COVER STORY : Unmasking Mexico’s Many Faces : ‘Splendors of Thirty Centuries’ arrives in L.A. next week; not just an art show, the exhibit is a national search for identity

“Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries,” opening next Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is by all measures a landmark event. Surveying 3,000 years of history and filling three vast display spaces with everything from ancient monumental sculpture to 20th-Century paintings, the 400-piece show is by far the biggest exhibition in the museum’s history.

“Splendors” attracted 585,000 visitors last fall and winter during its inaugural appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, ranking it with Van Gogh blockbusters. The San Antonio Museum of Art subsequently packed in 265,000 “Splendors” visitors in a four-month run, more than five times the museum’s usual attendance for a year.

Los Angeles’ reception promises to be even more enthusiastic. Long before truckloads of Mexican treasures arrived at the museum’s loading docks, the show had inspired two festivals of about 400 related events in Southern California. The museum received 1,000 calls during the first hour that it accepted members’ reservations for the specially ticketed exhibition.

In terms of public response, “Splendors” is already a smash hit. But Mexican business leaders who financed the exhibition and government leaders who have climbed on the bandwagon have more in mind than sending the crowds home happy. So do scholars and aficionados of Mexican art. So does Los Angeles’ Latino community.

Indeed, a nation’s aspirations are at stake and they encompass many facets. As well as being an art show, “Splendors” is a campaign for a more positive national image, a push for prosperity, the latest evidence of an ongoing quest for national identity and an effort to inspire respect by educating North Americans about Mexico’s cultural heritage.

Every faction seems to have its own agenda for the show. Yet it would seem that they agree on one thing: If “Splendors” is a success in the long run, it will be the last Mexican exhibition of its kind.

The show is an undeniably triumphant symbol of Mexico’s magnificent cultural heritage, but it is also an indicator of Mexico’s second-class status. “Splendors” belongs to a genre of exhibitions--typically titled “Treasures”--that generally come from nations whose art is little known and under-appreciated by North Americans and Europeans.

Several critics have written about the futility of trying to round up so much history in one exhibition--and the implications of doing so.

“The whole idea--whatever perfunctory official apologies accompany it--of squeezing the art history of an entire nation of nearly 90,000,000 people and three distinct civilizations into part of the floor of the Met seems a little sad, if not absurd. Would the Italians have sat still for a few galleries each of imperial Rome, the Renaissance and the industrial age?” Newsweek critic Peter Plagens mused in a review of the New York show.

“In a sense, this exhibition is an impossible task: you cannot boil down so vast a visual culture and ship it to a museum, especially when so much of the essential evidence consists of immovable buildings and their ornament. One silver altar frontal or a gilded retablo, no matter how impressive in itself, cannot possibly duplicate the devotional frenzy of encrustation that gives Mexican Baroque its special character, any more than a few Chacmool figures and feathered serpents can convey the impact of the step pyramids, ramps and avenues of Chichen Itza or El Tajin,” Robert Hughes wrote in Time.

In the new world order of international goodwill, economic equality and multicultural education envisioned by the exhibition’s supporters and enthusiasts, there would be no sequel to “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries.” There would be no need for Mexico to repeatedly “introduce” and ingratiate itself to its powerful northern neighbor. Mexico would have a shining image, well polished by trade and tourism.

In that ideal world, scholars would have turned their energies toward researching and presenting specialized areas of Mexico’s cultural heritage to a public that already has the big picture. Mexican art would be presented in much the same way--and at least as often--as, say, the art of France, Italy or Germany.

Can “Splendors” effect such changes? The question is worth considering because the stakes are so high and expectations are so pointed in Los Angeles, with its Mexican heritage and huge Latino population.

Yet the very notion that an art exhibition has been given such a daunting task has angered such commentators as the Nation’s George Black, who contended in a an article in The Times, that “Splendors” is “a lavish piece of public relations, designed to promote a different image of Mexico as both a timeless civilization and a modern, forward-looking trading partner.”

Noting that Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has promoted the show and that the Friends of the Arts of Mexico Foundation--the show’s sponsor--is the creation of Emilio Azcarraga, chairman of Mexico’s Televisa corporation, critics have characterized “Splendors” as a sanitized version of Mexico’s art history, tailored to fit Salinas’ reform-minded government. Others have charged that the exhibition was timed to bolster Mexico’s bid for a free-trade agreement with the United States.

“Historically, there is no truth to this,” says Miguel Angel Corzo, who coordinated the exhibition during a 2 1/2-year term as president of the Los Angeles-based Friends of the Arts of Mexico Foundation. “The exhibition was accepted as a concept by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987, well before Salinas’ candidacy. All the initial preparations and lists of objects were made during the administration of President De la Madrid.”

In 1989, a month after Salinas had come into office, Corzo and representatives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art met with the new president, but they presented him with “a fait accompli,” says Corzo, now director of the Getty Conservation Institute. “There was no input from Salinas in terms of the objects or the venues.” Salinas endorsed the exhibition enthusiastically, Corzo says, “but if there was any idea of a free-trade agreement, it was only in his mind. There was no talk about it.”

The Mexican government didn’t get into the act until 1990, with the formation of “Mexico: A Work of Art,” a festival of arts and business-oriented events organized to promote trade and tourism, Corzo says.

As for the motivations of Azcarraga--who bankrolled “Splendors” through Televisa and rallied additional support from various Mexican exporters--he is a patron of the arts who “has a great sense of his own country” and a strong desire to present its best face to the rest of the world, Corzo says.

Although “Splendors” has come under heavy critical fire for the forces that are said to have propelled it, Mexico is hardly unique in its use of art as a diplomatic emissary. Indeed, many people in the art world scoff at the hypocrisy of singling out “Splendors” for severe scrutiny.

“So what else is new?” asks Marion Oettinger, curator of folk and Latin American art at the San Antonio Museum of Art. “What do you think the (United States Information Agency) is doing when it sends exhibitions to foreign countries? When there’s a World’s Fair and we have a pavilion, the art shown there is a statement of how we want the rest of the world to see us.”

Still others contend that Mexican art is more inherently or overtly political than the art of North America, so it naturally lends itself to being used for extra-art purposes. Art in Mexico “has always been political in the most basic sense, a common language conveying commonly held attitudes about what the world is and who runs it (or, in many cases, who should be running it),” Michael Ennis wrote in Texas Monthly.

But this argument seems to have little support in the art community. “All great public art is political,” says Virginia Fields, LACMA’s curator of pre-Columbian art and coordinator of the show in Los Angeles.

Corzo agrees: “One can’t eliminate politics from art any more than one can eliminate politics from life, but I don’t see that Mexico is different from other countries.”

In any event, “Splendors” is not the first big show of Mexican art to arrive in the United States with sociopolitical baggage. “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” was reportedly brought to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1940 by museum President Nelson A. Rockefeller because it suited his purposes as coordinator of the federal Office of Inter-American Affairs.

Among more recent examples, consider introductions to the catalogue for “Treasures of Mexico,” a traveling exhibition from Mexican national museums, which appeared in 1978 at the County Museum of Art.

“We are convinced that only culture, and with it law and peace, brings peoples and nations together. . . . In culture, through its diverse manifestations, there is the seed of universal understanding which unites all men in the ideal and in the respect for the rights of others,” wrote Santiago Roel Garcia, secretary of foreign affairs. “Mexico presents to the people of the United States a sample of its culture . . . with the desire that the knowledge of it will strengthen understanding and with it the fraternal friendship that should unite our two countries.”

Armand Hammer, whose foundation financed “Treasures of Mexico”--at a time when he was publicly promoting better relations with Mexico as a means of tapping into its oil reserves--echoed Roel Garcia’s sentiments. “I have long felt that art is a universal emissary speaking to each one of us; enabling us better to understand and communicate individually, nationally, and internationally,” Hammer wrote.

Mexican art seems to have carried a heavy sociopolitical burden since the U.S. revival of Mexican art in the 1920s, but curators tend to take the situation in stride. “It’s not an issue,” Oettinger says. “You take the good with the bad. This exhibition is not the only face of Mexico, but it is a face and it’s important.”

“I’ve thought about all the purposes the exhibition is supposed to serve--educational, social, political. If there are many reasons for the exhibition, it certainly can accommodate all those reasons,” Fields says.

One of those purposes is Mexicans’ ongoing search for an identity, and again “Splendors” is not the first show to address that issue.

“We Mexicans have not always clearly understood the nature of our identity. After all, the Mexican cultural debate carried out in the 20th Century is a part of the gigantic effort made in an attempt to explain the painful Latin American mystery of whether we are barbarians or civilized human beings,” Jorge Alberto Lozoya of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in the catalogue for “Images of Mexico,” a massive exhibition that toured Europe in 1987-88. (Its only U.S. stop was in Dallas.)

Although it is far from the first sweeping survey of Mexican art to appear in the United States, Corzo says “Splendors” is the first to assiduously track the continuity of Mexican art history with unique, authentic objects. The major periods of Mexico’s cultural heritage are displayed in four chronologically arranged sections: pre-Columbian, vice regal or colonial, 19th Century and 20th Century. In contrast, the show’s closest predecessor, “Masterworks of Mexican Art” (which stopped at LACMA in 1963-64 during a four-year international tour), included replicas and presented the art in a series of isolated periods, he says.

While Mexican and Latino visitors make connections with their heritage, other viewers may be faced with art that they marvel at but struggle to understand.

Mexican Pulitzer Prize-winning author Octavio Paz, who has written essays for “Splendors” and “Treasures of Mexico” catalogues, characterizes Mexican art as having a “radical strangeness” that stems from having grown up in isolation from Europe.

Attempting to explain that “strangeness,” Corzo says that people from Western European cultures may have difficulty understanding pre-Hispanic Mexican art because they are accustomed to “art that was made to convey a sense of beauty and excellence.” In contrast, “pre-Hispanic art in Mexico was created to show the fierceness and strength of deities. A cosmic vision is manifest in pre-Hispanic figures.”

The colonial period represents “a transition between the pre-Hispanic way of looking at things and the European way of looking at things,” he says, citing the 16th-Century “Atrial Cross” from Mexico City’s Basilica de Guadalupe as an example. The large size of the thorns in the center of the 11-foot stone cross retains the strength of pre-Hispanic art on an imported European form.

“The 19th-Century art may seem somewhat strange because it is naive and highly localized,” Corzo continues, “and the muralists’ work is really strange because of the strength of its plasticity, the fullness of the volumes and the intensity of the colors.”

But generalizations about Mexican art are problematic, Corzo says. “There’s a continuity in Mexican art, but it’s difficult to see it as a whole.”

“There’s enormous cultural and linguistic diversity brought together under a broad theme in this exhibition,” Fields agrees. “You can see the process of contact and synthesis, all the differences of style, medium and iconography that are particular to different regions. This art was very much a product of the environment and culture, and the landscape is incredibly diverse--from tropical lowlands to mountain plateaus.”

Both she and Corzo believe the biggest surprise for visitors will be the art from Mexico’s colonial period, which is often dismissed as European and therefore uninteresting.

“Everyone knows pre-Hispanic art, if only from Kahlua advertisements. Most people who come to the show already know about the muralists and now Frida Kahlo is all the rage, so there’s nothing new there,” Corzo says. “We made a determined effort to represent the colonial period because it’s very important in Mexico’s development and it hasn’t been given its due. We have an incredible variety of objects--paintings, garments, altars, retablos, furniture and ceramics. They show the ability of Mexican craftsmen and artists not only to learn unfamiliar forms and to excel, but to give them a different twist and maintain their great sense of color.”

Fields expects the exhibition to break stereotypes about Mexican art as visitors see the great depth of history set before them in the Anderson Building and two floors of the Hammer Building. Public education, then, is on her agenda for the exhibition. So are future exhibitions that might be helped by contacts made during the organization of “Splendors.”

At the moment, two more Mexican shows are on the books at LACMA and neither is a 3,000-year survey:

* “The Ancient Americas: Art From Sacred Landscapes,” organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, will go on view in 1993.

* “Painting the Maya Universe: Royal Ceramics From the Classic Period,” co-organized by the county museum and Duke University Museum of Art, is scheduled for 1994.

“We hope that this exhibition will elicit enough interest to lead to other shows that are not global,” Corzo says, noting that the colonial period and contemporary art are likely areas of future exploration.

He doubts that “Splendors” will lead to a rush of tourism, however. “People will probably still come to Mexico for the sun, the beaches and the margaritas. That’s fine and dandy, but we want them to know there is another aspect to our country. For more than 30 centuries, Mexico has had a social structure that has produced a cultural heritage with a special character,” Corzo says.

“The news about Mexico tends to be about drugs, illegals, corruption, debt and the price of oil. We want to present Mexico in another context--an aesthetic context that shows the importance of Mexico’s distinctive culture.”

Ticket Information for ‘Splendors’

Special tickets are required for “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries”: They are issued for a specific day and time, guaranteeing entry to the exhibition throughout that hour; visitors may remain in the exhibition as long as they wish. The exhibition hours are Tue.-Thur., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fri., 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Tickets are available now at all Ticketmaster outlets (service charges will be added) and will be available beginning Oct. 6 at the museum box office. Tickets are $5; $3.50 for students and senior citizens with I.D.; $1 for children 6-17, and free for children under 6.

Information: Ticketmaster: (213) 480-7676; museum ticket office (213) 857-6110.

The museum also will have three companion exhibitions on view: “Diego Rivera and His Century: Mexican Prints and Drawings from the Collection;” “Manuel Alvarez Bravo: A Portfolio of Photographs;” and “Young Mexican Artists: Selected by the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City,” featuring paintings, collages, sculptures, photographs and tapestries by eight contemporary artists.