Highlights from Latin American Art

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Spanish Colonial Art

This monumental biombo (folding screen) is an exceptional work from the seventeenth century in Mexico. The Spanish and Portuguese word biombo was derived from the Japanese word for folding screen, by­ōbu (literally, “protection from the wind”). Biombos were first introduced to New Spain (Mexico) from Japan through the legendary Manila galleons at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1614 the Japanese shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu sent a number of screens as gifts to Viceroy Luis de Velasco (1607–11). Subsequently, biombos were created in Mexico City and Puebla, and by the seventeenth century they had become a standard and fashionable decoration in elite households – some painted by the best artists of New Spain (Mexico). In fact, colonial artists showed a great deal of freedom when creating biombos. They painted a variety of subjects, including mythological, allegorical, and historical themes, as well as city views, emblems, and fêtes galantes (themes of the celebration of love).

This extraordinary folding screen depicts an Indian wedding and a palo volador (flying pole), one of only two screens known to represent this subject (the other is in the Museo de América, Madrid, Spain). The festivities take place in a village situated near canals – probably Santa Anita Ixtacalco, a famous site in the environs of Mexico City. On the right, a newly wed Indian couple is shown leaving the church, flanked by their native padrinos (godparents). A number of figures participate in pre-Columbian games that continued to be played in colonial times, including a mitote, or Dance of Moctezuma. In this game, which includes a sumptuously dressed figure who plays the part of Moctezuma, eight richly attired dancers imitate the dance performed by the Aztec king, accompanied by a harpist and guitarist. In the center, several figures are climbing up and dangling down from a flying pole, while the dazzled crowd in the foreground points at the spectacle. On the left, an Indian lies on the ground and juggles a log with his feet; the surrounding crowd includes Spaniards, distinguishable by their seventeenth-century capes, some of whom gesture toward the various performances. For all its attention to ethnographic detail, the scene is set against an imaginary landscape of the type usually seen in Flemish paintings. 

This screen is historically significant for two reasons: The subject satisfied European curiosity about the customs and rituals of the peoples of the New World, and it proved that the native population of New Spain fully participated in an important Christian sacrament – marriage – thereby conveying the notion of a “civilized” land. While the screen is unsigned, the exquisite detail (seen, for example, in the attire of the dancers and spectators), coupled with masterful, loose brushstrokes (seen in the figures dangling from the pole), reveals the hand of an accomplished and confident artist, probably Manuel de Arellano, who was active in Mexico City during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Additionally, the screen may have been the prototype for the development of new iconographies in eighteenth-century New Spain, including the famous casta paintings and the depiction of Indian weddings. (Ilona Katzew, adapted from her catalogue essay in Joseph J. Rishel and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, eds. The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2007)

The history of Guatemala under the Spaniards began with the arrival of the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado in 1524. The original colonial capital was founded under the name of Santiago de Guatemala (modern-day Antigua) in 1542. The city was the economic, political, and religious center of the region until the devastating series of earthquakes of 1773, when the capital was moved to its present location of Guatemala City. Many monastic orders were based in Antigua, and monumental pieces of silver were commissioned to decorate the interiors of churches for the Spanish and indigenous communities. This exquisitely cast altar cross was created by Pedro Xuárez de Mayorga, a Spanish silversmith who arrived in Guatemala in the mid-sixteenth century. The altar cross has several hallmarks on its foot and stem: one names the artist “Mayorga” and another is the cockleshell mark for Santiago de Guatemala (Antigua).

The iconography of the piece is rich in details about the life of Christ. The four points feature images of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, while the central medallion illustrates the garden of Gethsemane and the Church of All Nations, the site of Christ’s final agonized meditation before his arrest. The back of the cross is also lavishly decorated with images of God the Father, and the four Doctors of the Church. The pairing of the Doctors of the Church with the evangelists is a frequent iconographic motif meant to highlight their role in the interpretation of the gospels. A highly expressive figure of the crucified Christ is affixed to the front, heightening the overall emotional effect of the piece.

On the stem, placed in elaborate niches, are figures of the twelve apostles. The base is densely engraved with images of various prophets and Franciscan saints, which may indicate that the cross was commissioned by the Franciscan order, the first to arrive in Guatemala in 1525. The rich symbolism of this exquisitely crafted work of silver illustrates the culmination of Christ’s sacrifice and the role played by key figures in Christian biblical history in promoting, defending, and disseminating the teachings of Christ, a subject that would have been addressed during the Catholic mass. The cross can be removed from the base and was therefore likely also used as a processional cross. (Sofía Sanabrais and Ilona Katzew)

Latin American Modernism

José Clemente Orozco was, with Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), one of “Los Tres Grandes” (the Big Three) of Mexican muralists. Early in his youth, he lost his left hand and wrist to an explosion that also permanently impaired his hearing and sight. Throughout his career Orozco offered biting comments about society’s ills. Orozco, however, was opposed to the political and propagandistic quality of the work of Rivera and Siqueiros. “A painting should not be a commentary, but the fact itself,” the artist said. Orozco visited Europe only once but traveled to the United States more often, twice staying for years at a time. In 1930 he had a solo exhibition at Delphic Studios in New York – run by Alma Reed, a noted patron of Mexican modernism and American social realism – and also painted murals at Pomona College in Claremont, California; at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire; and at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

During his stay in New York City from 1927 to 1934, Orozco created a number of works depicting Manhattan. The city, a symbol of modernity, is often featured as an alienating place filled with estranged people who are downtrodden by massive architecture. Orozco advocated the creation of a new art that would be uniquely American, one tied neither to European nor Mesoamerican traditions. “If new races have appeared in the New World,” said Orozco, “such races have the unavoidable duty to produce New Art.” Instead of equating a sense of “Americanness” with the picturesque, as Rivera and others had done, Orozco in his works of this period equated Manhattan with continental renewal. Exhibited at Delphic Studios, Street Corner (Brick Building) is an important work from one of Orozco’s most arresting phases. (Ilona Katzew)

Tropic (Trópico) is one of Wifredo Lam’s most iconic images. Born in 1902 in Sagua La Grande, Cuba, to a Chinese father and a mulatto mother, Lam moved in 1923 to Madrid, Spain, to study art. In 1938 he moved to Paris and befriended Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who introduced him to a wide circle of avant-garde artists and writers. The events of World War II forced Lam to Marseilles, where in 1939 he met the poet and writer André Breton (1896-1966) and others seeking to leave France. Lam escaped to Havana in 1942 and remained there for ten years before returning to Paris in 1952. 

The decade that Lam spent in Cuba (1942-1952) was, artistically, his most important and original. During this time Lam developed his signature style by synthesizing the dreamlike qualities of surrealism with a pictorial space largely indebted to cubism. His works, which are populated with human and vegetable hybrids, derive largely from his interest in Santería, the popular Cuban religion that fuses Catholicism with African religious practices of Yoruba origin. (Ilona Katzew)

Postwar and Contemporary Latin American Art

Francis Alÿs is among the best known artists who have emerged from Latin America over the last two decades. Born in Belgium, Alÿs moved to Mexico City in 1987, where he still lives and works. Trained as an architect, Alÿs turned to visual art in the early 1990s and has worked in a variety of media – performance, painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Many of his public interventions, which are documented in film and photography, consist of journeys through cities, with an accessory conditioning and recording his passage (for example, a can of dripping paint or a block of ice that the artist pushes through the streets until it melts). “Each of my interventions is another fragment of a story that I am inventing, of the city that I am mapping,” Alÿs has said. His works are alluring and poetic – voyages that trace his passage through time and space and the evanescence of this act. Collaboration and an emphasis on artistic process are key elements in all of Alÿs’s works.

The video installation SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC is a powerful reflection on the absurdity of geographical boundaries – in this case, the Green Line. The term Green Line refers to the 1949 armistice lines established between Israel, and Syria, Jordan, and Egypt at the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Green Line separates Israel not only from these countries but also from territories annexed by Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its name derived from the green pencil used to draw the line on the map during the talks. In the summer of 1995 Alÿs performed a walk in São Paulo known as “The Leak”; he reenacted the walk in Jerusalem on June 4 and 5, 2004, following the portion of the Green Line that runs through Jerusalem while holding a leaking can of green paint. The walk’s starting and ending points were determined by the municipal borders drawn on a map of Jerusalem issued by the Survey of Israel Institute in 2003. More than fifteen gallons of green vinyl paint were used to trace the almost fifteen miles of the line. In February 2005, a film documentation of the walk was presented to a number of people – Israelis and Palestinians – invited by the artist to react spontaneously to the action; a selection of these interviews accompany the film. (Ilona Katzew)

The emotive, spiritual side of Mathias Goeritz’s art is nowhere better represented than in Message (Mensaje), one of his series of monochromatic plaques begun in 1957 and which reached its fullest expression in the 1960s. Message (Mensaje), from 1967, was made from a punched sheet of steel that, like the altarpiece of a baroque church, was then carefully covered with gold leaf. The rich texture and profound luminosity of the work is designed to trigger a visceral reaction in the viewer and foster contemplation.

Geometric abstraction is one of the most significant tendencies of the Latin American avant-garde, and artists from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela who worked in this style are internationally recognized. Goeritz, born in Danzig, Germany, in 1915, was arguably one of the most important artists from Mexico working with so-called pure abstraction. In 1941 Goeritz escaped Nazi Germany by way of North Africa and Spain. While in Spain, he organized major exhibitions; he also played a crucial role in bringing together Spanish avant-garde artists after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). In 1948 Goeritz moved to Santillana del Mar in the north of Spain. Fascinated by the Paleolithic cave paintings of nearby Altamira, he founded the School of Altamira, advocating a return to abstract simplicity and collective authorship.

In 1949 Goeritz traveled to Mexico, where he was invited to teach at the School of Architecture at the University of Guadalajara. Four years later he moved to Mexico City. By this time, murals in the narrative style of Diego Rivera (1886-1957) were discredited among some younger artists, including Goeritz, who opposed the government’s institutionalization of a nationalistic art. A teacher, cultural activist, sculptor, painter, and architect, Goeritz was a towering figure who changed the art scene in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s: he promoted a new form of visual modernity anchored in geometric abstraction and a more cosmopolitan worldview. He wrote manifestos stressing the social and spiritual value of art and criticizing the frivolity of the art world. Both loved and despised – Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) accused him of introducing “dangerous foreign influences” – he was a catalyst for major artistic innovation.

Goeritz is best known for monumental projects that blurred the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, such as Mexico City’s El Eco (The Echo) Experimental Museum (1953) and the famous Torres de Ciudad Satélite (Towers of Satellite City) (1957-58), a collaborative work with the Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-1988). He also created a discrete number of works on a smaller, less architectural scale, such as Message (Mensaje). (Ilona Katzew)