Brooch with Onyx Mask and Futuristic Headdress

A stylized face fitted with an onyx mask and crowned by an abstract, almost futuristic headdress of geometric projections, this brooch is Los Castillo working at the meeting point of representation and modern abstraction. The piece reads first as a face, then dissolves upward into sculptural form, the dark onyx grounding the composition while the silver projections lift it into something closer to a modernist mask than a portrait.

The combination of a recognizable face with abstracted forms rising above it is characteristic of the workshop's design intelligence. Los Castillo, founded in Taxco in 1939 when Antonio Castillo and his brothers left William Spratling's Las Delicias (Morrill, p. 166), built much of its identity on reworking Mexican and Pre-Columbian imagery through a modern sculptural eye, and the onyx-masked head belongs squarely to that program.

Onyx supplies the brooch's color and gravity, set flush as a mask rather than mounted as an ornamental stone, an approach consistent with the workshop's deep tradition of working stone as subject (Morrill, p. 206). The geometric headdress, by contrast, is pure silver, all line and projection, giving the piece its forward, futuristic momentum.

The brooch is recorded in Gobi Stromberg's Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda (2008), p. 86, plate 66, and carries the applied-button Los Castillo Taxco mark. Published Los Castillo jewelry of this date comes to market only occasionally and is sought by collectors of the workshop's modernist period.