Colonial Latin American Review ISSN: 1060-9164 (Print) 1466-1802 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccla20 New stages for new Spanish painting Aaron M. Hyman To cite this article: Aaron M. Hyman (2018) New stages for new Spanish painting, Colonial Latin American Review, 27:3, 413-421 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2018.1527555 Published online: 21 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccla20 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 2018, VOL. 27, NO. 3, 413–421 EXHIBITION REVIEW New stages for new Spanish painting Review of Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici Curated by Ilona Katzew with Jaime Cuadriello, Luisa Elena Alcalá, and Paula Mues Orts Palacio de Cultura Citibanamex (Palacio de Iturbide), Mexico City (29 June 29–15 October, 2017); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (19 November, 2017–18 March, 2018); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (24 April–22 July, 2018) In all three of its venues, Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici opened with an immense oval canvas signed in 1723 by Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675–1728), offering the visitor a chance of epiphany at once literal and artistic (Figure 1; cat. 1–3). On the one hand, a gleaming Eucharist in an angel-supported monstrance casts a heavenly glow onto Saints Francis and Colette, who stare up in awe. On the other, the canvas might have prompted an artistic awakening, as its swirls of drapery, balletic bodies, and loose, commanding brushwork present a vision of the heights painting reached in eighteenth-century Mexico City. One must stand at a healthy distance to take in Rodríguez Juárez’s imposing work (over thirteen feet in height). But two adjacent canvases pulled the visitor close and forced a Figure 1. Installation view of ’Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 2017-2018. Photo: Museum Associate s/LACMA. Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 414 REVIEW: PAINTED IN MEXICO recalibration of vision while opening a view onto an eighteenth-century drama that took place in the viceregal capital. Rodríguez Juárez’s canvas appears again, this time represented within the space of another, comparatively small painting showing an interior view of the convent church of Corpus Christi, where the oval painting is seen on the high altar. Both the altarpiece and this picture of it were likely commissioned by Viceroy Baltasar de Zúñiga y Guzmán, Marquis de Valero, though for notably different purposes. The large oval canvas served as the devotional focal point for local audiences in the parish church of a convent founded by Valero, the first to (controversially) accept noble indigenous women. The convent complex was complete by 1720, but still lacked royal approval when Valero was called back to Spain in 1722. That convent itself appears in the third painting, its distinctive facade seen on the far side of Mexico City’s Alameda, a park laid out in perfect gridded order. The exhibition and robust corresponding catalog entry suggest that the viceroy thus commissioned Nicolás Enríquez (1704–1790) to paint these two views of the structure—interior and exterior—in order to finally garner royal sanction. This strategy seems to have proved successful and the convent opened its doors in time for Corpus Christi in 1724. Taken together, these three paintings drew the viewer ever closer to inspect increasingly specific details—the grand canvas, its representation in the church, the small view of the church within Mexico City’s urban fabric—while simultaneously telescoping conceptually outward to a transatlantic imperial theater, the actors and agendas that animated it, and the objects deployed as critical tools of negotiation and exchange. This three-painting vignette was a metonym of the very best of Painted in Mexico—an exhibition resulting from nearly a decade of collaborative work undertaken by the four curators. These opening paintings, not usually on public view and in three different repositories (in Mexico and Spain), index the curators’ broad-ranging preparatory travel and research, and the astute eyes with which they spotted not only works of evident quality but also chances to reunite paintings scattered by tumultuous post-colonial circumstances and markets, and by contemporary institutional agendas. The very image of the viceroy, who is seen within the painted space of Corpus Christi, is testament to that close looking and thus the visual evidence that made the show’s transatlantic tales so rich: he and his companions had been covered by a bare, pink-toned floor until the curators spotted traces of figures below and had the overpainting, which obscured them, removed. Such restoration efforts also made possible the attribution of artworks—such as the two paintings of Corpus Christi to Nicolás Enríquez—which was a clear aim of the curators. Painted in Mexico thus exemplified curation in both the contemporary and the deeper, etymological valences of the word. The works on exhibit evinced impeccable selection. To single out Rodríguez Juárez’s St. Lucy, a small painting not only off the beaten art-historical path in San Luís Potosí but also dwarfed within its home in that city’s cathedral, requires a practiced eye (Figure 2; cat. 19). Cleaned of dust and carefully illuminated, its lustrously handled paint, remarkable degree of finish, and strange iconography (with no gory eyes on the saint’s golden plate) were appreciated by museum-goers in a way that is frankly difficult when the work is in situ. But the exhibition was also a testament to curation as care (from the Latin cura): to the efforts of a group of art historians who understand themselves as the shepherds of eighteenthcentury painting in Mexico. This sense of mission propelled extensive technical analysis and conservation treatments—undertaken for nearly fifty percent (!) of the over one hundred works presented; negotiations with local religious communities and national cultural authorities to allow their works to be treated and shipped abroad (Katzew and Lorenzo 2017); and herculean efforts to document and photograph works—a critical and difficult step for under-studied materials—that for logistical reasons (often related to their grand scale) could not travel or be exhibited. COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 415 Figure 2. Juan Rodríguez Juárez, Saint Lucy, c. 1720, oil on canvas, 83 × 60 cm. Catedral de San Luis Potosí. Painted in Mexico’s guiding claim was that eighteenth-century Mexican painting is worthy of serious reconsideration. As such, the show is a definitive (even oversized) response to the earliest art historians of colonial painting, such as Manuel Toussaint, who, beginning in the 1930s, dismissed the period and its artists in favor of works produced directly in the wake of conquest and during the relative political stability of the seventeenth century (Toussaint 416 REVIEW: PAINTED IN MEXICO 1982 [1965], 136, 160). The exhibition is the culmination of the curators’ efforts to redress this historiographic bias against this later period. The result of their pioneering scholarship is that specialist and general audiences alike are, in fact, perhaps most familiar with thoroughly eighteenth-century genres: casta paintings, biombos, representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and grand religious allegories (Cuadriello 2001; 2004; Katzew 2005; Alcalá 2007). This was particularly the case at the show’s United States venues, where local museum patrons have become acquainted with collections that Ilona Katzew (LACMA) and Ronda Kasl (organizing curator of the show’s installation at the Met) have assembled from primarily eighteenth-century material, much of which won a spotlight in the exhibit. It is an ironic triumph that the curators’ collective decades of institutional and scholarly excellence made the guiding claim of their own show seem, in some respects, like a given. To offer museum-goers an introduction to the art of eighteenth-century New Spain, the over one hundred works were thematically subdivided into seven sections: Great Masters; Master Storytellers and the Art of Expression; Noble Pursuits and the Academy; Paintings of the Land; The Power of Portraiture; The Allegorical World; and Imagining the Sacred. Though these sections were configured differently in each venue, ‘Great Masters’ opened the exhibit at all three. That section offered less a theme than an implicit claim and with it an ideological framework through which to view the rest of the show: being a master was of the utmost importance to these painters and their publics and so too should it be to us. Nearly all of the artists represented in this section had other works in the show and the paintings that formed this cluster could just as easily have been incorporated into the subsequent thematic groupings. In defining these works in terms of their artists, then, the curators asked us as viewers to look more pointedly at the who (named artists) and the how (individual, masterful styles) of these paintings rather than necessarily at the what (their content), which was foregrounded in the exhibit’s other sections. This theme also indicated at the outset that this show would not represent the majority of work created in New Spain—anonymously produced, often mixed-media—in favor of spotlighting elite oil painting in the grand European tradition. This approach struck quite different tones in the exhibition’s three venues. Staged in a period palace in Mexico City, the works seemed at home and audiences already familiar with well-known colonial artists integrated new ones into the canon (the show making a particular bid for the brothers Juan and Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez). The oil paintings shone in LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion for temporary exhibitions, offset by gorgeous slate-colored walls, and juxtaposed with a neighboring show about modern vernacular design in Mexico and California (Kaplan 2017)—both shows featured in the Getty Center’s ‘Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA’ initiative. In New York, visitors walked past pictures made for connoisseurs of nineteenth-century Parisian salons, as well as an adjacent special exhibition treating the art and culture of visiting Versailles during roughly the same period that the artists featured in Painted in Mexico were active (Kisluk-Grosheide and Rondot 2018). These juxtapositions at the Met forced a comparison between the Mexican ‘Great Master’ paintings and their European counterparts in a museum that initially helped define a canon that excluded such Latin American works based on the very stylistic and technical criteria with which the viewer was now supposed to appreciate them. The works brought together in this exhibit and catalog—ranging from the well known to the rarely seen—will without doubt (re)define the canon of eighteenth-century New Spanish painting for decades to come. They will do so, however, against the backdrop of their now having been displayed in major American museums, which brought them into frames of art historical reference built upon categories and valuations of style, quality, and intertextual relationships forged in Europe. The curators of Painted in Mexico well understood this and COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 417 organized this show with a careful eye to how these works could underline different facets of the relationships between local production and global concerns, between Latin America and Europe. The unavoidable tensions they were thus working under were evident from the outset. The three-painting vignette, discussed above and which opened the show, used artworks to reveal questions of a largely socio-historical nature—actors and enterprises of the Church and Crown in a transatlantic empire. Moving on to the adjacent works organized as a grouping about master artists and their grand styles, however, the viewer was forced to look back: were Enríquez’s paintings meant to be viewed as art and were we supposed to marvel at his style? Or were these mere supporting documents to Rodríguez Juárez’s altarpiece, a work now difficult to see as anything but a technically accomplished narrative painting (rather than as, say, a tool of viceregal self-legitimization or a token in a gift exchange between elite indigenous audiences and the colonial regime, as one might have previously suspected)? Such disjunctive experiences, dependent in part as they were upon venue, reflect the challenges of displaying colonial art at a moment when major American institutions scramble to belatedly assemble collections that represent colonial Latin American materials and, in turn, to think about both where they should be hung in relation to existing European collections and how to educate a broader public in so doing. Art historians meanwhile similarly work to incorporate colonial artworks into histories built upon questions of stylistic evolution, singular authorship, and artists’ biographies, categories that may or may not be the most appropriate with which to approach art produced in the early modern Americas (Hyman and Mundy 2015; Cohen-Aponte 2016/17). Beginning the show with ‘Great Masters’ advocated the application of those Europeanate categories of analysis, but its venues underlined the successes and difficulties of doing so. Alternatively, in each of the show’s iterations, the distinctive New Spanish forms and genres, particularly those found in the subsection ‘Paintings of the Land,’ were unreservedly astounding. Visitors witnessed highlights of New Spanish casta painting, from Miguel Cabrera’s 1763 ‘De español y morisca, albina’ (cat. 60), a recently discovered work that is now a jewel in LACMA’s crown, to a group in a more unusual full-length format, attributed to José de Ibarra (cat. 57–59); and they were able to peruse staggering details of local dress and comportment in scenes of quotidian life, including a unique portrayal of an indigenous wedding signed by Juan Rodríguez Juárez (cat. 64) and a music-laden fete painted onto the folding panels of a biombo, attributed to Cabrera (c. 1715–1768) (cat. 71). These last three works, and indeed a large percentage of those in this section, came from private collections, a strength of the show and a testament to the long relationships its curators have developed with an international community of collectors and gallerists. The exhibit thus managed to both delight broader publics with exceptional works and surprise eighteenth-century specialists with little-known gems even within comparatively well-studied genres. Stunning paintings of Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor and Plaza del Volador by Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz (1713–1772)—rarely seen given their home in the National Museum of Fine Arts, Malta—were hung next to his important and well-publicized canvases of French port cities, which were copied from print and are now housed at LACMA (cat. 66–70). The sections devoted to ‘Imagining the Sacred’ and ‘The Allegorical World’ stressed even more distinctively New Spanish artistic forms and traditions (Figure 3). For instance, José de Ibarra’s painting of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan at once underscored New Spanish facture —a statue made from pasta de caña and celebrated for its miraculous self-renovation—and the prototypically New Spanish mode of rendering such sacred statues at life- or over lifescale within paintings. Similarly distinctive, an Allegory of the Faith and Portrait of Bachiller José Manuel del Castillo, attributed in the show to José de Páez (1721–c. 1790) (cat. 111), is 418 REVIEW: PAINTED IN MEXICO Figure 3. View of ‘Imagining the Sacred,’ as displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. the kind of work one would be hard-pressed to find in a European painting collection; carefully rendered lettering covers roughly a third of the canvas’s large surface (236.5 × 321.5 cm), underlining a particular viceregal affinity for including text in images, a feature highlighted by many works in the show and deserving of future scholarly attention. These kinds of large paintings, with the de rigueur inclusion of multiple iconic renditions of the Virgin of Guadalupe, were accompanied by an assortment of small-format, jewel-toned devotional pictures and allegories, a large proportion painted on copper. The metal’s prevalent use as a substrate was drawn out to great effect with the inclusion of many examples, the show thus also implicitly exposing how eighteenth-century painters seem to have almost invariably been as comfortable working with loose brushwork on grand scale as they were with crafting minutely detailed compositions in the less forgiving technique of oil-on-copper, a flexibility distinctive to New Spanish painters and in need of more research (Bargellini 1999). It would be interesting to imagine an alternative arrangement of the show that firmly focused on such entirely distinctive varieties and features of painting in eighteenth-century New Spain: bold, dramatically illuminated representations of miraculous icons; text-laden and densely symbolic allegories; and seemingly anthropological (if totally fantastical) renderings of everyday life, such as casta paintings, cityscapes, and portraiture. In Los Angeles and Mexico City, an open floor plan allowed for vistas and easy movement between the exhibition’s subsections such that none seemed to be given primacy, the distinctively New Spanish and the more obviously Europeanate held in productive tension. In contrast, a maze-like space at the Met served to make palpable the linear structure of the exhibition’s catalog, which might be seen to stress and favor Europeanate modes of looking at and judging works of art by foregrounding sections on master painters and academic painterly discourses. And yet, of course, to have started the show with rooms of casta paintings and copies of the Virgin of COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 419 Guadalupe’s icon—that is, to deprioritize or refuse such comparisons with Europe altogether— would have been to perform a kind of exoticization for Latin American materials and to thoroughly underplay the status of these objects as true works of art, a no less fraught strategy. The need to navigate between these poles is, in part, a product of colonialism itself, of the political and ideological principles that set the New World at both political and conceptual removes from Europe. This show prioritized closing the gap and stressing the artistic commonalities between the metropole and the colony. By far the strongest indication to this effect was the section devoted to the supposed painters’ academy of Mexico City. In so prominently positioning and heavily weighting the academy, the curators aligned New Spanish painting with not only the institutional structures of elite European painting in the eighteenth century, but also with European ideological underpinnings, the treatises and discourses that emerged in the Renaissance and coalesced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about what it meant to be an artist and make great works of art. But this section of the exhibition presented as fact what was actually a quite tendentious argument: namely that an academy was founded by the brothers Juan and Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez around 1722 and was in more or less continuous operation until the opening of the Academy of San Carlos in 1783, thereby advocating a Mexican precedent for what could otherwise be seen as a Spanish, colonial imposition (given that all early professors at San Carlos were mandated to be of Spanish blood). In fact, we know very little about the goings-on of these early iterations of academicism, let alone the thinking that animated them, save disparate and sparse mentions of an academy and ‘professors’ in the documentary record (1722, 1753, 1764) and a handful of references to the ownership and use of European art theoretical texts. Nonetheless this section called for full enfranchisement within this epitome of Enlightenment-era institutions, using paintings of bare-chested men to suggest definitively that artists routinely sketched from live models and positioning Miguel Cabrera’s Maravilla americana (1756), a publication about the inspection of the Virgin of Guadalupe icon, as an artistic treatise in its own right. The notion of an academy served as a suture for the disparate materials gathered in this section—from European treatises to painted copies of Charles Le Brun’s prints of the Battles of Alexander by Morlete Ruiz (cat. 44–46) to a delightful painting of Guadalupe’s creation in God’s celestial ‘workshop’ (cat. 28); this positioning made evident the desire to show various New World traditions (from the copy to the religious icon) as forming part of a coherent sense of artistry, albeit one owing almost entirely to European conceptions of the work of art and thus the role and standing of the artist. Part of what made treating the material in such a way possible was the particular temporal frame for this version of the eighteenth century in New Spain. Though the exhibition’s stated time span ostensibly placed its earliest works in line with the Bourbon assumption of the Spanish throne in 1700, all but four works post-dated 1710 and the remainder were mostly completed after 1720. A factor in this imbalance was the exclusion of renowned seventeenth-century painters who worked into the early decades of the next century; the absence of a work by Cristóbal de Villalpando (c. 1649–1714) was particularly notable in Mexico City and New York, venues that hosted a celebrated, 29-foot-tall canvas by the painter before welcoming Painted in Mexico (Cristóbal de Villalpando 2017). In turn, the rather surprising exclusion of the last decade of the century in the exhibition’s title (‘1700–1790’) further threatened to hem in the exhibition’s coverage; but in fact, this marker seems to have functioned less as an actual delimitation—indeed, several works were signed and dated after 1790—than as a clear indication that the tumultuous years leading up to the wars of Mexican Independence would not be represented in the selection. This, then, was a relatively apolitical version of New Spanish painting, free from many of the post-colonial agendas that 420 REVIEW: PAINTED IN MEXICO have driven scholars—including the show’s curators—in recent years (Katzew 2011). If images of the viceroys and prelates appeared in several paintings, we were meant to marvel first and foremost at their depictions as Art. The curators of Painted in Mexico placed full faith in their selected works and the artists they chose to champion, artists to whom they quite convincingly attributed nearly all of the show’s unsigned paintings based on technical and stylistic analysis. These paintings, the show contended, could stand toe-to-toe with those in any museum, and their power could transcend and elude the narrow frames that have acted as testament of colonialism’s legacy. This was a bold choice, and the opportunity to make it stems from a series of formidable achievements. In this very journal, nearly twenty years ago, Ilona Katzew reviewed an exhibition of viceregal art that opened in its entirety only at the Museo de América in Madrid—that is, at the colonial art museum and not at the Prado—with a catalogue that was never translated into English (Bérchez 1999; Katzew 2000). The possibility of now discussing how colonial painting should be displayed at the Met or at LACMA is a testament to the groundbreaking work of Katzew and her fellow curators in the intervening years and their explicit efforts to see colonial art as art full-stop, and as worthy of entrance into the highest realms of cultural display in the grand Western tradition. It surely is. How it can best be exhibited there and explained to new publics is an open-ended question, however, one with which curators and scholars will continue to contend for years to come. The still-nascent field of colonial Latin American art history now enjoys a spotlight, and this brings with it real-world corollaries, including university hires, curatorial positions, funding for research at both the graduate and professional levels and thus, in turn, the requisite interest of academic and general publics to warrant such a large-scale exhibition in the first place. The very chance for this growing community to debate such issues within the halls of major metropolitan American museums is a privilege. And Painted in Mexico will thus reverberate as an imposing announcement of a certain kind of arrival for the field, bringing with it the burdens of greater visibility: increased scrutiny and intensified accountabilities. Works cited Alcalá, Luisa Elena. 2007. ‘Loreto y Guadalupe: la compleja construcción del panteón mariano novohispano. In Historia, nación, región, edited by Verónica Oikión Solano, 281–324. Zamora: Colegio de Michoacán. Bargellini, Clara. 1999. Paintings on copper in Spanish America. In Copper as canvas: Two centuries of masterpiece paintings on copper, 1575–1775, exh. cat. edited by Michael K. Komanecky, 31–44. New York: Oxford University Press. Bérchez, Joaquín, ed. 1999. Los Siglos de Oro en los virreinatos de América, 1550–1700. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felip II y Carlos V. Cohen-Aponte, Ananda. 2016/2017 Forging a popular art history: Indigenismo and the art of colonial Peru. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67–68: 273–89. Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican painter of the Baroque. 2017. Exh. cat. Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex. Cuadriello, Jaime, ed. 2001. El divino pintor: la creación de María de Guadalupe en el taller celestial. Mexico City: Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe. ———, ed. 2004. Las glorias de la República de Tlaxcala: o la conciencia como imagen sublime. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Hyman, Aaron M., and Barbara E. Mundy. 2015. Out of the shadow of Vasari: towards a new model of the ‘artist’ in colonial Latin America. Colonial Latin American Review 24 (3): 283–317. Kaplan, Wendy, ed. 2017. Design in California and Mexico 1915–1985: found in translation. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Katzew, Ilona. 2000. Exhibition review: Los Siglos de Oro en los virreinatos de América, 1550–1700. Colonial Latin American Review 9 (2): 299–307. ———. 2005. Casta painting: images of race in eighteenth-century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press. COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 421 ———, ed. 2011. Contested visions in the Spanish colonial world. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Katzew, Ilona, and José Maria Lorenzo. 2017. A community votes: the journey of a painting from Aguascalientes. https://unframed.lacma.org/2017/12/27/community-votes-journey-painting-aguascalientes. Accessed 5 June 2018. Kisluk-Grosheide, Daniëlle, and Bertrand Rondot, eds. 2018. Visitors to Versailles: from Louis XIV to the French Revolution. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Toussaint, Manuel. 1982. Pintura colonial en México. 2nd edition. Edited by Xavier Moyssén. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Aaron M. Hyman Johns Hopkins University ahyman6@jhu.edu © 2018 Aaron M. Hyman https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2018.1527555