Ever seen one of these? It looks like Gaudí or something contemporary, but this flame-rimmed terracotta vessel is from ancient Japan - Middle Jomon period, c. 2000 BCE. This one's in Cleveland, but the Met has one, not to mention the National Museum in Tokyo. They never fail to give me a thrill - I find myself grinning - as if history looped around, as if our earliest ancestors knew wild abstract asymmetrical things our next-earliest ancestors forgot. (Just whose ancestors made these is a tricky question. Not the modern Japanese, and possibly not the Ainu either...)I found this picture in a beautiful book I got my parents for Christmas, Phaidon's 30,000 Years of Art: The story of human creativity across time and space. The book weighs a ton (good thing I ordered it delivered!), but that's because it has 1000 beautiful photos of art from everywhere. Their editors have a good eye, and, while there are obvious gaps, they get it right often enough. The conceit of the book is to present the history of art as if it were a single history, and so you're likely to find objects from Peru and China, or Iraq and Sweden, or Greece and Tanzania on facing pages (even as each object comes with a lengthy and generally helpful description). The juxtapositions are often stimulating. (The only thing that rings false is that each work is identified first by the present country: USA, Czech Republic, Yemen, etc.) I'd say it's a great coffee table book but with the caveat that your coffee table had better be pretty sturdy! The photos are gorgeous, and the book is full of wonders.
