Pre-Columbian Bird-Glyph Brooch

This brooch shows how the Taxco silversmiths of the 1940s looked to the deep past of Mexico for a modern visual language. Working in the years just after the war, Héctor Aguilar reached back to Pre-Columbian iconography and reworked an ancient bird-glyph into a piece of wearable modernist design, a synthesis of indigenous source and contemporary form that defined the best of the movement.

The design centers on a stylized bird-glyph, its forms reduced to symmetrical scrolled motifs that flank a central circular onyx cabochon. Incised linear detailing animates the silver frame, and decorative finials finish the composition, the whole reading as a modern interpretation of ancient iconography rather than a literal copy. The dark onyx set against bright silver gives the brooch its graphic clarity.

Aguilar led the Taller Borda in Taxco, the workshop he built into one of the town's major silver enterprises after William Spratling established the silver revival there in the 1930s. Pieces such as this one carry his conjoined HA hallmark with the Sterling and Made in Mexico marks, and the brooch is recorded in Gobi Stromberg's Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda (2008, p. 93, plate 82).

Documented examples of Aguilar's Pre-Columbian-inspired jewelry are sought by collectors of mid-century Mexican silver, and a published, hallmarked brooch of this period carries the appeal of a piece whose place in the literature is established.