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In Praise of Copying: Los Angeles Reclaims Colonial Art

2022-06-16T10:40:03.885Z


The County Museum shows for the first time in the exhibition 'Archive of the World' the art collection amassed for 15 years


Two versions of the Virgin of Guadalupe open the 'Archive of the World' exhibition at LACMA. Unique Nicole (Getty Images)

Two large canvases open

World Archive: Art and Imagination in Spanish America

, a recent exhibition opened at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA).

They are two oil paintings of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon of New World painting.

The figures were already part of the collection, but they hang together for the first time in this exhibition that shows a collection created in just under 20 years of art made between 1500 and 1800. The exhibition vindicates from a young museum (the LACMA opened its doors in 1965) colonial art made in the new continent.

The two works are separated by 29 years.

The first was painted in 1691 by Antonio and Manuel de Arellano, father and son who founded a recognized dynasty of viceregal art under a single signature.

The second, from 1720, is by Antonio de Torres and shows the Guadalupana in her traditional pose with a more aesthetic color palette, almost pastel colors, representing a generational change for an image reproduced thousands of times.

This had at the feet of the figure a medallion in which Tepeyac appears, the pilgrimage site where the indigenous Juan Diego witnessed the apparition.

Both paintings give the viewer the sensation that they are known works, already seen before.

In the painting of the Arellano there is a message: Touched to the original.

With this legend, father and son warned the viewer that his work was a derivative of the iconic image that hangs today in the Basilica of Guadalupe, in Mexico City.

“It probably comes from a tracing made by the artist Juan Correa, a famous 17th-century painter, who had access to the image,” explains Ilona Katzew, head of the Latin American art department at LACMA and curator of this exhibition.

With these works, the curator shows a link in the artistic work of the New World: the issue of copies and religiosity.

"There is much talk of Hispanic American art as a derivative of European art, but I wanted to change the perspective a bit to change from copying in general, which is a praxis, an intellectual posture, a way of creating," Katzew explains.

A visitor to the exhibition observes the works in the section dedicated to sacred art.

Unique Nicole (Getty Images)

In another canvas,

View of the town and roadstead of Tolón

, Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz (Mexico, 1713-1772) masterfully captures a place where he was not.

The work, considered by the curator to be one of the best landscapes made in Mexico in the 18th century, was actually a copy of a commission from Louis XV to Claude Joseph Vernet to promote the kingdom's ports.

Morlete Ruiz painted 20 canvases from this collection the year of his death.

“The interesting thing is that only two years after those prints, Morlete Ruiz already had access to them, and he boasts that they are copies made by a Mexican painter.

What other argument can there be for an artist from New Spain to position himself in front of a group of European artists who are generating an artistic and mental bridge between everything that is happening?” asks Katzew, who in 2017 already explored Mexican painting in the 18th century with the famous exhibition

Pinxit Mexici

.

LACMA has been expanding its collection of Latin American art for about 15 years.

When Katzew arrived at the museum, located in downtown Los Angeles, the only piece owned by the center was a 16th-century Mexican goblet that had been part of the treasures of media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

The center had a robust catalog of pre-Hispanic pieces as well as modern Latin art, but he felt that the entire period connecting the extremes was a wasteland to be explored in California, a land that was both Spanish and Mexican.

Thanks to acquisitions in Europe and America, the collection rose to 90 pieces including paintings, sculptures, textiles and decorative objects such as lecterns, trunks and sewing boxes made in Guatemala with the aim of being traded in the empire of Peru.

More than 20 of these works are exhibited for the first time at

Archivo del Mundo

, which will be mounted until October in the Resnick pavilion.

Detail of Screen with indigenous betrothal, mitote and flying stick, by an anonymous author, dated between 1660 and 1690. -© Museum Associates/LACMA

The first piece that Katzew bought, and that can be seen now, is a painstaking work by an unknown author painted on a folding screen and dated between 1660 and 1690. The work shows an indigenous couple just out of church.

Outside the temple they come across the mitote dance, a pre-Hispanic festival in honor of Moctezuma preserved by the New Mexicans after the Conquest.

The masks of the dancers coexist in the same space with another group that practices the traditional rite of the bird men, known today as Papantla flyers.

There are also Spanish-style gentlemen with capes and elegant clothing.

It is, in short, a mixture of the vibrant crossroads of cultures and ideas of the New World in that early modern age.

“Everyone is epilogued there in some way: The screen is an Asian format,

oil painting is of European origin, local festivities.

Everything comes together in a single object”, adds the curator.

The construction of identity is another of the themes explored by the exhibition.

This is not only about skin color, a complex issue in America thanks to the racial mix that the Conquest brought, but also about codes such as dress.

The suits and garments highlighted social and racial differences in a 16-tier caste system.

As an example, there are oil paintings of interracial couples formed by Spanish men and Moorish women, identified by garments with colors of Afro-descendant peoples.

One of these,

Morisca y albina

, by Miguel Cabrera (Mexico, 1715-1768), even shows both of them playing with an albino baby, one of the obsessions of the time.

"The figure of the Moorish woman has a much finer finish than the Spanish," explains Katzew, author of a couple of books on the caste system in America.

“Cabrera was an artist who defines herself as Spanish, but it is known that she was probably of mixed origin.

He always introduces winks of him in the pictures that imply that he did not accept the hierarchical notion of race, ”adds the specialist.

Cabrera left in his strokes the essence that unites the exhibited works: the need to broaden the canon and the need to see what is American as something new that he does not necessarily copy from Europe.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-06-16

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