmec culture died out. The term "rubber people" refers to the ancient practice, spanning from ancient Olmecs to Aztecs, of extracting latex from Castilla elastica, a rubber tree in the area. The juice of a local vine, Ipomoea alba, was then mixed with this latex to create rubber as early as 1600 BCE.

Early modern explorers and archaeologists, however, mistakenly applied the name "Olmec" to the rediscovered ruins and artifacts in the heartland decades before it was understood that these were not created by people the Aztecs knew as the "Olmec", but rather a culture that was 2000 years older. Despite the mistaken identity, the name has stuck.

It is not known what name the ancient Olmec used for themselves; some later Mesoamerican accounts seem to refer to the ancient Olmec as "Tamoanchan". A contemporary term sometimes used to describe the Olmec culture is tenocelome, meaning "mouth of the jaguar".

In part because the Olmecs developed the first Mesoamerican civilization and in part because little is known of the Olmecs (relative, for example, to the Maya or Aztec), a number of Olmec alternative origin speculations have been put forth. Although several of these speculations, particularly the theory that the Olmecs were of African origin popularized by Ivan van Sertima's book They Came Before Columbus, have become well-known within popular culture, they are not considered credible by the vast majority of Mesoamerican researchers.

An Olmec mask.

Three celts, Olmec ritual objects.

An Olmec jade mask.

An Olmec-style painting from the Juxtlahuaca cave.

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