The Secret Museum

by Molly Oldfield

  The Aztecs commissioned its creation. When they used it in ceremonies to venerate their ancestors, it must have been spectacular. Each of the 28 holes around the outside would have contained an eagle feather. Imagine it, held high, surrounded by people drumming, singing and celebrating.

  The shield wasn’t made by the Aztecs but by Mixtec craftsmen, with turquoise pieces sourced from far and wide, perhaps in exchange for parrot and macaw feathers. It was made to order. The Aztecs were in charge at the time, a full century before the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century. They demanded tribute from their subjects, including the highly skilled Mixtec people (who also made the lienzo stored in the Royal Ontario Museum).

  We don’t know what happened to it next. It disappeared for centuries, until, some time between 1906 and 1908 when a respected German botanist named Carl Albert Purpus (1851–1941) was out looking for plants near Acatlan, in Puebla, Mexico, and wandered into a cave. There he unwittingly found a treasure trove of Mixtec turquoise creations – this shield, several less striking ones and some ritual masks.

  The shield (and other artefacts) came to the attention of George Gustav Heye, founder of the National Museum of the American Indian’s predecessor, the private Heye Foundation Museum in New York City, in 1920. George Heye sent Marshall H. Saville, a well-known scholar and a member of the museum staff, to Mexico to meet Purpus, evaluate his collection and arrange for its purchase and shipment to New York.

  The shield has been in storage since Heye’s collection became the National Museum of the American Indian. It can’t be hung permanently on exhibition because the turquoise pieces have a tendency to fall off. The glue holding them in place is centuries old. The sound of 400-year-old turquoise tinkling as it hits the museum floor is not what any museum curator wants to hear.

  I visited the shield on the same day I saw the spacesuits (the two museum storage facilities are a short drive away from one another). I met Pat Neitfield, the collections manager of the National Museum of the American Indian, and she took me to see it.

  On our way to find the shield we walked up through three storeys of artefacts. There were shelves holding kayaks, canoes and reed boats, the way rowing boats are stored in a boatshed. Nearby were headdresses, clothing and several totem poles made by the Haida, Tlingit and Kwakiutl peoples of British Columbia and south-eastern Alaska.

  We stopped to look closely at a Seneca Iroquois log cabin built on the Tonawanda reservation in New York state. Pat isn’t sure it will ever be reassembled, but it’s being stored as lumber because it is the only one that still exists.

  We also saw a Tli’cho (Dogrib) tipi – one of only two known to be in existence – made from 42 caribou and thousands of other things packed away in boxes.

  Pat unlocked the high-security vault containing the Mixtec turquoise sun shield. There were lots of beeps as alarms were turned off. We walked inside and carefully lifted the shield down from its shelf, on to a table. It is stunning.

  Thousands of tiny pieces of turquoise have been carefully shaped and polished, then glued, using resin or gum, on to a round wooden base, to create an intricate mosaic made from ripples of greens and blues.

  A few little pieces of turquoise that have fallen off are stored in a glass vial nearby.

  In the mosaic, I could make out the sky, the sun, the sun’s rays and a person – a warrior or a god (no one is sure which) – falling from the sun, towards a hill, with two warriors flanking the falling being on either side. The hill stands for the ancient town of Culhuacán, the mythical homeland of the Aztec people.

  There is a lot of debate about what is going on in the scene depicted. It seems to be an Aztec creation myth, and it has been suggested that the falling figure is a female, one of the warrior goddesses who descend with the sun from noon to sunset. The two figures beside her are males, holding staffs and blowing on conchshell trumpets.

  For the Aztecs, the sun was the symbol of their ruler and the state, and it is represented in turquoise, a stone that was as precious in Mexico as gold was in Europe. They called it teoxihuitl – turquoise of the gods. The Aztec ruler Moctezuma II wore a turquoise nose plug, a loincloth made with turquoise beads and a turquoise diadem when sacrificing humans to the Aztec gods.

  There are some turquoise mosaics in the British Museum, including a shield a little like this one but with shell and beads, not just glittering turquoise. The British Museum’s shield is on display. It shows a solar disc, created from red shell, with four rays beaming out, dividing the world into quarters. Inside each quarter is a sky bearer with its arms in the air; these are the gods who support the sky. There is also a tree made from mosaic with a snake wrapped around it. The tree represents a point of union between the underworld, the Earth and the celestial realms.

  The British Museum think the Aztecs gave their shield to Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) as tribute when he arrived in the New World and took control of their empire. The Aztecs were accustomed to demanding tribute from their dominions so, when the strange Spaniards arrived, they imagined that this was what they would want as well and packed up boats full of turquoise and gold and silver treasures to send back to Europe. The Spanish accounts say that Moctezuma believed Cortés was an incarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, as their legends told them that the god would one day return as a fair-skinned man. Of course, this might just be Spanish propaganda but, either way, when presented with booty galore, the Spanish could hardly believe their luck. They shipped the treasure back to Europe to show what they had found.

  People back home were impressed. This was their first taste of the New World. It must have been mind blowing for them to see the work of a completely unfamiliar civilization, from far across the sea.

  The artist Albrecht Dürer wrote in his diary:

  All the days of my life I have seen nothing that has so rejoiced my heart as these things. For I saw among them strange and exquisitely worked objects and marvelled at the subtle genius of the men in distant lands.

  As he wrote these words, the mighty empire was being smashed to pieces by the invading Spanish.

  The Mixtec who created the sun shield would not have had an inkling of all the upheaval that was about to happen in Mexico. In the end, they joined with the Spanish, preferring their rule to that of the Aztecs, and the Aztec empire was reduced to ruins. Many of the local Mixtec people were also wiped out by European diseases, like smallpox. It’s amazing that this shield has survived in such incredible condition, hidden in a cave, during all the centuries of change.

  Today, the Museum of the American Indian concentrates on collecting native contemporary art, but the Mixtec turquoise shield will always be one of its most precious treasures.

  [Mixtec turquoise shield]

  Mixtec craftsmen made this shield using 14,000 turquoise pieces sourced from far and wide. It’s not on display because the glue in the shield is centuries old, and the sound of turquoise tinkling as it hits the museum floor is the last thing a museum curator wants to hear.

  [Moctezuma II (c.1466–1520)]

  Ruler of the Aztecs.

  [Hernán Cortés with Montezuma II]

  The Aztecs were accustomed to demanding tribute from their dominions so, when the strange Spaniards arrived, they imagined that this was what they would want as well and gave them all kinds of treasures to send back to Europe.

  THERE IS A CELESTIAL WORK of art inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York that is always there, hanging on the wall of the gallery just at the beginning of the spiral that runs up through the museum. Although it is a permanent feature of the collection, very few people know it is there, and even fewer people have been lucky enough to see it.

  Alicia is a large, painted tile mural created by the Spanish surrealist artist Joan Miró with the help of his friend the ceramicist Josep Lloréns Artigas and his son. It is made out of 190 ceramic tiles, and is fairly large: taller than you, and far wider – it is over 2.5 metres high and nearly 6 metres wide.

  So, if it is
so big, and adorns the wall at the entrance to the museum, how is it possible that so few people know of its existence? Well, it lives hidden behind a white wall, where the curators of the museum keep an eye on it through a secret window, to make sure that it is okay.

  Why have a beautiful artwork if it can rarely be seen? It wasn’t always hidden: when the piece was first created, it was seen all the time.

  Its life began with Harry F. Guggenheim, then the president of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. (Solomon was the uncle of both Peggy Guggenheim and Harry F. Guggenheim).

  In 1963, Harry F. Guggenheim decided to commission a brilliant memorial to his wife, Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, who had died that year at the age of 56. He asked the museum’s director, Thomas M. Messer, to ask Miró whether he would create something that would reflect Alicia’s spirit.

  The museum owned a lot of the artist’s work, including The Tilled Field (1923–24). Miró was excited by the idea, and began to discuss ideas with Artigas. The two artists were lifelong friends and collaborators. They had met in 1912 when Miró was an art student in Barcelona and began working together in 1944. At first Miró painted on Artigas’s vases, then Miró began to make his own sculptures; Artigas would then translate Miró’s sculptures into clay.

  Thomas M. Messer, Miró and Miro’s dealer, Mr Pierre Matisse, exchanged letters as the Alicia project progressed. Today, these letters are in the archive of the museum. Reading them gave me a fascinating insight into the creation of the work. Miró was excited about creating the piece, and in 1964 he visited New York with his wife, Pilar, to see the space the mural would fill. The couple had supper with Harry Guggenheim. Then there was a lull. It seems that 1964 was a bad year for Miró, but in May 1965 he wrote expressing his wish that the year to come would ‘bring us a big smile’. It seems that, as he had hoped, things picked up.

  In the summer of 1966, Miró wrote to Messer, ‘I am delighted to tell you that the great mural has already been started. I am very hopeful about the results of this first stage. Let’s hope that our great friend Fire will also bring us his richness and his beauty for the next steps.’ He left it to the elements to add the finishing touches to his surrealist work, and may have enjoyed the element of surprise.

  Once it was finished, he and Artigas signed the mural on the bottom right. Artigas’s son travelled to New York with the tiles and hung them in the gallery, where they have been ever since. The mural delighted everyone. Messer immediately sent a telegram to Miró, who was in Mallorca, saying, ‘Overwhelmed by the beauty of your mural stop hope very much that you may be present at its unvailing [sic] May 18th.’

  A party was thrown on 18 May 1967 to celebrate the mural, which was officially unveiled at 9.30 p.m. Miró was there. Harry F. Guggenheim paid tribute to his wife and said how instrumental she had been in shaping the growth of the museum when it first opened. Thomas Messer observed, ‘Besides enriching the collection, the mural, through its permanent place on the first wall encountered in ascending the museum’s spiral ramp, will ever remain a dramatic visual accent.’ A former colleague of Alicia’s wrote an article in the magazine Newsday that Miró’s colours and shapes brought ‘a light-hearted, gay sort of innocence to his highly sophisticated work. In short, I can’t think of any artist better suited to do a mural dedicated to “Miss P”.’

  After the ceremony, Messer wrote to Miró, ‘to confirm once again how proud and happy we are to count the Alicia mural among the museum’s treasures.’ To Artigas, he wrote how ‘moving’ and ‘satisfactory’ the unveiling occasion had been and how well the mural worked in the museum: ‘The somber monumental surface glows from the white walls of the building, creating a strong and completely resolved unit of its own.’

  For many years, the mural was the first thing visitors to the museum would see. Anyone who knew that Alicia was a tribute to Alicia Patterson Guggenheim may have wondered why Miró had woven the name Alice into his abstract creation of shapes and colours, rather than Alicia. Miró was quite mysterious about this.

  I read letters that discussed the decision to include Alicia’s name in the mural, as Guggenheim had suggested. Messer had nervously asked, by letter, ‘whether the “A” of Alicia’s name might be allowed to enter your thoughts to perhaps find its way into the surface of the world in ever so discreet, indirect and elliptical a manner’. To his relief, Miró replied right away, ‘I myself feel that inscribing the name Alice on this fresco offers me new possibilities and new means of expression … we will soon begin the work.’

  Messer did later suggest to Miró in a letter that he had misspelt Alicia’s name: ‘Before it is too late, could you allow me to bring again to your attention that the desired name is Alicia. I am sure that this will make little difference to your compositional and formal explorations, and of course matters a great deal to us.’ Miró didn’t reply, but clearly wasn’t up for changing anything. When Messer once asked him about it in person, ‘He merely returned a puckish smile accompanied by an indefinable grunt.’ In the end, it did not matter: everyone loved the mural.

  In 1969, it was covered over with a temporary wall so that it would not disturb the aesthetics of an exhibition. Because the red, black, blue and grey mural with its spirited motifs is such an impressive, timeless piece, and is in such a prominent place, it is difficult to exhibit it without it taking over the space. The curators at the museum prefer to have a blank canvas of white wall for their exhibitions and usually hang the first artwork, or introductory text of each exhibition, on the temporary wall that covers the precious mural.

  Occasionally, though, it does come out of hiding. The last time was in 2003, for the ‘From Picasso to Pollock’ exhibition. It fitted the theme of the exhibition, so the wall in front of it was knocked down and it was displayed in all its playful, colourful glory for several months. That was the first time it had been seen in over a decade, and it has not appeared since.

  If you go to an exhibition at this fabulous museum, imagine it there, behind the first piece of art, or the first piece of text, twinkling behind the wall as you ascend the Guggenheim spiral. I love the shapes, the colours, the stars and inventiveness of the piece. I think that, even if you can’t always see it, it’s nice to know it’s there, secretly existing behind a wall, a monument to the love her husband felt for Alicia, rendered in colour and shaped by two friends who met long ago in Barcelona.

  [The Guggenheims]

  When Alicia Patterson Guggenheim died at the age of 56, her husband, Harry F. Guggenheim commissioned a brilliant memorial to his wife.

  [Joan Miró i Ferrà (1893–1983)]

  Miró agreed to create something magical that would reflect Alicia Guggenheim’s spirit.

  I WAS AT A DINNER party in Boston, where I met an 82-year-old man named Hans. I started chatting to Hans right away and told him I was writing a book about treasures you’ll never be able to see. With a twinkle in his eye, he said, ‘How wonderful. I have just the friend for you. He’ll know of some hidden treasures. I’ll introduce you by letter. He and I travelled together in Mali when we were 19; his name is David Attenborough.’ Hans is my kind of man.

  I think, had he lived a century ago, Hans and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) would have been good friends. She was a zestful, curious, travelling sort just like him and used Boston as a base from which to explore the world, collecting artefacts and friends, just as he does. Like Isabella, Hans’s home is a cabinet of curious things; he has a well from Mali in his living room, a photograph of himself with the Dalai Lama, and shelves full of artefacts from all over Africa. Recently, he donated three Dogon sculptures to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

  Isabella Stewart Gardner began adventuring in earnest when her only child died, aged two. She and her husband set off for Europe to revive her saddened heart. This was the beginning of a lifetime of travelling, writing, collecting and entertaining.

  Her favourite place in the world was Venice. She and her husband, Jack, would stay at the Palazzo Barbaro on t
he Grand Canal, a gathering spot for American and English expats. The couple spent their days buying art and antiques, and their evenings at the opera, or dining with artists and writers.

  Back in Boston, she built a replica Venetian palazzo to house her collection, in an unpopular area surrounded by a marsh. No one could believe she had moved there. ‘What will you do for company?’ they asked. ‘Oh! People will come to me!’ she replied. Or so I was told at dinner.

  She was right. The museum in the reclaimed marsh is now in a popular part of Boston, down the road from the Museum of Fine Arts and Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, and people flock to wander around it and see the treasures she picked up on her travels.

  It is the world’s only private art collection in which the building, collection and installations are the creation of one individual, and a woman at that. It houses the first paintings by Botticelli and Piero della Francesca to come to America and her Titian Europa is considered one of the most important paintings in any American museum. Nothing has a label beside it: Isabella Stewart Gardner insisted this is how she wanted her collection to be displayed. Nothing has been moved; even empty frames remain on the walls after paintings valued at $500 million were stolen. Entry is free to anyone called Isabella, or who visits on their birthday.

  The archives of the museum are stuffed with over 7,000 letters thanking Isabella for dinners and concerts thrown for her friends, including one from the writer Henry James and another from the artist John Singer Sargent. ‘Has the music room dissolved, this morning, in the sunshine? I felt last night as though I were in a Hans Anderson Fairy Tale, ready to go on a flying carpet at any moment,’ wrote the American novelist T. R. Sullivan on 10 January 1902. Alongside the letters are 28 travel journals she wrote and shelves packed with rare books.