Painting the castes of Mexico

A remarkable new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art includes a lovely group of tender paintings by the great 18th century Mexican artist Miguel Cabrera. Each large canvas juxtaposes a serene image of a contented family -- Mom, Dad and one or two grinning kids -- with unexpected elements of still-life painting. Piles of lettuce, beans and root vegetables, an avocado sliced in half to show its seed or baskets filled with ripe fruit are conspicuously displayed down in the lower right- or left-hand corner. Often, the names of the fruits and vegetables are identified by elegantly written script -- chayotes, texacotes, aguacate etc.

Careful script is also written across the top of each. Translated into English, these passages say: From Spaniard and Black, a Mulatto; From Spaniard and Mulatto, a Morisca; From Mestizo and Indian, a Coyote; From Spaniard and Albino, a Return-Backward (a quaint biological locution, referring to something not unlike a recessive trait).

These are castas -- or caste paintings -- a fascinating but not widely known genre of art that charts the mixing of races in New Spain in the centuries after European conquest. Cabrera’s juxtaposition of family groups with still-life elements -- each carefully labeled, like specimens in a scientific display -- is an extraordinary artistic invention. Through it, a fabricated hierarchy of racial typing is given the illusion of natural order.

The clincher in this game of scientific “proof” is the painter’s convincing naturalist style. If Cabrera’s gorgeous craftsmanship couldn’t carry off the illusion, the labeling and juxtapositions wouldn’t be nearly as convincing. Masterful brushwork renders the sensuous tactility of surfaces, which range from satin and lace to burlap and rope. The luminous elegance of a pearl necklace around an aristocratic woman’s throat competes with the shredded weave of rough cotton in a peasant’s torn blouse.

Cabrera keeps the space of the pictures shallow, almost like a sculptural relief, so that these sensuously depicted objects crowd the foreground. Elegant linear contours emphasize the organic quality of two-dimensional design. The paintings practically demand to be closely scrutinized. The amiable warmth of the depicted familial interaction is then replayed in your communion with the pictures.

The brilliance of casta painting lies in its astonishing fusion of the touching and the perverse. Human societies invented the concept of race, then constructed complex hierarchies for it. Casta paintings naturalized a thoroughly unnatural phenomenon. They showed what the socially constructed range of possibilities in 18th century Mexico would be.

Spaniards, Indians and Africans are the source material. Castas usually depict 16 combinations of racial mixing. Sometimes a single canvas would be divided into a grid -- four across, four down. More often, 16 individual canvases or copper plates would be used to create a large set of paintings.

The first castas date from 1711, and two (attributed to Manuel Arellano) are in the show. Cabrera’s apotheosis of the genre came in 1763, in his only known examples.

The last half of the century saw the genre explode in popularity. LACMA’s exhibition offers more than 100 individual paintings, including two rare complete sets of images -- one by the prolific and gifted sentimentalist Jose de Paez, about whom little is known; and the other by Jose Joaquin Magon, who emphasized the sitters’ occupations.

Social rank was based on a European standard. That standard was racial -- LACMA’s show is titled “Inventing Race: Casta Painting in 18th Century Mexico” -- but it was also religious. (Male dominance was a given.) Belief in Christianity was central to a person’s stature. Catholic Spaniards were at the top of the heap. Next came Creoles -- Spaniards born in the New World. Africans, who had been brought to Mexico in chains as slaves, were at the bottom. In between were Indians, who were religiously sanctioned in an important way.

How? Cabrera, a mestizo (Spaniard and Indian) from Oaxaca, was the best artist in New Spain. On April 30, 1751, he was invited to inspect and certify the miraculous nature of the original image of the Virgin of Guadalupe housed at the basilica just north of Mexico City. There, the mother of God was said to have made herself visible to the Indian peasant Juan Diego, 220 years before; her image was miraculously imprinted onto his cloak.

After inspection, Cabrera swore that no mortal hand had painted the image. A copy was made and sent to Rome. Pope Benedict XIV confirmed the Virgin of Guadalupe as patron saint of New Spain -- and immediately, Indians rose in social rank as “New Christians.” In late castas, after an Indian mixes with a Spaniard and their offspring continue to mix with Spaniards, the third generation was considered to have become white.

No such dubious honor was available to Africans. In a singular example of tortured logic, their original blackness was widely considered to have resulted from imprinting by a white Ethiopian mother’s imagination during conception. She was thinking of a black object, and the result was a black infant. In Cabrera’s lovely picture of a Spaniard father and an albino mother, the dark-skinned child -- a “return backward” -- who is lovingly caressed between them recalls the mother’s likely African ancestry.

These boggling layers of cultural fancy unfold in surprising ways throughout the show. For example, only twice is a scene between husband and wife marked by anything less than ideal domestic harmony, and in both cases the put-upon man is a Spaniard, the aggressive woman an African. These works are clearly racist warnings.

Asians, though present in Mexican society, appear nowhere in the casta worldview -- for reasons not yet understood.

And Cabrera’s picture of a poor mestizo and Indian couple, whose barefoot offspring are given the zoologically condescending name of coyotes, softens the blow of their lowly lot in life by using a composition reminiscent of the Holy Family with the infant St. John the Baptist.

In short, castas are not documentary images, recording for posterity the daily lives of ordinary men and women in 18th century New Spain. Instead they’re visual theater -- scripted, costumed, set-designed, acted -- as befits an art of the Baroque age. The achievement of the show, smartly selected and beautifully installed by LACMA’s associate curator of Latin American art, Ilona Katzew, is to denaturalize what Cabrera and the rest so skillfully managed to make seem natural.

Eighteenth century Mexico saw dramatic social transformations -- thanks in part to the huge wealth being created in the colony. Silver mining and international trade flourished. Mexico stood at the crossroads of Spain’s far-flung empire in the New World and the Philippines. The colony threatened to eclipse the power and authority of the mother country.

Castas were one efficacious way to envision order amid the alarming possibility for colonial chaos. With places for everyone and everyone in their places, domestic tranquillity reigns.

Katzew believes that the casta motif did not emerge as an expression of 18th century Enlightenment ideals, in which cataloging and scientific analyses were highly prized. Convincingly, she argues instead that the form responded to a profound 17th century urge to assert criollismo -- Creole pride -- a Mexican identity distinct from Spain’s.

The curator divided the show into early and late. The early work, which includes exceptional examples by Jose de Ibarra, Juan Rodriguez Juarez and several anonymous artists, culminates with Cabrera.

Europe provided a market for these painters. Their early reliance on European artistic models is perhaps clearest in a 1715 Juarez canvas, where the graceful child comes straight from Rembrandt. (Apparently, when a Spaniard marries a castizo -- the offspring of a Spaniard and a mestizo -- their child is a Dutch Old Master.)

Paez and Magon dominated the late period. They employed symbols of labor and nature’s bounty to emphasize an image of colonial productivity. Whimsical decorative elaboration, acute emotional sensibility and flights of extreme pictorial fantasy become increasingly prominent. The casta motif went rococo.

And then, suddenly, it was over. Mexico’s 19th century wars of independence overwhelmed the idealized, harmonious social pecking order that casta paintings envisioned and advanced for 100 years.

Disappointingly, LACMA’s exhibition does not come with a catalog. But its debut coincides with the publication of Katzew’s doctoral dissertation (Yale University Press), which contains richly illuminating scholarship. It’s also a shame that “Inventing Race” will not travel. The art of Mexico’s colonial or vice-regal period has only been seriously studied in the last several decades, and international exhibitions remain too rare.

Castas in particular have been regarded with some embarrassment, given the racist foundations of the genre. In Mexico you might encounter such a picture here and there in a provincial museum, or maybe at the great Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City. The huge 1990 traveling show “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” wanted to rehabilitate colonial art, but even then only four casta panels were included.

Hiding or ignoring the past won’t change it, though, never mind help clarify contested social issues like race and marriage today. A smaller 1996 show (also organized by Katzew) at the Americas Society in New York began the genre’s return to light. LACMA’s fascinating show -- the most complete casta presentation ever mounted, in or out of Mexico -- should not be missed.

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‘Inventing Race: Casta Painting in 18th Century Mexico’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: Mon.-Tue., Thu., noon-8 p.m.; Fri., noon-9 p.m.; Sat.-Sun.,

11 a.m.-8 p.m.

Ends: Aug. 8

Price: $5-$9

Contact: (323) 857-6000