ART REVIEW : A Fiesta of Mexican Folk Treasures

This fall, Mexican culture will be the centerpiece of art-world L.A. The massive survey exhibition “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” opens at the County Museum of Art Oct. 6 and acts as the hub for a citywide celebration of everything from the country’s ancient civilizations to its food.

Two just-opened smaller exhibitions at the Craft and Folk Art Museum and Cal State Northridge act as overture to the oncoming hubbub. It seems entirely apt that they should be devoted to the Mexican folk arts.

Anyone who’s ever been to Mexico City knows the nation has its cosmopolitan side. The Paseo de la Reforma rolls away from Chapultepec Park towards the Zocalo. It is remindful of Paris’ Champs Elysees. And for good reason. It was ordered built by the French Emperor Maximilian for his homesick wife Carlota before the Napoleonic puppet pair were deposed by Benito Juarez.

The street is still lovely, pollution notwithstanding, and full of doggedly enduring working people who seem capable of moving pianos with nothing more than a strong back and a strap across the forehead. They throng the park on Sunday afternoons festooned in threadbare finery, celebratory in spite of poverty. These are the folks who make the soul of Mexico and--mainly outside the cities--fashion its traditional craft objects.

In this country, we tend to associate folk art with loners and eccentric outsiders. One look at these two exhibitions is sufficient reminder that that’s not the way it works in Mexico. There the crafts are practiced as an integral part of communal life. Artisans fashion masks for holy day celebrations, toys for the kids and objects of household use. The activity extends into a cottage industry beamed at the tourist trade where the objects can become lifelessly repetitious. Even at that, anybody who’s ever shopped for Christmas mementos at a central market knows how the exercise of a bit of discretion can turn up modest objects of great charm and surprising power. Not for nothing have mainstream artists--like the ceramic sculptor Kenneth Price--been moved and influenced by them.

Both exhibitions come from the Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection. The 135 works on view at the museum, “Folk Treasures of Mexico” (sponsored by the Los Angeles Times/Nuestro Tiempo through a grant from the Times Mirror Foundation), now reside in the collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art. Its curator, Marion Oettinger, says he tried to select pieces that escape the tourist traps. A good percentage of it has that extra charge of expressive energy that nudges it across the invisible line that exists between the entertainment of craft and the insight of art. One notable example is “Gourd in the Shape of a Crane,” a piece that Brancusi might have admired.

Among the masks is a jaguar head and a wooden depiction of a grotesque Centurion that would cause a collector of African or Oceanic art to do a double take. A set of burnished clay molds for papier-mache masks have the vivid character of the cast from a rustic, fairy-tale opera. A series of peasant clay figures by members of the Aguilar family are as startlingly direct as the fence posts where Rockefeller found them displayed.

Mexico is awash in its own long history and it echoes through the show. A series of paintings on “The Stations of the Cross” from around 1850 recalls the colonial era when indigenous artists were set to work creating images based on European models. The resulting hybrid style resembles nothing so much as religious painting of the late Middle Ages with its squat, chunky figures and aura of devotional humility.

The whole historical spectrum is suggested. A 19th-Century portrait of a woman in mourning brings us into the modern era. Such work certainly influenced Frida Kahlo.

An artist of recent times rockets us back to Mexico’s ancient days. Teodora Blanco was a ceramic sculptor who died in 1981. She made little bell-shaped fantasy figures. They’re a trifle too decorative but they get the mind into the more lyric moments of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” One imaginative work makes a figure out of three stacked heads. Many are accompanied by small animals that act as magical familiars. Blanco hints at both surrealism and the clay figures of ancient West Mexico.

Represented in both exhibitions, Blanco’s work looks a trifle stronger in Northridge. The Cal State show also leans further to the open-market, useful-crafts end of the spectrum. Installed to suggest an outdoor bazaar, this selection of 350 pieces is from another beneficiary--the Mexican Museum of San Francisco.

It’s a regular cornucopia of articles not unfamiliar in many a Southland household. There are heavy blown glass wine goblets in cobalt blue and pale teal green, a selection of huaraches like the ones some of us wore as teen-agers, as well as several varieties of painted chests. Ceramics range from exuberantly floral to seriously earthy. At that there is aesthetic admiration to be kindled in such touches as a jade-green glaze that lends its objects both weight and transparency.

Both shows suggest the extension of the influence of Mexican folk art into the life of the Southland. At the museum there is a variation on the traditional home altar by L.A. artist Frank Romero and another that will be arranged by various artists over the run of the show. At Northridge, Romero has installed an elaborately painted low rider. Unfortunately it was not in place for viewing at a press preview. Too bad. It should be a spectacular example of what happens when Mexican folk art meets the L.A. hot-rod aesthetic.

If there is a shared disappointment in these shows, it is the way they tend to muffle one of the most original and compelling characteristics of Mexican popular art. The rather macabre skeletons and spooks of the Mexican Day of the Dead reflect a culture that appears to live with mortality on familiar and almost humorous terms. There is wisdom in treating death as a normal part of life so it is unfortunate to find it in such short supply here. On the other hand there is nothing wrong with good cheer.

* Craft and Folk Art Museum, May Co., 6087 Wilshire Blvd., to Dec. 29, (213) 937-5544. Closed Mondays.

* Cal State Northridge, Fine Arts Building, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge, to Oct. 28, (818) 885-2226. Closed Sundays.