ART : Same Show, Different Splendors : ‘Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries’ arrives in the land whose art it celebrates minus, for legal reasons, about 20% of the artworks seen in U.S

The magnum art exhibition “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” is now on view at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MARCO) here, but it’s not quite the same show that toured New York, San Antonio and Los Angeles in 1990 and ’91. The differences between “Splendors” in its American and Mexican showings arises because pieces from foreign collections--about 20% of the American exhibition--are not displayed here.

The missing pieces include such singular modern works as David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “Echo of a Scream,” property of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Diego Rivera’s “Flower Day,” from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. These and other works were not lent for the Mexican showing because “they weren’t requested,” says John Buchanan, registrar of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, which organized the exhibition that toured the United States.

“We feel that it wouldn’t be ethical to ask for pieces without our being able to guarantee that they’d be returned to their owners,” says Fernando Trevino Lozano, director of Monterrey’s year-old contemporary art museum.

Fear of a grand art theft? Not exactly. Sponsors of the current exhibition--MARCO, the Mexican National Institute for Anthropology and History and the Mexican Fine Arts Institute--did not request the loan of foreign-held pieces for legal, and what amount to bureaucratic, reasons.

Mexico’s 1972 law governing cultural patrimony declares as property of the nation all pre-Hispanic artifacts and most colonial works of art. It also allows the work of contemporary artists to be appended to the national patrimony by decree. Works by several artists have been included in the patrimony in this way. Works that have been decreed to be national treasures, but which were legally acquired under the jurisdiction of prior laws, are not outside the scope of the new law. To enjoy immunity from seizure, these works must be registered with government authorities.

“The presumptive owners of national and artistic monuments have the obligation to declare them to the authorities. If they don’t do that, or haven’t, those works are subject to confiscation,” explains Jorge Martinez of the Mexican National Institute for Anthropology and History.

Some, if not most, foreign owners of pieces shown on the American tour of “Splendors” have been legalized under the 1972 law. Harvard’s Peabody Museum, for example, claims to have legitimized the Mexican objects in its collections of pre-Hispanic artifacts. But Mexico’s cultural patrimony law also provides for the requisition of suspect works, for up to 90 days, by decree. Had foreign-owned pieces been brought to Mexico for exhibition, they could have wound up ensnared, if only while legitimizing documents were shown and clarifications made. Knowing the ways of their bureaucrats, the Mexican show’s organizers decided not to tempt.

It is in the modern, or 19th and 20th centuries, where MARCO’s version of “Splendors” is most radically different from the exhibition that toured the United States. “The Wounded Deer (The Little Deer),” a 1948 oil by Frida Kahlo that belongs to socialite Carolyn Farb of Houston, is not here. “Frida and Diego Rivera,” a wedding portrait painted by Kahlo in San Francisco in 1931 and now owned by that city’s Museum of Modern Art, also did not make the MARCO showing.

Their places have been taken by Mexican-owned works, some of which were, ironically, not allowed to leave the country for the U.S. showings. Works by Kahlo seen here, but not North-of-the-border, include “The Duality of My Existence,” owned by a private collector in Mexico City, and “The Two Fridas,” regarded as Kahlo’s masterwork. The painting permanently resides in Mexico City’s Fine Arts Museum.

“This is the kind of work that would not have been allowed to leave Mexico, because of its importance to the collection of the fine arts museum,” notes MARCO director Trevino. (The painting was allowed to travel in 1978 as part of “Treasures of Mexico,” which was organized by the Armand Hammer Foundation and seen at LACMA. The work, along with many other Kahlo paintings, has since been declared a national treasure.)

Other foreign-owned works that were seen in the United States but that are not in the Mexico exhibition include Diego Rivera’s 1925 “The Tortilla Maker” (owned by the UC San Francisco School of Medicine) and his 1928 “Dance in Tehuantepec” (owned by the IBM Corp.). The latter was replaced with an oil of a market scene from the same town, painted a year later. A 1940 self-portrait of Jose Clemente Orozco (owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art) is replaced with a 1931 version.

The most impressive absence from the pre-Hispanic era is a 3 1/2-inch-tall golden bell in the form of a warrior in battle regalia. The piece, of unknown provenance but estimated to be about 500 years old, has been returned to Leningrad’s Heritage Museum. Also missing is the so-called “Madrid Stela,” actually a wing of a Maya throne, which a military officer pilfered from Mexico in 1787. It now resides in Spain’s Museum of the Americas.

Also falling out of the current exhibition is a legless 7th-Century stone carving--ironically given the name “Standing Figure”--which was bequeathed in 1979 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Nelson Rockefeller. It has been replaced by a statuette from the National Institute for Anthropology and History. Two replacements were found for a stone monument to the Aztec deity Huehueteotl, identified in showings as a brazier, that the St. Louis Art Museum loaned to the American venues for “Splendors.”

The colonial section suffers little change from the U.S. showing, with fewer than half a dozen pieces missing. Most of the colonial pieces available for the American tour came from Mexico City’s Franz Mayer Museum, which has lent them to the Mexican organizers. The MARCO exhibition has been enriched by new pieces from national collections. Among the additions are a stone sculpture of a mutt, in a pre-Hispanic style, but obviously a product of the conquest. (There were no mutts in Mexico before the Spanish came, only dogs of that species that is called the Mexican hairless.)

Also included for the first time are three 17th-Century feather paintings, whose colors, sadly, haven’t fared well under the influence of time and sunlight, and four 18th-Century works known as the Tlaxcala linens, which present presumptive portraits of 114 indigenous warriors and provide a narrative depiction of the battles to capture Mexico City and its environs. But, perhaps in the style of the times, all 114 warriors have identical faces, even identical feathers in their heads, and the mural’s depictions of Hernan Cortes tell us little about the man who, more than any other, influenced Mexico’s life.

Another telling aspect of “Splendors” in Mexico is the lack of political work--a major criticism of its American incarnation. “Splendors” pretends to be above political conflict, yet one of the outstanding features of Mexican contemporary art is the emergence of what may be called Opposition Art--a form almost unknown to the past and distinguishable, not so much by materials or style, as by content.

Mexico’s pre-Hispanic art was largely of a civic or religious nature, commissioned by religious and political chieftains. It does not evidence protest or even resentment of, for example, the somewhat overbearing Aztec empire. Nor are countervailing themes to be found in Mexico’s colonial art, which was produced under the surveillance of the Inquisition and various viceroys. But Opposition Art--usually, denouncing domestic inequality and also the sins of Uncle Sam--is the strongest thematic current in Mexico’s 20th-Century art, especially in the period between 1920 and 1960. Mexico’s best-known painters, muralists Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, may have been grand masters on purely technical grounds, but it’s hard to make a case for their talent without reference to their political work. “Splendors” includes “Cain in the Unites States,” a 1947 Siqueiros oil about racial violence that calls to mind the Rodney G. King beating videotape. The painting was not part of the American sojourn, but besides this work there are no socially conscious additions to the exhibitions.

“Splendors” was conceived and, in the United States, partially financed by the Friends of the Arts of Mexico, a group that includes several Mexican exporters. If a dearth of politically charged art is understandable in foreign markets, it is not to be expected in a domestic showing like that at MARCO, for which more than five dozen substitute works were recruited--mostly as loans from the Mexican government, the former patron, and today, the world’s most important collector of the Opposition genre. Given the origins of “Splendors,” the dearth of Opposition Art cannot be called a purge. But it is an exclusion, and the exclusion seems intentional.

“ ‘Splendors’ is a collection of pieces of transcendental and historical significance, not of works that had to do with only what was happening in Mexico in the ‘30s and ‘40s,” says MARCO director Trevino.

Over the past decade, the force of Mexican protest movements has declined, he says, and so, too, has interest in Opposition Art.

“Mexico is passing through an stage of re-establishing its own image,” Trevino explains. “The human and interior content are more important than narration, and art in ‘Splendors’ is valued as art, not as politics or morals.”

“Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” remains at Monterrey’s Museo de Arte Contemporaneo until Aug. 2 and then moves to Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts.