Mexican Art I. [antikvár]

Every motionless face, every stone turned face is an enigma. We come and go, it remains for ever. In the vortex of time, it watclies us from far away and yet from near. A horizon separates us: the passage of death. The stones of Mexico have this unfaltering gaze, even when we do not know what endures in them: what consciousness does that look imply? Here, our sculptors have tried to arrest the permanence of life—life beyond death ; there, in Mexico, their stones are a witness to the permanence of death—death beyond life. The approach of their sculptors seems the reverse of ours, and their idiom, to this extent, escapes our comprehension. How can a westerner, who dreams of immortalising life, effectively understand a vision where death alone is vested with perpetuity and where, by holding life in equilibrium, death alone makes possible the movement of life? Mexican heads are at the same time fascinating and horrible for the European because he no