Reception and Collection of Chupicuaro Artifacts

Chupícuaro pottery first began appearing for sale by locals in the mid-1920s (Frierman ix). It was discovered by the area’s locals through the action of road cuts, plows, and looting (Weaver 6). The ceramics were considered “primitive art”, a style popularized from the Age of Discovery through the early and mid-20^th century (“Primitivism”). Pablo Picasso and other well-known European artists were inspired to create “primitive” artwork by the works of “savage” and “uncivilized” nations recently colonized by Europe (“Primitivism”), making art collectors eager to buy the original artifacts on which these famous artists’ styles were based. The fascination with “primitive art” in connection with an earlier interest in “nineteenth and twentieth century French masters” inspired the purchase by Natalie Wood of Mildred and Edgar Dorsey Taylor’s extensive Chupícuaro collection, originally “assembled in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s (Frierman x)[1], undoubtedly along with many other unpublished private collections. Its popularity among collectors has made the site victim to severe plundering (Bichet 31).

The academic world, meanwhile, took little interest in Chupícuaro. Faugère and Darras complain of the “handicaps” to the scholarship of West Mexico and Chupícuaro (“Chupícuaro”, par. 4). These regions are considered “marginal entities without monumental architecture” and not properly Mesoamerican (par. 4). They therefore suffer from a lack of large, continuous archaeological study (par. 4).