In Memory of Esther Pasztory
Back in 2011, I came across the work of the art theorist and art historian Esther Pasztory. Her global theory of art, published in the 2005 book Thinking with Things, is groundbreaking for its interdisciplinary approach that merges art history, archaeology, anthropology, and cognitive science. By focusing on how objects—things—shape human thought and give form to our culture, the book offers up the thesis that art is primarily cognitive, and only secondarily visual. Things are good to think with, as she expains. Her theories challenge any and all paradigms concerning naturalism, abstraction, and the Winckelmann-driven narrative of art, through its interweaving of Pre-Colombian art history with the art history of the West and wider world; hence its subtitle: ‘Toward a New Vision of Art’. Which makes the book, influential and monumental, in its ambition and legacy. It has entirely changed the course of my life and how I see the world and its “things”; but more so, how I think. I was lucky to get to eventually get to know her, and consider her a friend, whose life advice I’ll forever cherish. This tribute was written on the request of her husband—and it is meant to, in words, express just how much she meant to me and the many others who she inspired, with her ideas, scholarship, and teaching throughout her storied life.
Esther Pasztory was an extraordinarily brave, erudite, inspiring, tireless, and fascinating human being who was born on 21 June 1943, in Budapest, and passed away on 26 June 2024, in California. Esther and her family emigrated to the United States of America in 1956; she was thrust into a strange and unfamiliar, still-emerging society that masked its complexities behind a veneer of post-war optimism and suburban idyll. With grace and determination, Esther sought to make sense of her new surroundings by assimilating, yet she remained connected to her Hungarian roots through her immediate family and, in her early-adult years, in Hungarian society in New York. She married a Hungarian, Blaise Pasztory, with whom she had a son, Adam. Via her son — who has twin children — she was also a proud grandmother. After first meeting one another in the 1990s, Esther remarried, to artist Richard Eaton; a Maine-native who showed her what life was like there; the two summered and later settled, in Deer Isle.
A throughline in Esther’s life is the interweaving, over time, of instances of serendipity aligning with her eternal curiosity — leading her to study at Vassar, later transferring to Barnard. As Esther’s family had settled in Morristown, New Jersey, for most of her adult life she was based in states situated on the eastern coast, of the USA. An interest in learning more about art that was created beyond the ‘West’, particularly that found in Sub-Saharan Africa, led Esther to study African group compositions — with a particular focus on contextual form. A desire to understand why ‘art’ looks the way it does, based on the social context that enabled its production, soon became a primary focus in her research and lifelong academic development. Making use of geography for her later dissertation — which, like her MA, was also completed at Columbia — Esther chose to study the murals of Tepantitla at Teotihuacan. Mostly because Mexico, was nearby.
Esther received her PhD from Columbia in 1971, which was published in book form in 1976 — The Murals of Tepantitla, Teotihuacan — with Garland Publications of New York. Having previously published her first major essay in The Art Bulletin in 1970, on the use of group composition in Western Sub-Saharan African art, Esther’s 1976 book was the first of many scholarly publications that she would author during the course of her life.
Esther’s research and work on the arts and cultures of ancient Mesoamerican societies, quite simply, revolutionized, professionalized, and laid foundations for the subsequent maturation of the field. After her dissertation, she began teaching at Columbia, where she would remain until her retirement, in 2013. Early in her teaching career, Esther gave a graduate seminar on Aztec art, and would later publish the first book on the subject, Aztec Art, in 1983. Her interest in Aztec art was a natural outgrowth of her fascination with Teotihuacan — with its ‘stage sets’ — leading her to probe the Aztecs, as prevailing thought at that time considered them in some way as the inheritors of Teotihuacan’s culture. In her 1997 book, Teotihuacan: An Experiment in Living, Esther offered distilled insights into the urban and social life of that city, arguing for an analysis of Teotihuacan that utilized on-site observation rather than textual analysis. That approach led her to develop a global view and parallel theory about the development of art, across time.
In 2005, Esther published her book and theory concerning global art, titled Thinking with Things, with the University of Texas Press, examining art not in relation to its form or content but instead the structures that determine a society’s level of social integration. There are four: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and the state. The book examines and explains how each of these types of social organizations have preferences for self-identification that inform the values their societies gravitate toward. One of the book’s concluding theses is that stylistic ‘naturalism’ — with its anthropomorphism and many technical requirements — is not a signifier of a society’s structure, but of its content. This is an intellectual outgrowth of Esther’s pre-teaching years, being at the nexus of time in which ‘primitive art’ was deschackeld from the pre-Structuralist ideas of ‘savage minds’. By shifting scholarly focus from aesthetics and content of art, to the underlying social frameworks; Esther provides a novel perspective on how art functions as a reflection of social cohesion and of identity — regardless of geography, tools, language; even time.
Esther’s dedication to teaching was equally rigorous. She mentored countless students, inspiring generations of art scholars with her rigorous approach, profound knowledge, and genuine passion for her subjects. Many have gone on to carve their own paths in the field of Mesoamerican art and theory. Esther’s ability to weave personal narratives that brought these ancient cultures to life, made her approach to studying the art of the past uniquely rooted in her own life biography. Never feeling quite as if she found her way in the USA, she understood contemporary America, through America’s ancient cultures.
Beyond her work in academia, Esther also wrote historical fiction, publishing Daughter of the Pyramids , in 2003, wherein the central character time travels back to the Maya city of Tikal. In her own words, she once explained writing historical fiction allowed her to access and explore the emotions of people who lived in ancient Mesoamerican cultures, which would otherwise be inaccessible to an historian. In her 2018 memoir Exile Space, she expanded her work in fiction, writing more on the life of Naomi — the main character in Daughter of the Pyramids. At the time of her death, she was working on an illustrated book for teenagers, on the art of Mesoamerica and Peru.
Esther Pasztory’s intellectual contributions and her commitment to education have made profound impacts on many fields, ideas, and subjects — over her many decades spent thinking, and writing, about art. Particularly in her areas of specialization, such as Teotihuacan, the Aztecs, and her views on global art theory. Her layered approach to life — in its physicality, and intangibly, in her processes of thinking — was uniquely her own; kaleidoscopic in its ability to vastly synthesize, and theorize. She and her work have expanded understanding of Mesoamerican art while solidifying Columbia as a nucleus of Pre-Columbian scholarship; while also shaping debate and redefining art history itself. She will be remembered for her infinite scholarly achievements, though equally (if not more) for her warmth, generosity, kindness, wit, and everlasting impact she had on students, friends, colleagues, and family. Above all, it is hoped that she will be remembered for her bravery, resilience, self-mastery, humor, ability to inspire others (just by being herself), and the deeply personal way she merged the professional with the personal — creating a life, and a legacy, whose impact will emerge in time’s fullness.
John Bezold, Amsterdam, 3 July 2024
