Volume 42, Number 13 · August 10, 1995
Mother of the World
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730–1930 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
an exhibition held in 1994 at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the
Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730–1930
catalog of the exhibition by Jean-Marcel Humbert, by Michael Pantazzi, by Christiane Ziegler
National Gallery of Canada, 607 pp., $49.95 Canadian (paper)
'Egyptomania,' the lavish exhibit sponsored jointly by the Louvre, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, and held last year, had the benefit of an equally sumptuous catalog. This was the first show devoted to the modern fascination with ancient Egypt, and it was inevitably selective. It scrupulously included an early round of King Tut mania in the 1920s, but not its reprise fifty years later. It displayed Theda Bara's Cleopatra, but not Elizabeth Taylor's, and, perhaps deliberately, avoided mentioning all the blockbuster exhibits initiated by the second apotheosis of King Tut in the 1970s.[1]
Review, 5165 words
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