New Maguey Necklace

Named for the maguey — the agave plant central to Mesoamerican subsistence and ceremony — this silver necklace belongs to a design series that Héctor Aguilar developed at the Taller Borda. Penny C. Morrill's 1996 monograph catalogs the pattern as the "New Maguey Necklace" (plate I-44) and places its introduction around 1940, noting a coordinating bracelet that confirms Aguilar considered the motif worth extending into a suite. That documentation gives the design a named and traceable identity within the Taxco production of the period.

The pendant section renders the agave in sculptural silver: a domed hemisphere at the center, evoking the plant's dense heart, is ringed by a corona of petal-like raised forms, while paired volutes sweep outward on both sides in the curling motion of maguey leaves. Applied ball accents mark each structural junction, a constructive accent Aguilar carried throughout his botanical vocabulary. The chain on either side is built from paired horizontal bars linked by small four-petaled nodes, a secondary botanical rhythm that gives coherence to the full sweep of the piece.

Morrill records early examples of the suite in 940 silver, the alloy characteristic of Aguilar's Taller Borda output in the 1940s, when the workshop was developing a design language drawn from Mexican plant life. The Maguey series belongs to that period of consolidation, when indigenous botanical forms — the agave, the flower, the coiling leaf — were becoming the recurring formal preoccupations of the Taller Borda.

Record data: the title is corrected to New Maguey Necklace, which is the name under which Morrill catalogues the documented design (Silver Masters of Mexico: Hector Aguilar and the Taller Borda, 1996, pl. I-44), and the date is narrowed to circa 1940, the introduction date she gives. The Date field previously read 1939-1962, which is the span of the Taller Borda rather than a date for this design.

Fineness: Morrill's documented example is 940 silver. No photograph of this object's own mark is held in the record, so Materials are left at the generic "silver" rather than asserting 940. This matters because later variants of the pattern were made in 990, and a 940 published example should not be used to certify the standard of an unread object. A photograph of the stamp would resolve it, and the fineness should be entered then.