Review: Indian art pieces taken from U.S. return home for exhibit

Some of the earliest surviving art by native North Americans left America long ago. Soldiers, traders and priests, with magpie eyes for brilliance, bundled it up and shipped it across the sea to Europe. Painted robes, embroidered slippers and feathered headdresses tinkling with chimes found their way into cupboards in 18th-century London and Paris, and lay there half-forgotten. Now, in “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, some of those wondrous things have come home.

Of the about 130 pieces in the show, on loan from more than 50 international collections, those sent by the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris are exceptional: a drawing, on animal hide, of a half-abstract bird with prismatic wings; a raven-plume bonnet with feathers swept back as if hit by wind; and a bead-encrusted shoulder bag with a double-crescent design. They are all part of an exhibition that has to be one of the most completely beautiful sights in New York right now: But what would Europeans have thought when they first unpacked these objects in Paris centuries ago?

They might have noticed that the crescent emblems stitched on the beaded bag looked vaguely familiar. But from where? Moorish Spain. And the beads? They were glass, probably Venetian. Even a viewer who found the plumed bonnet outlandish might have admired the skill that had gone into weaving its headband from porcupine quills. And surely to 18th-century eyes, as to ours, the drawing of the great bird had a undeniable majesty and a sophistication that spoke of a deep history.

That history long predated the arrival of Europeans, as is demonstrated by the precious archaeological remains that open the show. The oldest is a carved stone pipe in the form of man with a double-bun hairdo and wearing a feather bustle, a feature of ritual attire to this day. The small sculpture may date to the first century B.C. and was found in a burial mound in what is now Ohio.