Serpent Brooch

The Serpent Brooch belongs to the figurative register of Héctor Aguilar's silverwork, where the Taller Borda turned from pure geometry to zoomorphic form. Aguilar pursued it with a sculptor's confidence rather than mere decorative borrowing. The piece is recorded in Penny C. Morrill's Silver Masters of Mexico: Héctor Aguilar and the Taller Borda (1996), fig. I-102. Its hallmark carries the (B) period code, and the design dates to around 1940.

The design language is muscular and serpentine, the body coiled and modeled in low relief so that the silver itself seems to undulate. Cast in heavy 990 silver, a purer, softer alloy than the standard 925, the brooch carries weight and presence, its surface hand-finished to bring up the subtle play of light across the modeled scales and form. The vocabulary is bold, sculptural, and architectural, the work of a maker who thought first as a designer of mass and silhouette and only second as an ornamentalist.

The brooch emerged from the Taller Borda, Aguilar's Taxco workshop. Around 1940 the Taller was working in a heavier, more architectonic idiom, and the lost-wax casting employed here speaks to that ambition: a technique demanding model, mold, and finishing skill in sequence, used to achieve the dimensional richness that hand-fabrication alone could not.

Documented Aguilar serpent castings in 990 silver are rarely seen at auction. Its appearance in Morrill anchors both attribution and date, and the purity of the alloy, the crispness of the modeled relief, and the integrity of the original hallmark are the markers to weigh in any example.

Los Angeles County Museum of ArtLos Angeles, California

Serpent Brooch (Prendedor en forma de serpiente), circa 1940

Accession M.2015.70.3. Official museum record Photo: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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