Portraits of their times

Sometime in the mid- to late 19th century, an artist whose identity is mysterious painted an elegant likeness of an older, rather grim-faced Peruvian woman wrapped in a luxurious royal blue shawl elaborately embroidered with white flowers and trimmed in fringe. The good-size painting -- about 3 feet tall and 2 1/2 feet wide -- turns up well into an absorbing survey of Latin American portraiture at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Her lips pursed, watery eyes cast to the side, hair parted and slicked close to her head, she is a calm, immovable mountain of formal serenity. The woman has donned her finery as a kind of secular consecration of a rare and momentous event -- an adventure of a kind that has long since passed into history. Sitting for a portrait rendered in oils for posterity doesn’t happen much today.

In our world, cameras are ubiquitous, and life’s progress from cradle to grave is regularly recorded with a degree of relentless detail and casual aplomb that would have astounded earlier generations. But in this portrait, which dates to a time when the camera was still a novelty, the painter underscored the exaltation of the event by surrounding the mestizo woman’s splendid shawl with a barely modulated plane of brown color. Out of this “soil” grows the lush garden of her finely sewn raiment.

At the picture’s center, like a metaphoric seed from which the abundant floral garden has grown, the woman holds in her stout yet delicately posed hands a tiny oval portrait of a man. Jewels frame the little picture. The image is carefully positioned over the woman’s heart. No doubt her husband, he too is dressed in his formal best and seated in an identical pose before a dun-colored background. This portrait-within-a-portrait is like a visual echo. The focal point of the larger pictorial composition, it is offered with stern pride for our perusal. His very being is the heartfelt occasion for her portrait.

Brilliant portraiture like this is of course geared toward establishing identity -- physical, psychological, social and cultural. Even though the mestizo woman’s name has been lost, and the specific circumstances around the painting’s commission and subsequent history are sketchy or unknown, her singular individuality radiates from the canvas.

Formal, seated portraiture has a long history. Among the oldest examples in “Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits” is an exquisite painted-earthenware sculpture of a dignitary wearing a marvelous headdress in the form of a deer, which was found in a Mayan burial site and dates from about AD 600 to 900. The portly fellow is as lively and commanding a figure as the Peruvian woman is austere and imposing. Yet in another more recent but equally exceptional work, Los Angeles artist Salomon Huerta takes the thousand-year-old convention of the seated portrait and literally turns it around.

His untitled oil painting from 2000 shows a young black man from behind, dressed in casual chinos and a hot pink T-shirt. He sits ramrod-straight in a folding chair. His head is shaved smooth. Its slick surface, which reflects a spot of light in a soft glow, is repeated in the sitter’s unruffled clothing, crisply creased slacks and polished black shoes. The meticulously described folding chair underscores the bilateral symmetry of the composition.

Like the Peruvian portrait, this figure is set against a two-dimensional field of color. Unlike the Peruvian portrait, however, the background field does not provide a focusing contrast to the painterly realism of the sitter and the clothing. Instead, it repeats their sleek, nearly uninflected style. Emphasizing shape, outline, blocks of pigment and balanced equilibrium, Huerta’s painting is heavy on abstraction. Who is the man seated in the chair? The precise identity of “Untitled Figure” is pointedly withheld.

Huerta made the portrait at the end of a period in which identity politics provided common subject matter for art. A Chicano, he was also working in a 30-year-old tradition that often claimed art’s principal function was to assert collective cultural identity. This startling portrait, like the others for which Huerta first gained notice, simultaneously acknowledges and turns away from those conventions. Identity, this seated oracle avers, is as much a question as an answer -- a mystery to be savored, not only a solution to be sought.

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Surprises abounding

Exhibitions of this scope -- “Retratos” roams over territory that includes 15 modern nations and spans two millenniums -- don’t always offer much more than a cursory glimpse into their subject. “Retratos” is a happy exception. The exhibition was jointly organized by the San Antonio Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and El Museo del Barrio in New York, where it had its debut in December. Perhaps because large surveys of Latin American art are not often done, its 105 paintings and sculptures offer many surprises -- and, it turns out, at least one larger oddity.

Here’s the curious part: Roughly one-third of the works on view are by artists whose identity is unknown. Even those whose name might be attached to a specific work, through a signature on the canvas or some other document, can remain mysterious. “Regrettably, nothing is known about the artists of these two images,” says the catalog entry for a pair of watercolor miniatures on ivory made in Puerto Rico in the 1840s. “Little is known about the artist,” says a wall label for the lovely painting of the woman in the shawl. Many catalog entries discuss details of the sitters’ lives while saying nothing of the artists.

One of the show’s knockout surprises -- “Woman From Bahia,” painted in Brazil in the mid-1800s -- is by an unidentified artist. An Afro-Brazilian beauty is adorned with gleaming bracelets, hair clips and 11 necklaces of giant beads, all fashioned from gold. Whether she was a slave in a wealthy household or the free daughter of slaves is not known, but her wistful air and the slight stoop to her shoulders makes her seem weighted down by the splendor of her adornment. Her beauty matches that of her jewelry, but her world-weariness suggests the cruel labor required to obtain it.

That an artist whose name has been lost in just a century could have painted so touching and keenly observed a picture seems remarkable. Portraiture is a hedge against mortality. What does it mean that the identity of so many of the artists who made these portraits has been erased?

For the ancient works of Moche and Mayan art, the anonymity is not surprising, and the antiquity of the objects is only part of the reason. The eight ceramic vessels and figures show highly individuated personalities, but they come from societies in which the separation between art and life that characterizes modern eras does not apply. Gifted artisans, not artists in the modern sense, most likely made them, and the notion that these artisans might be identified as individuals separated out from everyday society would no doubt have struck them as odd.

The artist as a distinct personality whose creativity is thought to equal in importance the social standing of the sitter -- or even to surpass it -- is a modern idea. It emerged with full force in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, then spread. The remainder of the exhibition coincides with these centuries, and the galleries are divided into reasonable categories.

There’s the “viceregal era” (24 works), when European colonists after Columbus were restructuring the social order in North, Central and South America as well as proselytizing Catholicism. Then comes the 19th century (42 objects), divided into two: the tumultuous battles for independence in the early decades, as the colonies broke away from Spain and Portugal, and the consolidation of national identities later. Tellingly, the show’s first self-portrait turns up here -- a woman, Guadalupe Carpio, shown surrounded by her mother and children and painting a portrait of her father. The catalog reports that “little is known” about her.

In the modern era (18 works), tradition is pitted against the rebellious avant-garde, both stylistically and in areas such as social reform. Finally, 13 contemporary works conclude the show. Portraiture shifts in accordance with social transformations.

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The imprint of colonialism

Overall, the contemporary section of “Retratos” is the weakest -- perhaps because, as Huerta’s wonderful painting attests, portraiture is no longer a straightforward category for art. But all the modern and contemporary artists are of course known, including names that are celebrated -- Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Fernando Botero, Vik Muniz, etc.

The frequent anonymity of the artists is most intriguing during the viceregal period and the 19th century, which account for two-thirds of the exhibition. Perhaps the simplest way to explain their common facelessness is as a trait of colonialism: An artist was a kind of skilled manual laborer. The job was to produce the pictures the colony needed, usually as an expression of authority.

In colonial society, final authority is reserved by a foreign power, whose representatives, surrogates and subjects might be depicted in a painting. An artist was working for “the man,” in other words, and the social values of the colonial system, not the aspirations of the skilled laborer, were embodied in any portrait. Painters occupied a lower rung on the food chain. Their eventual emergence as recognizable individuals is a feature of modern social evolution.

“Retratos” includes a number of terrific objects. Among them is a pair of works -- one a formal double portrait of a prosperous husband and wife, the other a devotional painting on a small sheet of zinc in which a couple gives thanks for a miracle -- by the first great modern Latin American portraitist, the largely self-taught Mexican Hermenegildo Bustos (1832-1907).

But there are disappointing omissions, led by Andres Sanchez Galque’s remarkable “The Mulattoes of Esmeralda,” which shows three richly adorned men who attended a festival in Quito, capital of today’s Ecuador, honoring Spain’s Philip III. Painted in 1599, this stunner may be the earliest signed portrait made in Latin America, and thus critical to the show, but Madrid’s Prado Museum, which owns the treasure, would not let it travel beyond the New York debut.

Felix Zarate’s full-length 1840 figure of Sister Maria Francisca de San Callateno is a fine example of the unique and compelling portrait genre of “crowned nuns,” which shows them adorned with elaborate flower headdresses when they take their vows and metaphorically wed Christ, or when they die. The greatest group of crowned nun paintings, however, is in the collection of a Mexican national museum in Tepozotlan, and none of those are here.

Nor does the show include what may be the most beautiful of all nuns’ portraits -- a full-length figure of a Creole novice, Sister Ana Maria de San Francisco y Neve, whose ethereal all-white habit is broken by the Bible she holds perpendicular to her breast. The novice has thrust her index finger inside the book’s pages, creating a suggestive image of a lesion that brilliantly alludes to St. Thomas satisfying his doubts about the risen Christ by plunging his finger into the savior’s open wound. The magnificent portrait, also not firmly attributed, may have been painted by the 18th century Mexican master Jose de Paez.

The question of attribution -- identifying the hand of the artist -- is also a function of modern scholarship in art history, which is still in its relative infancy for Latin American art. Whatever omissions the show might have are more than compensated for by the exciting sense of discovery that unfolds.

In fact, between the time the catalog for “Retratos” went to press last fall and the opening of the show, the name was discovered of the artist who painted the marvelous portrait of the Peruvian woman in her elaborate shawl, presenting the little jeweled portrait of her husband for our perusal. Cleaning revealed a signature: Manuel Ugalde. According to the label on the museum wall, little is known about him -- but you can be certain that much more will be.