Its art is in the right place

SOMETIMES an art show’s location can be as powerful and illuminating as the actual works on display. A perfectly chosen venue can transport us in time, breathe life into inanimate objects and turn a static diorama of the past (or present) into 3-D, experiential reality.

It’s impossible to stroll the Vatican museums or the Uffizi, admiring the Renaissance masters, without feeling the presence of a beneficently smiling Medici, or Savonarola’s baleful glare. Conversely, how many critics have fretted about whether Frank Gehry’s shimmering Guggenheim Bilbao might be upstaging the less-than-lustrous artworks inside it, like a willful ingenue at a Hollywood cocktail party?

It’s hard to imagine a better fit between a mise-en-scene and its subject than the aptly named “Revelaciones” (Revelations), a vast exhibition of Latin American colonial-era art that will arrive at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in August. Currently, it’s installed in resplendent surroundings at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, smack in the middle of this convulsive metropolis of 8.6 million, the second stop in a trek that began last year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

What LACMA viewers will experience this summer and fall is a show that Times critic Christopher Knight, reviewing the Philadelphia edition (titled “Tesoros / Treasures / Tesouros”), praised as an “astounding” survey of painting, sculpture and decorative art produced in Spain and Portugal’s New World colonies, from Columbus’ arrival in 1492 to the wars of independence in the early 1800s that gave bloody birth to Latin America’s new republics. (See the review at www.calendarlive.com/latin.)

Made up of 250 works from 13 countries, “Revelaciones” brings together art from throughout the Spanish-speaking former colonies (plus formerly Portuguese-ruled Brazil), which were divided into administrative viceroys but functioned as interlocking parts of an empire. This approach allows the curators to draw thematic and stylistic links from Cuba all the way to the Rio de la Plata in South America.

Many objects are stunning, even one-of-a-kind: an 18th century sculpture of “Our Lady of Sorrows,” from Ecuador, her face framed by a brilliantly fabricated black-and-gold shroud; a Guatemalan sculpture of the infant Christ crucified, a tear dripping from one child-sized eye; a sculpture of St. Jerome, his musculature and the folds of fabric around his stomach rendered with Bernini-like virtuosity.

Colonization, the show makes clear, quickly scrambled the New World’s creative DNA. The creation of craftsmen’s guilds in Mexico City; Lima, Peru; and elsewhere brought Mannerist and Baroque influences to the Andes and Mesoamerica. A painting of the Crucifixion from 1637, by Batazar de Echave Ibia, could’ve been made in Spanish-occupied Flanders a half-century earlier. New pigments were produced from the addition of exotic South American ingredients. Quechua Indian words and imagery sprouted on colonial pottery.

It all testifies to an intense exchange of artistry and ideas, a cultural swap meet with few parallels before or since.

What LACMA viewers won’t experience, alas (unless they hustle down here before June 24), is the revelatory perspective of seeing “Revelaciones” framed by the venerable San Ildefonso museum: its antique stone colonnades, contemplative courtyards and acidly satirical murals by Jose Clemente Orozco, part of Mexico’s holy trinity of modern mural painters whose other members were Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Orozco’s murals were added in the 1920s, and their depictions of arrogant capitalists literally trampling over the poor expressed the quasi-Marxist sentiments of Mexico’s post-revolutionary government. They provide an ironic visual commentary on the treasures contained in “Revelaciones.”

Treasures within a treasure

SAN Ildefonso, in fact, incorporates practically the entire arc of Mexican history over the last four centuries. It was founded in 1588 as a Jesuit seminary. After the Jesuits were expelled from the New World in the late 18th century (for opposing the exploitation of native peoples), the building was used as classrooms for a school of medicine and later as an army barracks by the U.S. and French forces that invaded Mexico in the mid-19th century. After passing through several more incarnations, it was restored and reopened to the public in 1992 as a museum.

The building sits at the northeast corner of the capital’s sprawling Zocalo, or main square, an area mobbed by ambulant vendors selling pirated DVDs and knockoff Tommy Hilfiger socks. Both a living symbol of Mexico’s past and a refuge from its roiling present, the building has preserved a theatrical air, a sense of drama rooted in history. As you wander the exhibition’s 12 third-floor galleries, you pass through tall, heavy wooden doors that are opened and closed by solemn, deferential guards. Questions about rank and privilege never are far from the visitor’s mind.

Aside from their aesthetic merits, many objects in the show functioned as visual transmitters of Renaissance Europe’s sense of its manifest destiny. The spiritual side of that worldview synthesized Roman Catholicism with indigenous beliefs, because the Spanish and Portuguese authorities knew that the best way to make Indian populations accept their new rulers was to layer Old World symbolism on top of existing New World cultural traditions.

Among the best examples in “Revelaciones” is the large painting “La Virgen Maria y el Cerro Rico de Potosi” (1740), by an unknown artist. It depicts the Potosi mountain in Bolivia, which has been anthropomorphized into the body of the Virgin Mary. The mother of Jesus thus is linked visually with an Indian Earth goddess who was worshiped in the region.

But the painting’s symbolism goes further. It suggests that God had preserved the mountain and its rich silver deposits until the arrival of the Spaniards, just as he had kept the Virgin free of original sin so that she could be the vessel for bringing Christ into the world. Pope Paul III and the Spanish King Carlos V appear in the lower half of the painting, giving thanks for this divinely ordained booty to dig up and haul back to Madrid and Rome.

Numerous other works illustrate how skillfully Christian and indigenous beliefs were woven together to serve the mission of saving Indians’ souls while subjugating their bodies. In the painting “Cristo nino con la corona imperial inca y vestidoras de sacerdote catolico,” the Christ child is depicted wearing an Incan crown and the garments of a Catholic priest. The beautiful wooden sculpture “Cristo Nino de Huanca” (circa 1600 to 1610), worshiped by a Peruvian cult, represents the infant Christ holding the Sacred Heart in one hand, an avocado half in the other, and dressed in the type of tunic worn by Indians when they converted to Christianity.

This sort of syncretism had a long history in the pre-Columbian Americas. Centuries before the conquistadors arrived, the great Indian empires had incorporated the gods of conquered tribes into their own pantheons. Latin America’s people were used to receiving their spiritual marching orders from the top down.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Spain by the late 1400s had driven the Moors off the Iberian peninsula. Regarding itself as Europe’s Christian champion, Spain was looking around for new fields to conquer and people to inculcate in the one true faith.

The New World crusade that followed finds its most chilling expression in “Revelaciones” in a Mexican sculpture from 1610 of “Santiago Mataindios.” The Spaniards carried the image of Santiago (St. James) Matamoros (literally, “the Moor killer”) on their battle flags when they fought the Islamic Moors. In the New World, the saint was transformed into “the Indian killer” (Mataindios), and in this nearly life-size bas-relief sculpture he is shown on horseback, plunging into battle among Indians with arms and legs hacked off, spewing blood.

San Ildefonso puts an up-tempo spin on the colonial era’s intercultural give and take. “This exhibition,” says the museum’s website, demonstrates “the arising of a new culture, vigorous and potent: the mestizo culture.” That’s true, as far as it goes. Mestizo, or “mixed-race” identity, has been a defining feature of Latin American society for centuries. Not only Indian but also African and Asian influences found their way into colonial Latin American art, via Spain and Portugal’s commerce with the Far East.

But rather than an objective, scientific term, “mestizaje” (racial mixture) is a 20th century ideological formulation invented to smooth over social and racial tensions in many Latin American countries. If everyone is mixed-raced, the logic goes, then officially there can be no racial or ethnic discrimination against, say, Indians or blacks.

In Mexico, that ideology was codified in the great mural art of the last century, when the country was trying to bind up the revolution’s wounds. One of Orozco’s most striking works in San Ildefonso depicts the conqueror Hernan Cortes and his female Indian interpreter, La Malinche, seated side by side, nude: a New World Adam and Eve from whose loins would spring the dynamic mestizo “race.”

Yet in key respects the history of colonial Latin America is less a story of two cultures and belief systems (European and indigenous) fruitfully cross-pollinating each other than a tale of one civilization muscling the other into submission. Using ornate artworks and massive edifices to shock and awe your opponents was an effective part of that strategy.

These conflicts, and the deep resentments they unleashed, still reverberate throughout the hemisphere. “Revelaciones” fittingly closes with an 1829 portrait of Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator who led uprisings against Spanish rule across South America. Today, would-be revolutionaries such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are trying to claim Bolivar’s mantle by denouncing the United States and multinational corporations as the new imperial conquistadores.

The questions raised by such fire-eating rhetoric are outside the scope of “Revelaciones” to answer. But the questions themselves are as durable and imposing as the majestic stone facade of San Ildefonso.

reed.johnson@latimes.com