REVIEW: Golden Kingdoms in WaPo

Post critic Sebastian Smee on Golden Kingdoms!

Donโ€™t expect to see a more beautiful show than โ€œGolden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americasโ€ anytime soon. The exhibition, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a fresh, transformative take on pre-Columbian art. It boasts more than 200 objects made from gleaming gold, green and blue jade, resplendent macaw feathers, turquoise, and coral-colored, scallop-shaped Spondylus shells, among other materials. Itโ€™s ravishing.

But itโ€™s more than that. Itโ€™s chewy. Itโ€™s mind-bending. It has enough fresh scholarship behind it to make you rethink basic assumptions. And it has, at the showโ€™s end, a small but concentrated dose of world-historical drama that will stop your heart.