MEXICO: SPLENDORS OF THIRTY CENTURIES

 The artistic heritage of Mexico, home to an array of ancient civilizations dating from 1000 B.C., is celebrated in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. The exhibition, the most comprehensive presentation of Mexican art in fifty years, documents the immense cultural richness of Mexico, spanning over three thousand years. Four hundred works of art, borrowed from architectural sites, churches, museums and private collections in Mexico, Europe and the United States, are featured in the exhibition.

 Architecture, sculpture, painting and a complex system of hieroglyphic writing are all achievements from the pre-Columbian era, illustrated by objects from eight archaeological sites, each representing a unique indigenous civilization at its cultural and artistic zenith.

 Other Mesoamerican civilizations are represented by the Maya city of Palenque (100-900), with its powerful portrait statuary, rich inventory of hieroglyphic texts, and successful blending of architecture and environment; El Tajín (100-1100), where an independent architectural spirit existed and the ritual ball game flourished; and Chichén Itzá (800-1200), whose chacmool figures, objects found at the entrance of temples to receive sacrificial offerings, have influenced twentieth-century sculptors. 

 Though sharing such characteristics as a calendar of both ritual and solar cycles and a ball game played on masonry courts for both ceremonial and political purposes, each site is marked by distinctive artistic and cultural achievements. The pre-Columbian period encompassed diverse sophisticated architectural styles, monumental public art commemorating historical events and persons, and painted and sculpted pictorial accounts relating complex religious and political themes. Pre-Columbian peoples developed a rich cosmology, expressed in art and architecture, that elaborated both their religious concepts and their knowledge of agriculture, astronomy, and mathematics, as well as documented their relationship to the gods in a complex universe in which they interacted via personal ritual and public ceremony.

 Pre-Columbian civilizations, which had flourished for more than twenty-five hundred years, fell to the Spanish conquistadors over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the three hundred-year period when Mexico was ruled by viceroys from Spain, the Spanish imposed Christianity and European culture on Mexico. An extension of its European origins, the colonial art created during this period-spectacular ecclesiastical and civic architecture, church paintings, sculpture, and domestic furnishings-gradually changed to reflect the fusion of two cultures.

 In the early post-conquest period, idealistic missionaries not only taught indigenous artists new principles, forms, and styles but also encouraged them to employ traditional methods in the service of the new religion: Aztec featherwork techniques were used to make priests' vestments and to depict religious subjects; cornstalk paste was used to create images of saints; mural paintings were applied to church walls. The second half of the sixteenth century, however, saw a dramatic decline in the native population due to disease and abuse and a growing influx of Europeans, some of whom were accomplished artists who brought sixteenth-century European techniques with them.

 In the seventeenth century, Mexicans began to formulate a national identity, and native elements of content and style became more prominent in the arts. A continuity with the pre-Columbian past was represented by the incorporation of indigenous motifs into architecture and the decorative arts. Decorative exuberance and elaborate patterning gave a distinctive character to buildings, furniture, ceramics, and metalwork in religious and domestic environments. The eighteenth-century baroque period witnessed the climax of the Mexican colonial style: a dense and flamboyant blending of European motifs joined to distinctive local traditions. This style, adopted by Mexican-born colonists (criollos), marked the beginning of a genuinely Mexican colonial artistic tradition.

 In 1820, after a decade of sporadic armed conflict with Spain, Mexico cast off its colonial yoke. The next forty years were marked by sharp divisions between conservatives and liberals who questioned the predominantly European orientation of Mexican aristocracy and government. The Royal Academy of San Carlos, founded in 1785, endured and even encouraged the debate between conservatives and liberals through its polished portraits of privileged individuals on the one hand and idealized visions of a pre-Hispanic past on the other.

 Provincial paintings by regional artists, such as Hermenegildo Bustos and José María Estrada, contrasted with those by academic artists, such as Rodrigo Gutierrez and José María Velasco. Despite formal training, some of the regional artists worked in a naive manner that was to inspire a number of Mexico's greatest twentieth-century painters. Mexico also had a landscape tradition that was begun by foreign artists who were inspired by the country's rugged terrain, limitless horizon, and transparent light. While artistic styles and techniques in nineteenth-century Mexico remained conservative, the depiction of the middle and lower classes of Mexico as a respectable, even honorable subject paved the way for the major artistic achievements of the Mexican muralists and surrealists in the following century.

 Predominant themes in twentieth-century Mexican art include death, passion, narrative, and social criticism. Rooted in the Revolution of 1910 and in a pervasive nationalism, early twentieth-century artists wanted to establish a continuity between Mexico's pre-Columbian past and the Mexico of their day. Programmatic art expressing religious or secular beliefs and wall painting had been two constant elements in Mexican art. In the first half of the century these elements reappeared in the great murals of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Other leading Mexican painters in this century have included Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, and Mexico's first contemporary landscape artist, Geraldo Murillo Cornado, known as Dr. Atl. New themes came from Mexico's historical past, particularly the conquest and the Revolution, from urban life, the worker, and technology. Artists sought to establish continuity between the native lifestyle and Mexico as they knew it. The revolutionary government's goal of creating a new society reinforced both the artists' interest in developing a new art and their impulse to discover Mexican cultural traditions. Mexican artists felt the need to incorporate the past and advance beyond it, and it was through that tension, present even today, that Mexican art in the twentieth century developed.

 "The history of Mexico is no less intricate than its geography. Two civilizations have lived and fought not only across its territory but in the soul of every Mexican. One is native to these lands; the other originated outside but is now so deeply rooted that it is a part of the Mexican people's very being." Thus wrote Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in 1990 as an introduction to the great exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. With these words he reiterated a sentiment that he had voiced four decades earlier in The Labyrinth of Solitude: "Any contact with the Mexican people, however brief, reveals that the ancient beliefs and customs are still in existence beneath Western forms."

 There is no easy continuity between these two civilizations. Paz emphasizes the sense of antithesis -- of opposition and struggle -- that exists between the ancient heritage and the new customs and values introduced by the conquering Spaniards. This difference is most keenly felt when one stands in the presence of ancient works that seem to typify the native society. "The sculptures and monuments of the ancient Mexicans are works that are at once marvelous and horrible," writes Paz. They are strange, baffling, even terrifying, making reference to sacred rites and systems of belief that shock modern viewers much as they did the first Spaniards who gazed upon them wonderstruck. And yet, Paz maintains, these frightful images express an essential part of the Mexican's being. They did not cease to have meaning just because another civilization was overlaid on the old.

 These two civilizations have been made splendidly manifest in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, with its selection of stunning artifacts organized to convey the essence of successive cultures that have occupied seats of power in the land.

 In this photo-panel exhibit, the Texas Humanities Resource Center traces the organization of the major show, from the great works that represent Olmec, Maya, and Aztec cultures to the religious and aesthetic images that reflect a new culture - at first imported but then naturalized, made truly Mexican. This panel exhibit is designed for programs that lead people to a better understanding of the history and culture - the epic drama - of Mexico. It has been developed by the THRC, in collaboration with the San Antonio Museum Association and the San Antonio Public Library Foundation. Major support has been provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, with matching support from the Texas Council for the Humanities.

 This abridged text is based on a publication produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art ©1990. It has been reprinted for THRC's photo-panel exhibit by permission of the San Antonio Museum of Fine Arts with permission also from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries [Exhibition Catalog]. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990.

 Coe, Michael D., and Richard A. Diehl. In the Land of the Olmec. 2 vols. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1980.

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 Kubler, George. The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya and Andean Peoples. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin, 1984.

 Moctezuma, Eduardo Matos. The Great Temple of the Aztecs: Treasures of Tenochtitlán. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988.

 Schele, Linda, and Mary Ellen Miller. Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986.

Cortés, Hernando. Letters from Mexico. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986.

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 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517-1521. Laguna Beach, CA: Buccaneer Books, 1986.

 Grizzard, Mary. Spanish Colonial Art and Architecture of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1986.

 Kubler, George, and Martín Soria. Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959.

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 Griego, Margot, and Barbara Cooney . Tortillitas Para Mama: And Other Nursery Rhymes, Spanish and English. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1981.

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 Lattimore, Deborah N. Why There Is No Arguing In Heaven: A Mayan Myth. New York: Harper and Row Junior Books, 1989.

 Rohmer, Harriet, adapted by. The Legend of Food Mountain: La Montana del Alimento. San Francisco: Children's Book Press, 1982.

 Wood, Marion. The Atlas of Ancient America. Cultural Atlas For Young People Series. New York: Facts on File, 1990.

Made possible by Friends of the Arts of Mexico, the exhibition was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An indemnity was granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Additional support was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Tinker Foundation, Inc.