SOURCE: "Surrounding Art with Language," in New York Times Book Review, May 30, 1993.

[In the following review, Herrera outlines the substance and style of Essays on Mexican Art, focusing on the poetic instinct that seems to inform Paz's aesthetic taste.]

Though arranged chronologically, Octavio Paz's collection of essays on Mexican art from the pre-Columbian period to the mid-20th century does not, as the author acknowledges, constitute a history of art. [Essays on Mexican Art] moves like a traveler's journal, sweeping over a vast cultural terrain, circling, stopping here and there for a closer look, retracing its steps, then setting off again in some new direction.

Perhaps because their subject's remoteness invites the free play of conjecture, Mr. Paz's most successful essays are those on pre-Columbian art. He captures the fearsome "otherness" when "idea becomes stone" in the great serpent-skirted Aztec goddess Coatlicue. "The mind stops dead: the enigma...