ART REVIEW : ‘Mexico’ Show Not a Pretty Picture : Exceptional Work Lost in Muddled Photo Exhibition

“Mexico Through Foreign Eyes: 1850-1990” is among the sillier shows of the season to date. A sentimental travelogue masquerading as a photography exhibition, it seems less interested in examining works of art than in selling a mythologized picture of Mexico.

Curators Carole Naggar and Fred Ritchin, hired to organize the show and assemble its bilingual catalogue for the independent Santa Monica exhibitions firm Pilar Perez and Associates, selected more than 180 photographs by more than four dozen American and European visitors to Mexico since the middle of the 19th Century. Among them are such major figures as William Henry Jackson and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as such compelling, if lesser-known, artists and photojournalists as Ellen Auerbach and Alex Webb. After stops in Mexico City, Monterrey and New York, it is currently on view at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Westwood.

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The organizers claim that throughout the medium’s 150-year history, Mexico has been the site of more artistic breakthroughs for visiting American and European photographers than any other country. Neither the show nor the book offers much to substantiate the claim, but who knows? Maybe they’re right.

What’s perplexing is the nature of the assertion as an organizing principle for an exhibition. It suggests something magical, mysterious and enduring about Mexico, something so unusually compelling that over the course of 150 years it galvanized the art of visiting photographers as radically different from one another as France’s Cartier-Bresson and Italy’s Tina Modotti, or as sharply distinctive as the incisive chronicler of urban children’s lives, Helen Levitt, and the stark abstractionist of city walls, Aaron Siskind.

In brief catalogue essays each curator pursues an aura characterizing Mexico--or characterizing many outsiders’ views of it--that is potent enough to have transformed the artistic outlook of widely disparate photographers. Naggar finds it in the Mexican embodiment of “otherness” for some Europeans and North Americans; Ritchin finds it in Mexico’s particular sense of time.

Yet any search for such a magic bullet capable of transforming the work of perceptive artists makes little sense. It also does a disservice to their art. You’re encouraged to stop considering the acute specificity of a photographer’s work, but that is what makes any art finally worth looking at. Instead, you’re coaxed to search for a missing common denominator that makes Cartier-Bresson and Modotti, Levitt and Siskind somehow alike.

Maybe it’s something in the water?

“Mexico Through Foreign Eyes” might be most succinctly described as a NAFTA show. Underwritten by the Banco Nacional de Mexico (BANAMEX), Eastman Kodak, Anheuser-Busch and Mexicana Airlines, and touring since 1993, it’s finally all about packaging and marketing the image of a country currently in the forefront of popular consciousness.

It’s too bad, because there are some exceptional pictures to be found scattered throughout the otherwise muddled show. Few are likely to be a surprise; in addition to the well-known Mexican pictures of Cartier-Bresson, Modotti and Levitt, there are fine pictures by the likes of Edward Weston, Paul Outterbridge, Harry Callahan, Arthur Tress, Richard Misrach, Paul Strand, Linda Connor and other accomplished photographers.

Among the most arresting is an 1867 albumen print by the little-known Frenchman Francois Aubert, who was a kind of court photographer to the Emperor Maximilian. A rather more grisly task was recording the aftermath of Maximilian’s execution, which Aubert had witnessed. His picture shows the slain emperor’s bullet-ridden, blood-stained white shirt, which has been tacked to the back of a door for display.

The shirt, and by extension the photographic record of it, are bluntly offered to the viewer as factual evidence of the deed. Mundane reportage reverberates against a poetic intimation of St. Veronica’s veil, which displays the image of the executed Christ as evidence of a miracle and was a popular subject in Mexican devotional painting of the period.