Art from the fertile soil of Mexico

April 10, 2003
ART REVIEW - From the fertile soil of Mexico

In San Diego, the land's colonial arts show it to have been a vibrant cultural crossroads.

"The Grandeur of Viceregal Mexico: Treasures From the Museo Franz Mayer"
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By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-wk-knight10apr10.story

SAN DIEGO -- The eloquence of the decorative arts as history's visual storytellers is hard to beat. Nowhere is this fact more in evidence than in an unusual and extraordinarily beautiful platter in the collection of Mexico City's Franz Mayer Museum. Made of tin-glazed earthenware in the town of Puebla about 300 years ago, the wide, heavily ornamented dish speaks volumes.

Its rectangular oval shape has been punctured by irregular cuts along the edges, in a manner that derives from European Baroque silverware. The dark blue glaze of its decoration was made with cobalt brought from Spain, where its popularity had been fostered by the Moors. The elaborate density of the organic pattern is itself an Islamic convention, but the chrysanthemums scattered across the ceramic surface are Chinese in origin, as is the blue-and-white palette. And the stylized birds with trailing tails that flit across the floral field recall the quetzal, indigenous to Central America.

So what we have here is a European-Middle Eastern-Asian-Mesoamerican platter. Who said globalization in art is new?

For much of its colonial era, midway between Spain and its colony in the Philippines, Mexico was like a membrane between Europe and Asia. Whatever passed through, from either direction, was irrevocably altered. Meanwhile, whatever grew from Mexican soil was forever tinged by the prevailing cultural winds. The Franz Mayer platter -- along with scores of other ceramics, silver and gold religious objects, items of furniture, paintings and gilded sculptures from the museum's unrivaled collection -- bristles with a robust energy that resonates for today's globalizing culture.

These intricate crosscurrents -- a true if undemocratic multiculturalism -- are the elemental subject of "The Grandeur of Viceregal Mexico: Treasures From the Museo Franz Mayer," a rich, expertly selected and impeccably installed exhibition now concluding a national tour at the San Diego Museum of Art. (It was organized by Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.) The Franz Mayer Museum, housed in a lovely 16th century former hospital at the edge of Alameda Park, joined the capital city's greatest landmarks the moment it opened in 1985. Few of its riches have been seen outside the country before now.

Franz Mayer (1882-1975) was a German Jewish businessman who in 1905 immigrated to Mexico City, where he eventually became a founding member of the Mexican stock exchange and a successful financier. Germans brought the practice of art collecting to mind-boggling heights by the 19th century and after, and the expatriate Mayer was no exception. His collection swelled to enormous size over the 50 years he spent assembling and then refining it. The San Diego presentation features more than 130 choice examples.

Mayer is also a model for "right man/right place/right time" honors. He began to collect in 1920, shortly after an era of Mexican political reform was opened by a new national constitution, and he focused on art produced between Spain's conquest in 1521 and Mexican independence in 1821 -- the three centuries during which viceroys governed the region. In a 20th century Mexico that looked to its pre-Columbian past for powerful historical roots, to popular arts as a sign of people's dignity and toward a Modernist future that could fulfill progressive aspirations, colonial art was widely discredited. Mayer found a wide- open collecting field with lots to choose from.

Like many great collectors, in other words, he collected against the grain. Tastes have shifted once more in recent decades, however, and political nervousness over colonial issues has been swept aside through a pointed shift in terminology: Spanish Colonial art has been rechristened Viceregal Mexican art -- our art, from a Mexican's viewpoint, not theirs. So a cultural and historical gap between Moctezuma and Diego Rivera has been filling in, and the Franz Mayer Museum -- like the magnificent National Museum in nearby Tepoztlán -- is a linchpin.

In San Diego the show is laid out handsomely, and it features the most helpful and coherent wall texts seen in a museum in many a moon. The first object is a 10-panel folding screen, some 18 feet wide, painted by an unidentified artist at the end of the 1600s. One side portrays the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in bloody, chaotic, dramatically Baroque style. The other shows a tranquil view of Mexico City that is all gridded order and harmony. (You can even spot the hospital that now houses the Mayer museum.) It takes a moment to realize that this interpretation of Spain's conquest and its assertion of subsequent order takes a form -- a big painted folding screen -- whose origins lie in Japan.

The museum has an outstanding collection of santos -- carved and painted figures of saints -- and it's well represented by eight sculptures and two large reliefs. Spain's conquest of Mexico coincided with the rise of Protestantism in Europe, so Baroque showbiz went all out in the effort to convert Indians to Catholicism and then hold them within the church.

The quality of carving can be erratic, but the sculptures are nonetheless inventive. The anonymous artist who carved a big theatrical tableau showing the marriage of the Virgin and St. Joseph had some trouble turning his mostly frontal figures in three-dimensional space, but their dazzling gilded clothing forms one continuous garment: It begins on Mary, runs across the rabbi and envelops Joseph. Marriage through the office of the church is deliriously exalted.

Elsewhere, the toylike quality of an imposing warrior figure of St. James on horseback is deftly contradicted by elaborate polychrome and gold leaf designs. Power is layered with exuberance.

The show is rich in exquisite furniture, liturgical objects and especially glazed earthenware. It also accurately reflects the relative modesty of the museum's paintings collection. Just seven paintings are on view.

In this context, however, colonial painting is revealed to turn on a quality present yet perhaps less prominent in European painting of its time. Miguel de Herrera's remarkable 1782 portrait of an unidentified lady is a decorative extravaganza -- her mountain of hair adorned with diamond brooches and feathered plumes suggestive of an Aztec deity; earlobes, throat and wrists wrapped in heavy jewels; bodice a colored thicket of intricate embroidery; elbows bent as an excuse to create cascades of exquisite lace.

In Viceregal Mexico there really wasn't much distinction between painting or sculpture and the decorative arts. They're all of a piece. Like the gilded embellishment that unites Mary, the rabbi and Joseph in a magical trinity in the marriage relief, this painting is decoration pushed to a near-hallucinatory level of elaboration. No wonder the lady isn't shown occupying an earthly space but, instead, floats against an abstract plane of dun color. She's a secular goddess, whose decoration sanctifies as much as ornaments.