3000 Years of Mexican Art : Landmark exhibit of works ranging from pre-Columbian to mid-20th Century opens next week at New York’s Metropolitan Museum and comes to L.A. in 1991

As Hernan Cortes’ small army neared the Aztecan capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, they arrived at Iztapalapa, a hilltop village that gave the Spaniards their first panoramic view of the sprawling New World metropolis in the valley of Mexico. Cortes and his men numbered only 400. The city was the seat of the expansive Aztec empire, and had a population of a half million.

As one chronicler in Cortes’ band described it, “We saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land . . . we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water . . . And some of our soldiers asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream . . . all was cemented and very splendid with many kinds of stone monuments with pictures on them, which gave much to think about.”

It is in such moments of confounded awe--on the eve of great destruction--that Mexican art, as we know it, had its ambiguous birth. For finally, the conquest of Mexico was as much a triumph of the eye as it was a victory of the sword and gun.

For many years to come, the conquistadores’ way of seeing the world would be the only true one, and they quickly set about remaking much of the fantastic, alien world they encountered in their own image, as a “New Spain.”

The chronicler, writing 30 years after the events, concludes his account of the dazzling first sight of Tenochtitlan by noting that, “Of all these wonders that I then beheld today all is overthrown and lost, nothing left standing.”

Now, 471 years later, at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, preparations are nearly complete for a new Mexican conquest. Opening Oct. 10 is “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries,” the most significant exhibition of art from Mexico to appear in New York in 50 years.

From New York City, the nearly 400 objects in the show will later travel exclusively to the two Chicano capitals of Mexamerica, appearing first at the San Antonio Museum of Art (April 6-Aug. 4, 1991), and then at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Sept. 29-Dec. 29, 1991). For Los Angeles, it will be the most important public presentation of Mexican art since the 1978 “Treasures of Mexico” show, sponsored by the Armand Hammer Foundation at the County Museum.

In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art,” the first major exhibition of its kind to be shown in the United States (see accompanying story). And in 1970, the Metropolitan Museum hosted “Before Cortes,” an historic show of the pre-Columbian sculpture of Mesoamerica.

But the Met show is perhaps the most comprehensive collection of ancient, colonial and modern Mexican artistry ever assembled in the United States. In scale, it is the largest show the museum has presented since “The Vatican Collection: The Papacy and Art” in 1985.

Currently, designers, lighting engineers, and workmen at the Metropolitan Museum are finishing the specially constructed, maze-like exhibition gallery as some of the pieces are being installed.

According to the show’s four co-curators, all members of the museum staff, featured works include Mayan and Aztecan sculptures, early post-conquest manuscripts, popular religious and devotional objects, costumes, graphics, and paintings, ranging in date of origin from 1000 BC to AD 1950.

Amassing such an enormous grouping of objects is a logistics triumph that has been three years in the making, with pieces drawn from 41 public and 24 private collections in Mexico, the United States and Europe.

The principal financial supporter of the multi-million dollar event is a newly formed, Los Angeles-based foundation, “Friends of the Arts of Mexico,” which in turn is the brainchild of Emilio Azcarraga, the chairman of Mexico’s Televisa network. In 1987, Azcarraga approached Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum, with the idea for a comprehensive show of Mexican art.

Although “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” is its most high-profile undertaking to date, the organization--which has a mandate to promote appreciation of Mexico’s artistic and cultural heritage in this country--has already sponsored a touring exhibition of work by young Mexican artists, as well as efforts to preserve the Rock Art of Baja California and the David Alfaro Siquieros “America Tropical” mural on Olvera Street.

John McDonald, exhibition coordinator of the Metropolitan show, and curator for the 19th-Century section, modestly sums up the collection that has been gathered for the October opening in New York City as “more than a roundup of the usual suspects.”

“We wanted to do a comprehensive exhibition. With 50 years since the last major show, it was long enough for people to forget, for generations to come and go and not have a chance to see this work. It will be an eye-opener for a New York audience.”

As befits an imperial exhibition of this sort, the scope of cultural periods and styles to be represented in the show is impressive, offering the North American public a rare opportunity to see under one roof a spectrum of Mexican artistic expression that would be difficult to match in weeks of museum touring in Mexico City.

Included in the pre-Hispanic section, which will comprise one-third of the exhibition, will be one of the colossal stone heads of the Olmec people, who came before the more familiar Mayan and Aztecan civilizations. The giant heads, discovered in La Venta and San Lorenzo, Tabasco on the Gulf Coast beginning in the 1920s, depict faces that appear distinctly Negroid and have caused many to speculate on the possibility of ancient contact between the peoples of Mesoamerica and Africa.

From the ancient Mayan city of Palenque, there will be an exquisitely naturalistic sculptured stucco head with an unforgettable penetrating, yet tranquil gaze. Julie Jones, curator for this section of the exhibition, explains that recent breakthroughs in cracking the Mayan hieroglyphic language allow us to now identify this figure as the king Pacal II, who ruled Palenque during during its 7th-Century heyday.

According to Jones, the pre-Columbian portion of the show will not just be “the son of ‘Before Cortes,’ “--the Metropolitan’s 1970 show--but will reflect the expansion of knowledge related to the ancient cultures of Mexico that has taken place over the last 50 years, with such “meaningful digging” as the 1978 excavation of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City.

The cultures of civilizations before the conquest will be further explored through artifacts of the great cities of Izapa, Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, Palenque, El Tajin, Chichen Itza and Tenochtitlan.

With the mixing of Spanish and indigenous blood after the conquest, Mexican art begins to reflect the mastery and subtle transformation of European artistic styles, along with an abiding rootedness in the ritual power and visual drama of the Pre-Hispanic cultures. A good deal of the rest of the show will illustrate this extraordinary tension which is the veritable reactor core of the Mexican tradition.

“Rather than finding continuity,” observes Johanna Hecht, curator for the Colonial--or Viceregal--element of the collection, “I would say there is a kind of attitude or historical sensibility that carries through. Aztecs attempted to identify with the Toltecs. And the criollos and mestizos come to do the same with the Aztecs.”

Sensitive to advance criticism of her section by some art critics, Hecht insists she is not presenting “conquistador art.” Indeed, there will be an anonymous miniature folk sculpture of St. James the Moor Killer, ironically depicted as a conquistador. Also, Jose de Alcibar’s somber 1777 religious portrait of the newly ordained 22-year-old nun Sor Maria Ignacia de la Sangre, which out-Baroques the Spanish master Velazquez with a dizzying excess of floral ornamentation and fetishized Christian iconography that comes close to being neo-Aztecan kitsch.

A stunning 16th-Century mosaic image of the Virgen de Guadalupe in the show stands six feet high and is executed entirely in mother-of-pearl inlay on wood, in a frame adorned with cracked shells. This artisanal object exudes a primal aura that resonates with the presence of the Madonna’s Indian alter-image, Tonantzin, the Aztecan goddess who had been worshipped, before the Spanish came, on the hill where Juan Diego had his visions of the Virgen.

Sadly, because of lending restrictions, this mosaic is among several objects that will only appear in the Metropolitan Museum’s installation of the show, depriving Los Angeles and San Antonio of potentially one of the most popular objects in the assembled collection. (This omission may yet lead to the first time someone comes to the Metropolitan Museum on a sacred pilgrimage--a number of years ago, a replica from Mexico of the Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos attracted thousands of San Antonio worshipers to a barrio chapel to view and pray to the small figure.)

With the works to be shown in the 19th- and 20th-Century sections of the exhibition, another current of the complex Mexican psyche will be evident.

Rebellion and the struggle for independence are now almost genetically ingrained in the Mexican national consciousness. For many artists, this has provoked passionate efforts to transcend the Eurocentric vision of the conquistador that marked modern Mexico’s beginning and achieve a completely native aesthetic.

The Metropolitan show promises an array of explosive self-portraits that testify to this inner struggle among Mexican artists. From the smoldering stare of Hermenegildo Bustos painted in 1891, to the exotic personal mythology of Frida Kahlo’s “Self Portrait With Monkeys,” and the fiery iconoclasm of muralist David Alfaro Siquieros’ self-portrait, where, with outstretched arm in front of him, the artist appears to be tearing at the canvas, attempting to escape, or perhaps, to pull the viewer in. All of these paintings, and other work by masters such as Jose Maria Velasco, Jose Guadalupe Posada, Diego Rivera and the major muralists, and Rufino Tamayo, testify to the crucible of self-exploration that has been the forge of revolutionary change in Mexico for the last two centuries.

Much of the museum and foundation literature describing the monumental show emphasizes the theme of the Mexican tradition’s grandeur and continuity, offering the images and objects of the massive exhibition as a collective symbol of modern Mexico’s rich cultural patrimony.

“Mexico has one of the most ancient, continuous, and important artistic heritages of any region of the Americas,” observes museum director Philippe de Montebello in one exhibition press release. “As our neighbor and friend it should be better known to us.”

The show itself will essentially be organized around the history, and prehistory, of the modern Mexican state. With one-third of the exhibits devoted to the pre-Columbian civilizations, and another third devoted to the colonial period, the remaining work will represent the Independence and Revolutionary periods of the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. The latest work dates from 1950.

Altogether, from Mayan stelae to Diego Rivera, the assemblage approximates a family history of what Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari--in another piece of exhibition literature--calls “La identidad nacional” (The national identity). The President’s office, along with the Ministry of Tourism, has gotten into the act with a festival of events, “Mexico: A Work of Art,” adding yet another level of public relations patina to the Metropolitan show.

Unfortunately, the new exhibition’s rather safe conceptual scheme mimics the general outline of the 1940 MOMA show, as well as the 1978 exhibition at LACMA. Consequently, important recent experiences in Mexico’s history, from the demise of the idealism of the muralists, to the 1968 student massacre at Tlateloco, crippling international debt, and the devastating Mexico City earthquake, will go unnoted. And we will have to wait for the next major Mexico show to hope for a more thematically reflective and syncretic approach to the profound questions Mexico’s traditions present.

Referring to the omission of contemporary work, exhibition coordinator McDonald explains, “If we had tried to do it justice, we would’ve had to nibble back on other sections--or break up the show with a staircase to another floor.” (The exhibit also contains no folk art, which was included in the 1940 MOMA show.)

While this artistic Circus Maximus of things Mexican is likely to win a new host of aficionados in New York City, it will be interesting to follow the Metropolitan show’s impact in San Antonio and Los Angeles, where the rich array of objects and images may yet rekindle some of the nationalist artistic sentiment that marked so much Chicano art of the Movimiento period through the ‘60s and ‘70s. At a time when young Mexican Americans are exploring new expressions of their own “root aesthetic” in rap, performance art, and film, such exposure could add heat and light to their mounting critical mass.

Whatever shortcomings or exaggerations may exist in the show’s interstices, the exhibits, along with a season of related lectures and films, will compose a not-to-be-missed tableau of the ages of a nation. Of course, there would seem to be limits to what can be shipped and seen in this country. “You can’t transport Teotihuacan or Monte Alban or a baroque church,” muses McDonald.

Still, in “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” we are likely to glimpse the deeper streams of Mexican identity, too often overlooked in media coverage of the country’s Byzantine political system, its poverty- and debt-burdened economy, and the perennial concern with the flow of undocumented workers across the U.S. border.