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30 Centuries Of Mexican Splendor

A Culture Long Ignored Gets Its Due In A New York Exhibit

November 04, 1990|By Michael Kilian.

The mesoamerican, or ``Indian,`` characteristics of the art are abruptly suppressed with the advent of the Viceregal period, though their influences can be sensed in the pain and intensity so evident in the religious pieces of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

As though breaking free of cruel bonds, that Indian vitality returns in the 19th Century works,and is thoroughly ingrained in the Mexican art of contemporary times.

Throughout is the pervasive and uniquely Mexican sense of fatality-or life defined in terms of death. As Paz wrote in his introduction to the exhibition`s 700-page catalog:

``The process (rupture-reintegration-rupture-reintegration) can be taken as a leitmotif of the history of Mexico. The true name of this process is the will for life. Or, to be more precise, the will for survival whether faced with discord and defeat or mere uncertainty with the dawn of each new day. A will sometimes blind, sometimes lucid, but always secretly astir, even when it adopts the passive form of traditionalism.

``Will for life is will for form. Death, in its most visible and immediate expression, is the disintegration of form. Childhood and youth are the promise of form. Old age is the ruin of physical form; death, the fall into formlessness. That is why one of the most ancient and simple

manifestations of the will for life is art. The first thing man did upon discovering that he was mortal was to erect a tomb. Art began with the consciousness of death. The mausoleum, since ancient times, has been both an homage to the dead and a defiance of death: the body decays, turns to dust, but the monument remains. Form remains. We are threatened not only by death but by time itself, which makes, then unmakes us. Every sculpture, every painting, every poem, every song is a form animated by the will to survive time and its erosions.``

The art of the Olmecs, the earliest complex society in the Americas, is overwhelmingly funereal-the well-preserved carvings and sculptures attendant to pyramids and recently uncovered burial sites, but representing aspects of everyday life: here a stone toad, there a monument to Mayahuel, the goddess of drink.

Life and death are similarly juxtaposed in the more elaborate works of the Mayan and Aztec civilizations, builders of the first great cities in the Americas. There is an expression of cruelty, reminders of the rituals of human sacrifice that so perplexed Cortes and other Europeans.

``A psychoanalyst might attribute the severity of aggressive and self-punishing tendancies to the rigid puritanism of those societies,`` Paz wrote. ``But, in that case, how shall we explain the Roman circus in an age of sexual license?``

The Spaniards brought the Renaissance and later the Baroque to Mexican art. They came as crusaders as much as conquerors and as a result religious works engulf the historical in the Viceregal section of the exhibition. Juan Correa`s elaborate 17th Century folding screen, ``The Encounter of Cortes and Moctezuma,`` is almost biblical in tone and sweep. The carved figures of Christ in the section are shockingly visceral in their depictions of bloodshed and mutilation.

The gilded and painted wooden 17th Century sculpture of San Felipe de Jesus, a Franciscan missionary martyred in Japan in 1597, is a wrenching expression of sacrifice. He stands with arms uplifted though his body is pierced with two crossed spears. An early 18th Century statue of the Italian martyr St. Lucy shows her in the act of blinding herself with a dagger.

If the Indian was subsumed by the Spanish in colonial Mexican art, a distinctly national sensibility arising from the clash and mixture of the two cultures began to emerge and flourish in the 17th Century, carrying directly and ever more vividly into the 19th Century.

In this period, we find paintings European in form, style and technique but passionately Mexican in flavor, such as Felipe Gutierrez`s solemnly domestic ``The Farewell`` and Jose Obregon`s 1869 historical tableau ``The Discovery of Pulque`` (a potent liquor brewed from cactus).

It is a very Mexican, and not Spanish, face that stares so strongly at us from ``El Senor Amo`` (``The Master``), by an itinerant Mexican artist of the 1870s known only as G. Morales.

The full, raging power and passion of revolutionary will explodes in the works of the early 20th Century. Francisco Goitia, one of Mexico`s earliest modernists, gives us skeletal remains hanging from cactus and trees in his 1914 ``Landscape of Zacatecas I`` and ``Landscape of Zacatecas II.`` His 1916 ``The Witch`` is a visage reminiscent of and more terrifying than Edvard Munch`s famous ``The Scream.``

Jose Clemente Orozco`s 1927 ``Combat`` and 1931 ``Pancho Villa`` and

``Barricade`` capture years of suffering, violence and rage.

The 20th Century section, the most familiar and probably the most popular, with American viewers, contains more than 80 paintings by 14 Mexican artists, with predominant space given to the great muralists Clemente Orozco