BARCELONA.- The works of art on view invite the visitor to make a journey through Pre-Hispanic civilizations from Meso-America to the Amazon, which represents the original cultures from Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and the Amazon.

This new exhibition organized by the Barbier-Mueller Museum, which will remain open to the public until October 2009, gathers, in the words of museum director, Anna Casas, pieces that have “great international recognition”, such as the ceramic sculpture known as "La Chupícuaro".

"The masterpiece as an aesthetic dialogue element” is the vertebrate axis of this new exhibition that, in the intimate atmosphere of the museum, allows the visitor to get close to the Pre-Columbian cultures in a new context.

The selection of 88 pieces on view represent the following Meso-American cultures: Aztec, Olmec, Maya, Colima and Nayarit, the Centro-American Gran Nicoya, Guanacaste, Diquis and Camay, the Inca and Huari )Andean) civilizations and the from the Amazon works of art from the Island of Marajó are included in the show.

Collector Jean-Paul Barbier-Mueller was absent because of heath reasons but he has explained through a press release that his family, during the eleven years that the museum has been open, has undertaken “an active policy of acquisitions which has allowed to double the number of pieces in the collection”.

This initiative has allowed, added Barbieri, to strengthen some groups, such as the Olmec, which being the oldest and of greater influence on the latter cultures, is known as the “mother” of Meso-America.

Precisely, the twenty never before seen pieces on view in Barcelona there are several Olmec that stand out.

Josef Mueller was born in 1887 into a middle-class family from Solothurn, in German-speaking Switzerland. Nothing predestined his becoming one of the greatest art collectors of all time. At the age of ten, he lost both his father and his mother, and was raised by a governess. However, he had the chance to frequently visit the home of one of his schoolmates, whose parents were lovers of modern art and who, as early as 1906, owned a beautiful painting from Picasso’s pink period: the portrait of a woman, seen in profile, which Mueller was later to acquire (fig. 2). At 20 years of age, he spent a whole year’s income on one painting, and swiftly made his way to Paris where he met the famous art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. Acting on the advice of the latter, he acquired a highly renowned painting by Cézanne, the portrait of the Jardinier Vallier, painted in 1905, at the very end of the future father of modern painting’s life.

By privation and through overcoming manifold difficulties, Josef Mueller put together a collection with extraordinary rapidity that, as early as 1918, included seven works by Cézanne (fig. 3), five by Matisse, and five by Renoir, without counting the Picassos, the Braques and as many other paintings by prestigious masters.

The thirst for novelty and the desire (formulated by Rimbaud) to be "absolutely modern" drove artists to explore the unknown. In the wake of the Impressionists’ revolutionary innovations, the Fauvists (Vlaminck (fig. 5), Derain (fig. 4), Matisse) were the first to realise that African fetishes, whose seeming crudeness had previously been cause for derision, could find a place among works of art that spring from man’s natural creative impulse and his endless quest for formal perfection.

In the 1920s, a handful of enthusiastic artists and collectors were delighted to discover both the ingenuity and the honesty of the designs of tribal artists who, oblivious to the notion of art for art’s sake, produced works not of personal expression, nor to please a public of connoisseurs, but as an essential part of their magical and religious beliefs, which sought to maintain a balance between the contradictory forces that operate in the world.

The rooms dedicated to Pre-Colombian Art in the Barbier-Mueller Museum invite the viewer to contemplate the works as key expressions of the cultures they represent. The collection covers most of the styles that exist in the pre-Hispanic cultures of Meso-America, Central America, Andean America, and the Amazon region. The sculptures, ceramics, fabrics and ritual objects on display take us back to a time when the unforeseen discovery of a new continent transformed our understanding of the world.