A four-panel painted screen measuring 6 feet tall and 10 feet wide is a touchstone for “Archivo del Mundo: Arte e Imaginación en Hispanoamérica, 1500-1800,” a magnificent new installation of works from the permanent collection at the Los Angeles Departmental Museum of Art. There are 90 objects, adding paintings, sculptures and ornamental arts, basically from Mexico but also from Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. The painted screen, made in Mexico at that time part of the seventeenth century. , is a profound foreign document, an exquisite “archive of the world” through its superbly complicated self.
First, as an oil-on-canvas portrait, the portrait reflects a legacy of European artistic culture unknown to pre-Hispanic Mexico. It shows a wedding party, probably in or near Mexico City, but the mysterious but voluptuous background of the blue and white landscape is a kind of flamenco-style level for the occasions that unfold in the detailed action ahead. to export to Spain or the Spanish Netherlands, where you would have to court the local taste.
Secondly, like a self-supporting screen (called a screen), it resembles those that can be discovered in a disgustingly rich house in China or Japan, but not in the Iberian Peninsula, Italy or France. The paintings depict the arrival and flourishing of Asian cultural heritage in New Spain along industrial routes from Manila, Philippines, to Acapulco on the Pacific coast. If the screen were meant for export, a European sponsor would get something deliciously unique.
Finally, as an elegant, eloquent, and brilliantly composed depiction of the festivities surrounding a Catholic marriage between an indigenous husband and wife in New Spain, the images embody the complex intersection of cultures in the centuries following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. The portrait commemorates a Christian sacrament, but is framed by indigenous dancers and an indigenous game in which men hanging from ropes at the ankles or waist rotate around a giant pole, a kind of high mast.
Mexico, Spain, Flanders, China, Japan, Philippines: multiculturalism has existed for many years in the art of Latin America, given the expanding global empire created by the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors Habsburg and Bourbon. We like to think that multiculturalism is new, but it’s not. The artist, whose identity is unknown, has nested them on his painted screen (and it is almost “his”, because then women were prevented from running in the studio).
Each of the 4 panels is a separate activity domain. From right to left, we see the wedding, then the dancers, up to the flying mast and despite everything the visitors gathered. Together, they set up an uninterrupted stage of glorious and conscientiously observed celebrations. Since the screen is on the floor, the smooth and physical zigzag that becomes of its 4 panels rises to the luminous sense of the animated action of the representation.
The existing installation is the first time that the screen is displayed correctly, standing, this is how it was intended to be lived. Acquired in 2005 from a Portuguese royal palace 40 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, it has been presented at LACMA hanging on the wall, like a painting. (It was also hung like this in the palace: a photograph is included in the indispensable catalog, which aims to be an essential and most appreciated consultant of the vital permanent art collection of the Museum of the Viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru. ) Recent conservation work. they made reorientation possible, and the difference is decisive.
More than a part of the works in “World Archive” – 46 – are paintings, and the quality is uniformly high. There’s room to grow, of course. Talavera poblana ceramics, with its beautiful fusion of Chinese, Moorish and indigenous influences. , is not represented, and an elaborate altarpiece would be a clever addition, if hard to find. (One wall in the exhibition features an organization of smaller devout paintings, perhaps intended to evoke a multi-panel altarpiece. )Few American museums have significant collections of what was once called Spanish colonial art, yet among those that do, LACMA stands out.
It is remarkable that it has been assembled in just 16 years under the watchful eye of curator Ilona Katzew. (The collection’s first two acquisitions —the ordinary screen plus a subtle painted copper badge, a symbol of the Nativity used as a component of a nun’s habit—through the wonderful eighteenth-century painter José de Páez—were purchased in 2005. ) In particular, the guilty provision made this possible.
The LACMA, like many museums, has almost nothing in terms of acquisition endowments with which to buy art. What he had, however, was an unlimited donation in 1997 of some 2,000 works, commonly Mexican fashionable highs, by art dealers Bernard and Edith Lewin (who have since died). It is not a formal collection of paintings, sculptures and drawings, but an ad hoc stock left over from Lewins’ Latin American art galleries in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs. The vital maxim of those works, adding the paintings of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo have been preserved through LACMA, while others have been alienated and sold to create a fund of acquisition of Latin American art, present and past.
Ironically, modern Mexican art allowed the creation of a brilliant museum collection of viceregal art from Latin America, ironic because Rivera and his radically splendid cohorts celebrated almost exclusively popular art and art from the pre-Hispanic past. Colonial art? Certainly not. They had little use for the cultural production of the region’s brutal colonizers, adding their devout theme. The studied and admired art history of the region stretches more or less from before 1500 to after 1800, with a dazzling gap of three hundred years between the two. .
Western art historians also tended to forget it, mistakenly regarding artists such as Miguel Cabrera (1695-1768) or Vicente Albán (1725-unknown) as deficient, compared to European painters. They were presented as imitators or artists who tried and by the maximum component could not keep up, who as exceptional talents who developed a unique aesthetic that not only expressed itself to their multicultural origins in the Americas, but thrived on differences.
The 300-year-old hole has closed. The consideration for the art of Latin America has increased in recent decades, after taking a great leap in 1990 with “Mexico: splendors of thirty centuries”, the extravagant exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose organization had the contribution of the Mexican poet. and diplomat Octavio Paz, who coincidentally won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year. (The exhibition was for LACMA. ) I would say that interest was cemented through the invigorating tensions between multiculturalism and white supremacy that run through art, which speaks to us. with such urgency today. It shows us anything we came from.
Take the two most recent acquisitions, either added to the collection last year. One is an extremely subtle polychrome sculpture of Guatemala’s “San Miguel Defeats the Devil,” the triumphant saint’s status on the back of the beast with his silver cross folded like a spear placed over the devil’s head. The other is a portrait of the Cuzco school of Peru of the last seventeenth century, which shows King Charles II of the Habsburgs, the sword drawn and held by two archangels (including Miguel), protecting against attacks a Eucharist internally exposed an impressive monstrance adorned with jewels.
It is not that the excellent St. Michael of the sculpture is a European with rosy cheeks and whiter than white, while the subjugated satan wears the brown, brown and mustachioed features of a gesticulating Indian. he is threatened with being overthrown from his augmented position to the more sensible of a Greco-Roman column through two dark and menacing Ottoman Turks and a Protestant heretic, while an idealized King Charles, almost with porcelain skin, stands in a supernatural serenity. Essentially, the same racially and spiritually codified messages are sent through works made a century apart in the two Spanish viceroyalties, the north and the south.
Golden and superbly designed, they emphasize the sumptuous two-dimensional decoration of the surface. The styles may not be more different from the complex spatial elaboration observed in European Baroque sculpture and painting, with its emphasis on volumetric figures unfolded in an infinite spiral of deep space. During those centuries, Europe actively sailed the world to colonize what it could, a space adventure reflected in its extravagant three-dimensional art. For artists performing in the colonized Americas, this is not necessary; they were not traveling anywhere.
Instead, they were inspired by indigenous visual traditions of textiles, hardware, ceramic decoration, and other available sources. In short, the European Baroque is based on the elaboration of space, while the Spanish-American Baroque demands the elaboration of the surface. LACMA, a magnificent silver monstrance, sumptuous embroidery of church clothes, boxes inlaid with bone and tortoiseshell and carved wooden trays painted on a dense array of floral motifs make the comparison.
Today, art in “World Archive” becomes more applicable than ever to fresh life. Perhaps the position to see this is in the “Virgin of Guadalupe,” arguably the best-known symbol of the colonial era.
The iconic portrait of a young woman, with her head down, dressed in a sequined suit and standing on a crescent moon, is depicted in two versions hanging from side to side. One, probably painted by the father-son team of Antonio and Manuel de Arellano, is a meticulous 1691 copy of the original that is still venerated in the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The other, a quarter of a century later, is through Antonio de Torres, a member of a gigantic circle of relatives of painters. (Torres’ dramatic and monumental canvas “The Elevation of the Cross” is also a visual approach. ) One symbol is more giant than the other, and the vignettes in the circles surrounding the central figure of the Virgin are different. But the Virgin herself is almost identical, up to the little finger bent with her left hand in prayer.
This is probably because a third intelligent artist, the wonderful Afro-Mexican painter Juan Correa, son of a Spanish surgeon and a liberated black woman, produced a waxed paper style of the original so that accurate copies of the miraculous symbol can be reproduced through others. The call above for them. Today, seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe duplicated on the gallery wall is like seeing dual versions of Andy Warhol’s celebrated “Marilyn Monroe,” whether reproduced from the same silkscreen. Then, as today, demand is a formal ground for artistic invention.
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Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (he was a finalist for the award in 1991, 2001 and 2007). In 2020, he also won the Rabkin Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Artistic Journalism.
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