Latin American pioneers

The allure of Paris has attracted artists from all over the world. In the 19th century, Latin American artists eagerly traveled to this artistic capital, in part because of the absence of an official art school, established art market, or proper exhibition venues back home. Skipping the famed but somewhat dated École des Beaux-Arts (the official art academy of France), these artists enrolled in private, independent, and affordable art studios, like the Académie Julian. They were exposed to new subject matters (like the female nude) and new artistic styles (like Impressionism). The conditions of these artists’ trips—whether government-funded or family sponsored, and the artistic studio in which they enrolled—often determined the course of their careers.

Audiences were difficult to please. When they returned home, these artists challenged the conservative tastes of patrons and critics, who often resented what they considered “modernist” ideas of foreign-trained artists. While in Paris, Latin American artists found that critics did not flinch at their adoption of these new styles, yet they did expect to see certain subjects they considered typical for artists from the Americas—including local types and costumes, iconic landscapes and ruins, and genre scenes (as in popular costumbrismopaintings). Even though Latin American artists tried to represent themselves as cosmopolitan, internationally trained artists, French critics sometimes felt differently. Latin American artists, including Epifanio Garay, Francisco Laso, and Francisco Oller, found the need to balance their local identities while also navigating international networks of artistic exchange in the French artistic capital.

Making Paris theirs

Artists from various Latin American countries joined in this artistic pilgrimage. Typically their trip followed a similar pattern of studying abroad for a few years, only to return home to either establish or teach at an art academy, or at their own art studio. In Colombia, the painter Epifanio Garay taught at the recently established Escuela de Bellas Artes in Bogotá (founded in 1886), introducing the controversial yet academic tradition of drawing from the live nude model.

Peruvian painter Francisco Laso traveled many times to Paris, and in Lima taught at his own art studio and worked on large commissions for both the Peruvian government and the Catholic Church. Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller studied in Paris and throughout Europe, and in 1870 established an art school in San Juan, in which he mentored the next generation of Puerto Rican artists, including women artists.

As diverse and wide-ranging as the careers of these three artists might seem, their education abroad prepared and inspired them for their careers back home. Rather than replicate the work of their French mentors, these Latin American artists carefully blended the local and the foreign, the old and the new, crafting a new type of painting that reflected a more international and cosmopolitan art scene.

Epifanio Garay

This was the case with Colombian Epifanio Garay, who painted The Levite’s Wife from the Ephraim Mountains—the first female nude in Colombian painting—fourteen years after his return from Paris. In the French capital he had been exposed to academic nudes such as Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus and others by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, his teacher at the Académie Julian.

Garay treaded carefully in his depiction of the first female nude in Colombian painting. For example, the painting shows a biblical nude, rather than the casual depiction of nakedness and is similar in style to French academic painting with its idealization of the female figure. Despite the religious context, the issue of nudity created such a controversy that in Bogotá the canvas was exhibited separately from other works of art. In Paris, however, this canvas would have most likely not have even raised an eyebrow, demonstrating strong differences in artistic temperament and religious conservatism.

Francisco Laso

For Peruvian artist Francisco Laso, who arrived in Paris in 1843 and again in 1851, and studied in the private atelier of Swiss painter Charles Gleyre, his goal was not necessarily to garner acclaim in his capital city, Lima, but rather abroad, in Paris. At the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris, Laso was one of two artists to represent Peru. His country was one of only two Latin American countries (the other being Mexico) to have their artistic work displayed internationally.

Laso exhibited two paintings, including Inhabitant of the Cordillera of Perufeaturing a man standing prominently in the center of the composition, and occupying most of the picture plane. He holds a figurative jar in both hands. The figure commands the viewer’s attention and respect. The ceramic portrait jar of a man whose hands are tied behind him depicts a victim that, according to art historian Natalia Majluf, stands as an “allegory of the oppression of the Peruvian Indian.” [1] However, French critics interpreted the ceramic vessel as one made by the man himself, rather than by his ancestors, thus missing the point—the struggle of the Amerindian in colonial and post-independent Peru. This misinterpretation effectively stereotyped the man as a simple potter, similar to the \costumbrista types of potters, tortilla makers, and cowboys that circulated in the travel accounts of Johann Moritz Rugendas and Carl Nebel. When French critics caricatured the inhabitant and reduced him to a costumbrista type, this led not only to its misunderstanding, but also to the painting’s renaming to Indian Potter.

Francisco Oller

Countering these cultural stereotypes, Puerto Rican Francisco Oller depicted his native island through landscapes, still-life paintings, and genre paintings, the culmination of which can be seen in his monumental canvas, The Wake, exhibited in both Puerto Rico and France. Here, Oller depicts a quotidian rural occurrence, where locals (including clergymen, farmers, and children) gather for a wake in a typical countryside Puerto Rican home. Details, such as the palm trees in the background and the plantains in the interior, as well as the straw hats, laced tablecloth, and woven baskets, help to situate the wake in a uniquely Puerto Rican setting. In so doing, the painting speaks to a Puerto Rican sense of place and identity, introducing a self-conscious authenticity to costumbrismo.

Famously known as the first Impressionist painter of Puerto Rico, Oller applied paint directly from the tube or with a palette knife, and purposefully called attention to the manner in which the work was painted. Even his interest in genre paintings, which depicted daily occurrences, reveals the influence of Impressionists like French artist Camille Pissaro, whom Oller briefly mentored.

Garay, Laso, and Oller were among the earliest artists in their countries to travel to Paris. By the twentieth century, this was no longer the case. As art historian Michele Greet has demonstrated, with an increase in government funding, cheaper modes of transatlantic navigation, and a the precedent of 19th-century travelers, there were more than 300 Latin American artists living and working in Paris between World War I and World War II, including Mexican Diego Rivera, Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral, and Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García.

Additional resources:

Read about an exhibition of Francisco Oller’s work at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016

Transatlantic encounters: Latin American artists in interwar Paris

Source:  Dr. Maya Jiménez, “Latin American artistic pilgrimages to Paris,” in Smarthistory, January 4, 2021, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/latin-american-artistic-pilgrimages-paris/.

Painting local landscapes in Mexico

Renowned Mexican landscapist José María Velasco painted views of the Valley of Mexico more than seven times. In one of his famous versions, called the Valley of Mexico (1877), Velasco painted the valley on site from the hill of Santa Isabel. Different from his earlier versions, Velasco raised the horizon line, allowing for the sky to occupy only one-third, rather than half the composition. This in turn allowed him to expand the foreground and include an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus with a snake in his beak—a clear reference to the founding of the city of Tenochtitlan by the Mexica, who had resided in the Valley of Mexico prior to the arrival of Europeans.

According to the Mexica, their patron deity—Huitzilopochtli—had told the them to look for a sign similar to this one so that the Mexica would know where to settle after making a long journey from their ancestral homeland. In Velasco’s painting, the eagle seems to have just flown from its perch on the cactus, and is ascending towards the sky, its prey still firmly held.

Additional references to Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past can be seen in the middle ground. Here, we find Mexico City and Lake Texcoco, both associated with the former Mexica capital city of Tenochtitlan. Behind the lake, and in the far distance, rise the recognizable peaks of the volcanoes of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl.

A close admirer of nature, Velasco also took the time to record the changing colors and shapes of clouds. In this particular canvas, one can make out the white puffy cumulus clouds near the center, in contrast to the thin, almost feathery cirrus clouds around the edges. Through these historic and observed references, Velasco does not provide a composite view of nature, but rather makes clear that the represented territory is indeed Mexico City.

Trained at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, under the leadership of Italian painter Eugenio Landesio (1810–1879). Velasco devoted his career to depicting the regions, volcanoes, and sites of Mexico, particularly the historic Valley of Mexico. Velasco, like many other Latin American artists in the nineteenth century, developed interests in painting the local landscape. They sought to document the land accurately and descriptively, working to create a sense of pride in their country’s past, present, and future.

European and U.S. artists had traveled to different countries in Latin America to paint the land, but had sought to create images of virgin or unspoiled nature, often with a romantic flair. Local artists, on the other hand, often imbued their views of nature with either historic or regional specificity, as we see in Velasco’s View of the Valley of Mexico.

The Volcanoes of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi

In Ecuador, painters Joaquín Pinto and Rafael Troya documented the famous volcanoes of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, the two highest peaks in Ecuador. Alongside the German explorers William Reiss and Alphons Stübel, Troya depicted these natural wonders, painting on site on more than 800 canvases. His depictions differ from those of foreign artists, such as German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who sought to capture Cotopaxi in a scientifically methodical way, or American painter Frederic Edwin Church’s apocalyptic vision of the volcano. Instead, Troya captures the simple yet grandiose presence of this iconic volcano in paintings like View of Cotopaxi from Tiopulo. While Pinto’s and Troya’s works were made for an international audience, and were shipped to Germany where they were then copied into prints, they nevertheless sparked a local interest in rediscovering sites from their country.

Painting the landscape of the Caribbean

In the Caribbean, a somewhat different phenomenon unfolded. Local artists tended to depict their native landscapes as a result of their own journeys abroad. Cuban painter Esteban Chartrand and Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller both trained abroad in France. In the case of Chartrand, he studied under the famous French landscape painter Theodore Rousseau, who formed part of the Barbizon School of landscape painters near Fontainebleau. Oller studied under various renowned French masters, including Thomas Couture and Gustave Courbet. Like Courbet, who painted the rural customs of his native Ornans, Oller recorded the folkloric customs of the Puerto Rican countryside.

Paintings such as Landscape with Royal Palms communicate a strong sense of Puerto Rican identity through the elevation of the palm tree, which would eventually become the logo of the New Progressive Party, one of the two major political parties in Puerto Rico. Known for its physical strength and ability to withstand strong winds, the royal palm sits humbly yet majestically in this rural Puerto Rican landscape.

The palm tree was not only a trademark of Puerto Rico, but of all of the Caribbean, as seen in Chartrand’s Yumurí Valley. In this more expansive landscape, Chartrand depicts not only the rugged and bountiful terrain of Cuba, but also the simplicity of rural life in his native Matanzas, located on the northern shore of Cuba.

An awakened national spirit

Works by artists like Velasco, Troya, Chartrand, and Oller offer an alternative to depictions by foreign artists. Minor yet significant details like the palm tree may seem lost in the work of foreigners, who instead focus on more iconic sites. Yet even when depicting something as iconic as the mountain, Cotopaxi, the view of the insider may differ, since for locals these views were not exotic, but rather a part of their immediate world waiting to be repurposed, for an awakening nationalist spirit. Depicting local sites allowed native artists to craft a new sense of cultural identity, while also reclaiming their historical past.

Additional resources

Read more about Picturing the Americas from the Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic from the Terra Foundation for American Art

Read more about Velasco’s The Valley of Mexico from the Santa Isabel Mountain Range

Source: Dr. Maya Jiménez, “Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” in Smarthistory, October 31, 2019, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/landscape-painting-latin-america/.

The challenge of the nude in 19th-century Latin American painting

Francisco Antonio Cano, Model of the Académie Julian, c. 1898, oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm (Colección del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia)

Artists have often studied the nude either by copying it from prints, manuals, illustrations, and sculptures, or directly from a live model. A common practice in European and U.S. art academies of the 19th century, the practice of drawing from life was not accepted in most Latin American art academies (with the exception of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City) until the early twentieth century. Even then, it was largely restricted to male students. The nude was considered morally offensive among religious and political conservatives throughout much of Latin America, and even in the United States, and so it became a sensitive subject for artists to depict. [1] For this reason, Latin American artists who wished to excel in their ability to paint the nude had to seek an artistic education either in Mexico or abroad in cities like Paris or London.

Carlos Baca-Flor, Female Academy, c. 1893-95, charcoal on paper, 48 x 62.5 cm (MALI, Museo de Arte de Lima)

At the Académie Julian in Paris, the practice of life drawing was considered integral to an artistic education. It was at this art school that Peruvian Carlos Baca Flor excelled in the study of the nude model and Colombian artist Francisco A. Cano was first exposed to it. Cano painted numerous nude studies, formally known as académies, and among them Model of the Académie Julian. In this painting, we see a bust-length, nude man, who looks directly towards viewer. Presented against a stark background and illuminated by natural light, Cano captures the subtle curves of the human body through careful chiaroscuro (shading). While Cano’s nude studies reflected a considerable part of his artistic education abroad, back home these works were never exhibited, though there were sometimes private commissions. [2]

Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez, The Huntress of the Andes, c. 1891, oil on canvas, 102 x 159 cm (Colección Andres Blaisten)

The mythological nude

On the few occasions that nude paintings were publicly shown, the subject was almost always represented in the context of mythology. Mexican artist Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez’s Huntress of the Andes and Chilean Valenzuela Puelma’s Nymph of Cherries are two examples. Gutiérrez’s painting alludes to Diana, the Goddess of the hunt, who is set against the backdrop of the Andes Mountains. While Gutierrez situates her in the Andean landscape, with snow covered peaks in the background, it is the female nude that dominates the picture plane. Diana is not presented in the act of hunting, but rather at rest, her body stretched diagonally across the animal pelt and her hand placed over her bow and arrow.

Alfredo Valenzuela Puelma, Nymph of Cherries, c. 1889, oil on canvas (Pinacoteca de la Universidad de Concepción, Chile)

 

Puelma, who had trained in the studio of French painter Jean Paul Laurens, depicts a nymph, a mythological spirit of nature usually depicted in a female guise. Here, the nymph is also depicted in a reclining position, as was common with female nudes painted by male artists, from as early as the Italian Renaissance (by artists like Titian) and throughout the nineteenth century (as in the case of Manet). The nymph provocatively looks out towards the viewer, her mouth partly open and her hand gesturing to the scattered cherries in the foreground. Her seductive pose and the tantalizing nature of the sweet cherries transform this female nude from a mythological subject, into an eroticized one. It was not enough to simply shroud the female nude in Classical mythology (or in some cases Biblical narratives, as in the case of Colombian Epifanio Garay), male artists were also expected to minimize her eroticism, demonstrating how the female nude, whether mythological or not, relied on a different set of viewing standards that sought to transcended physical desire and linked the ideal nude to spiritual beauty. [3]

Manuel Vilar, Tlahuicole, the Tlaxcaltecan General, Fighting in the Gladiatorial Sacrifice, 1851, painted plaster, 216 x 135 x 132 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City)

Differing standards

Athanadoros, Hagesandros, and Polydoros of Rhodes, Laocoön and his Sons, early first century C.E., marble, 7’10 1/2″ high (Vatican Museums)

Not only the gender of the artist, but also that of the model played an important role in the reception of many of these artworks. The male nude was not met with as much concern as the female nude. Spanish artist Manuel Vilar’s The Tlaxcalan General Tlahuicole Doing Battle on the Gladiator’s Stone of Sacrifice and even Cano’s Model of the Académie Julian do not show explicit nudity, but they nevertheless feature bare chested men. Vilar’s Tlaxcalan general relies heavily on exposed and indeed exaggerated musculature, a reference to the Aztec warrior’s heroic death as a martyr. Vilar based Tlahuicole on the ancient Greek statue of Laocoön and his Sons, demonstrating the strong influence of Graeco-Roman Classicism on the subject of the nude. Despite its subject matter and artistic influence, Vilar covers the figure’s genitalia with a leaf— an overt reference to the controversial nature of the nude.

Eduardo Sívori, The Maid’s Wakeup, 1887 (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Argentina)

A path towards modernism

Argentine Eduardo Sívori, who also trained under Jean Paul Laurens, pushed his luck even further, when he exhibited The Maid’s Wakeup in 1887 in Buenos Aires. Devoid of any historical or mythological narrative, Sívori depicted a naked, rather than nude woman, and a working woman, rather than an idealized one. The casual, unheroic nature of her nakedness, and the humility of her bedroom differed greatly from the classicizing nudes of other Latin American artists. In portraying a common woman, rather than an ideal one, and in not providing any legitimate reason for her nakedness, Sívori pushed the limits of acceptability. After exhibiting The Maid’s Wakeup to positive acclaim in Paris, at the Salon des Artistes Français of 1887, he encountered an entirely different response in Buenos Aires. One critic from the conservative newspaper, El Censor, protested not only the woman’s nudity, but also the fact that she was a simple maid, rather than a goddess. [4] Despite these criticisms, Sívori and others established a precedent of challenging moral conventions, ultimately paving a path towards modernism in Latin America.

Source: Dr. Maya Jiménez, “The challenge of the nude in 19th-century Latin American painting,” in Smarthistory, August 23, 2021, accessed August 9, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/nude-nineteenth-century-latin-american-painting/.

The Academy of San Carlos

by Dr. Maya Jiménez

Site of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City since 1791 (photo: Steven Zucker)

From its beginnings in the sixteenth century, the Viceroyalty of New Spain had been home to many accomplished artists. Some of these were Amerindian artists who used their knowledge of sculpture and graphic arts to produce works for conventos and codices; others, were of Spanish birth or heritage and worked mainly in the tradition of European painting and sculpture. By the eighteenth century, this European-based tradition had gained enough popularity and renown in New Spain that prominent artists such as Miguel Cabrera began to advocate for the establishment of an official art academy in Mexico City.

An official art academy for New Spain

Spain established the Academy of San Fernando in 1752 in Madrid—an official art school that, like art other academies across Europe, was designed to train artists in drawing, painting, and sculpture. This became the model for the earliest art academy in the Americas—the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, founded in 1785 under the leadership of Spanish engraver Jerónimo Antonio Gil (see medal above). Most of the faculty members were, like Gil, of Spanish descent, and the artistic lessons promulgated at San Carlos were likewise similar to those taught at the Academy of San Fernando across the Atlantic Ocean.

Jerónimo Antonio Gil, Prize of the Royal Spanish Academy (with profile bust depicting the Spanish king, Charles III), 1777, bronze, 44 x 4.5 mm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

Andrés López, Portrait of Don Matías de Galvez y Gallardo as Vice Protector of the Academy of San Carlos, 1790-1791 (Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico)

Gil developed an arts curriculum that included engraving, sculpture, painting, and architecture. As in the European academies, all students began their artistic education by first drawing from two-dimensional models (prints and drawings) and then progressing to three-dimensional examples, often plaster copies of classical statuary such as the Nike of Samothrace, which later decorated the courtyard of the Academy of San Carlos (this sculpture was excavated in 1863 but illustrates the use of casts of antiquities for study at the Academy). The collection of copies of classical sculpture—allude to the fact that art instruction at the academy was centered on Neoclassicism, a style of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries that sought to emulate the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome. A distinguishing characteristic of Neoclassicism, and one that paralleled the artistic vision of Gil, was the crisp delineation of form, which placed an emphasis on line rather than color (hence the academy’s focus on drawing in the curriculum). The recent archeological discovery of ancient Roman sites such as Herculaneum and Pompeii inspired both the interest in the classical (ancient Greek and Roman) style as well as moralizing subjects about patriotism, nationalism, and courage—ideals founded in 18th century Enlightenment philosophy that helped inspire the Mexican independence movement.

Art education in a colonial context

Andrés López’s Portrait of Don Matías de Galvez y Gallardo as Vice Protector of the Academy of San Carlos provides a view of the school and its students, as much as of its director, the Viceroy of New Spain (a viceroy rules a colony on behalf of a king), whose portrait it shows. While the Viceroy commands the viewer’s attention in the foreground, one cannot help but be distracted by the background where we see two mestizo children in tattered clothes make their way towards the background where drawing students measure a classical sculpture in order to faithfully render it on paper. What this scene implies is that, through attendance at the Academy, unruly children are transformed into disciplined students, from provincial artisans to sophisticated artists. Additionally, by depicting the Viceroy as pointing towards the two children, the López alludes to the mission of the Academy—to educate and professionalize artists, including those of mixed heritage. This depiction of unruly mestizo children also serves as a reminder that the goal of the Spanish colonizers in Latin America was to “civilize” the Indigenous population in all aspects of daily life—including religion and art.

José Gil de Castro, Portrait of Bolívar in Bogotá, 1830 (Museo Nacional de Arqueologia, Antropoligia, e Historia del Perú, Ministerio de Cultura del Perú)

Students at the Academy of San Carlos were not only transformed into artists; they were also made more cosmopolitan, since their education was formally aligned with Europe. However, this cosmopolitanism was not a simple adoption of European ideas and techniques. The art historian Maria Fernández writes that “far from passively absorbing and naively imitating European trends, Mexican cosmopolitanism in the visual arts manifests as active exchanges: adaptations, translations, innovations, and deliberate contestations of European hegemony.”¹ Latin American artists, whether trained at the academy or abroad, did not passively imitate international trends, but rather adapted and localized them.

Neoclassical style, Indigenous themes

In portraiture, such as in Gil de Castro’s Portrait of Bolívar in Bogotá, as well as in history painting, Neoclassicism was considered the academic style par excellence. As in Europe, Neoclassicism allowed Latin American artists to address nationalist values that were rooted in the present yet informed by the classical past. Mexican painters such as Juan Cordero, who had trained at the Academy of San Carlos and in Rome, adapted quickly to this new mode of representation. In 1850, while in Italy, Cordero painted Christopher Columbus at the Court of the Catholic Monarchs, shown at the 1851 exhibition of the Academy of San Carlos.Columbus Before the Catholic Monarchs was a turning point in the career of Cordero and in the history of Mexican art, and became one of the first paintings by a Mexican artist to depict a scene from colonial history.

Juan Cordero, Christopher Columbus at the Court of the Catholic Monarchs, 1850, oil on canvas, 180.5 x 251 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA (MUNAL), Mexico City)

In 1869, director Ramón Alcaraz introduced a prize in the category of history painting for the exhibitions held at the Academy of San Carlos. Indigenous subjects dominated the genre of history painting until 1881 in large part due to the restoration of the Republic in 1867 and the triumph of Mexico’s first Indigenous president, Benito Juárez. In Félix Parra’s Episodes of the Conquest: Massacre of Cholula, the Spanish conquest is not depicted in the context of discovery, as it was in Cordero’s work, but rather in the context of tragedy. Parra documents the bloody execution of the residents of Cholula by the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés, who stands proudly at the center. As Cortés’s men plunder the city of Cholula, exemplified by the figure at the right who greedily examines an object of value, the remaining victims try to save themselves and their families. A woman at left leans over her child, perhaps dead, in order to reach her deceased husband, who lies on his back with his arms outstretched, recalling the martyred image of Jesus on the cross.

Félix Parra, Episodes of the Conquest: The Massacre of Cholula, 1877, oil on canvas, 65 x 106 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte INBA (MUNAL), Mexico City)

On the other hand, José Obregón’s The Discovery of Pulque is entirely Indigenous in subject matter, documenting an event that took place before the time of the Spanish Conquest. Obregón depicts a young woman, Xochitl, offering pulque, a viscous alcoholic beverage made of maguey plants, to the Aztec Emperor Tecpancaltzin, shown seated on his throne. A woman at the far left holds the actual maguey plant, considered sacred to the Aztecs. She and her companions appear humble because of their tattered clothes and subjugated poses, while the men to the right of the composition, surrounding the Aztec emperor, are clearly of a higher status, as reflected in their feathered headdresses.

José María Obregón, The Discovery of Pulque, 1869, oil on canvas, 189 x 230 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA (MUNAL), Mexico City)

In keeping with his interest in classicism, Obregón depicts the scene according to the principle of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” which the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann articulated in Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks in 1755. Rather than portray the figures in this history painting with dramatic gestures, as might befit such an event, the artist depicts the calm and serene poses typical of classical art. Yet by classicizing Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past, Obregón Europeanized his Indigenous subjects demonstrating his adaptation rather than imitation of European trends.

Obregón’s The Discovery of Pulque is further fictionalized, since this drink was known to Mesoamerican cultures before the Aztecs. By presenting the beverage within the context of discovery, Obregón’s painting speaks to European interest in innovation, invention, and exploration. Nevertheless, by representing the Aztec as the cultivators of maguey plants and creators of pulque, Obregón counters the prevalent iconography of the era that commonly depicted the Spanish, not the Indigenous people, as “discoverers” and “creators,” as seen in Cordero’s Columbus Before the Catholic Monarchs.

Manuel Vilar, Tlahuicole, the Tlaxcaltecan General, Fighting in the Gladiatorial Sacrifice, 1851, painted plaster, 216 x 135 x 132 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA (MUNAL), Mexico City, photo: Steven Zucker)

The Spanish-born sculptor Manuel Vilar also capitalized on the glorification of the Indigenous people, as seen in his larger-than-life size sculpture, The Tlaxcalan General Tlahuicole Doing Battle on the Gladiator’s Stone of Sacrifice. Captured by the Aztecs during a flowery war against Tlaxcala, Tlahuicole was taken prisoner; however, after defeating various warriors, he was pardoned and asked to join the Aztec army. Tlahuicole declined the offer and instead accepted his fate in a ritual sacrifice. Depicted in a heroic and idealized state, as noted by his firm stance and idealized body, Vilar adheres to a style of Neoclassicism that he also helped to disseminate at the Academy of San Carlos.

A unique blend

Though artists from New Spain were educated in the latest European trends and techniques at the newly-established Academy of San Carlos, their works nevertheless exemplify a range of solutions to the challenge of representing the complex history and context of New Spain. Interestingly, they achieved this through a complex synthesis of both local and global influences, demonstrating the continuing development of Mexican cosmopolitanism.

Source: Dr. Maya Jiménez, “The Academy of San Carlos,” in Smarthistory, May 11, 2017, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/the-academy-of-san-carlos/.

 

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Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832

by Dr. Cynthia Neri Lewis

Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832, oil on canvas, 42 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches (collection of Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library)

Sometime between 1832–35, the German naturalist, explorer, trader, and self-taught traveler-artist Ferdinand Deppe produced two almost identical paintings documenting his visit to Alta California (a province of Mexico in what is today the state of California). [1] The paintings feature the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, founded by the Spanish Franciscans in 1771 on Tongva land. The Franciscans were one of several mendicant orders who established missions in the Americas from the 16th through the early 19th centuries to spread Christianity to Indigenous peoples and to acquire land for the Spanish Crown.

Deppe painted the majestic, snow-capped San Gabriel mountains with strong contour lines against a cloudy purple-blue sky. The mountain range looms large over a lush, sun-dappled landscape in which European and Tongva people interact peacefully. Such scenes of human figures seamlessly interspersed into panoramic settings typify American, Mexican, and European 19th-century Romantic painting. Like other 19th-century Romantic thinkers, Deppe saw landscape painting as a means of documenting the topographical, geographical, and botanical features of the San Gabriel Valley while simultaneously presenting nature’s spiritual and poetic possibilities. [2]

The church at the mission (detail), Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832, oil on canvas, 42 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches (collection of Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library)

Though the painting was not commissioned by the Spanish Franciscans, there is still an obvious colonial message presented within this landscape. Tiny figures dressed in red garments partake in a Catholic ceremony in front of the mission edifice. From a European perspective, the scene provided evidence of the successful conversion of the Tongva to Christianity. However, if we look beyond this, we can get a sense of the more diverse experiences of European, Mexican, Anglo-American, and Native peoples on the northern frontier of New Spain during the waning years of the Spanish colonial era.

 

Kiiy (detail), Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832, oil on canvas, 42 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches (collection of Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library)

“Hut to Temple”

The viewer is invited to enter the picture from the bottom right, where a kiiy (a Tongva domed hut made of thatched tule) is prominently featured. Deppe uses soft golden hues to render the effects of sunlight on the side of the kiiy and has paid special attention to defining its rough texture.

Mission (detail), Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832, oil on canvas, 42 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches (collection of Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library)

Date palm and kiiy (detail), Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832, oil on canvas, 42 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches (collection of Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library)

In the middle ground, a turquoise blue stream (actually, an irrigation ditch) forms a diagonal division across the picture plane, suggesting cultural progression from the thatched kiiy in the foreground to the stone mission in the middle ground. [3]  At the time of his visit, tule grew wild along the banks of the San Gabriel river. Though the stone mission church took primacy in the actual mission space, in Deppe’s painting the kiiy, a “Native” product of its environment, occupies an important position. By placing it in the foreground and emphasizing its material affinity with the landscape, he suggests that not only did Native life and culture survive after Spanish colonization, but that something natural, intrinsic, and ideal could still be gleaned from it. A date palm, a plant imported by the Spanish Franciscans, is painted beside the kiiy. Deppe has carefully painted the fronds of the leafy tree with bright yellow and white highlights, creating the effect of sun streaming through them. A few date fruits are visibly hanging in its branches. Here, the exotic tree helps to reinforce the Romantic idea of America as a utopia or Biblical Eden. Similarly (and conveniently), 16th–18th century Spanish Franciscan texts and mission fresco cycles often presented the Americas as a flowery garden paradise, a promised land, or a Heavenly (New) Jerusalem; the Franciscans viewed their American missions as a “New Temple” of Jerusalem. [4]

Flicker quill headband, 62 x 14.4 x 0.5 cm, collected by Ferdinand Deppe before 1837 (California) (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin)

European traveler-artists in the Americas

Deppe was in Mexico from 1824 through 1827, following the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt and other European naturalists and proponents of Romanticism who explored the American continent in the early 19th century. There, he collected natural history, including zoological and botanical specimens. During his subsequent visits to Alta California in the late 1820s and early 1830s, which had opened up to foreign visitors after becoming part of the new Mexican Republic in 1824, Deppe’s collecting changed to include “ethnographic material” such as Chumash and Ohlone basketry, ceremonial headdresses, and belts made from woodpecker and mallard feathers, quills, olivella, and abalone shell. This shift in focus was typical of the period, which saw a rising interest in ethnology (the comparative and analytic study of cultures).

Left: Ear ornament, bone, feather, glass beads, cord, abalone shell, 15 cm long, collected by Ferdinand Deppe before 1837 (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin); right: Woven feather belt, 187 cm long, collected by Ferdinand Deppe before 1837 (California) (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin)

In 1832, Deppe visited several California missions with his friend Alfred Robinson, a merchant from Boston. They were invited to a feast at Mission San Jose, where they observed Native dancers performing. Robinson recalled the way that the dancers’ bodies were painted and adorned with feathers. Many of Robinson’s descriptions match the mission objects collected by Deppe, which were later displayed in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and the British Museum.

 If we take a closer look at the figures in Deppe’s San Gabriel landscape, we see a few Tongva men wearing headbands and taparrobos (loin cloths), but several others in European attire. They are not pictured wearing the elaborate Native regalia the artist collected at the nearby missions. This discrepancy points to Deppe’s multiple roles, intentions, and patrons: the “natural history” specimens he collected were clearly aimed at a different audience than his landscape paintings. Deppe was not only an artist, but a trader, a naturalist, a horticulturalist, and an ethnology collector, so he catered to a diverse clientele, including private collectors of Romantic landscape painting and European ethnology museums with an interest in acquiring and displaying American objects. His work also ap

 If we take a closer look at the figures in Deppe’s San Gabriel landscape, we see a few Tongva men wearing headbands and taparrobos (loin cloths), but several others in European attire. They are not pictured wearing the elaborate Native regalia the artist collected at the nearby missions. This discrepancy points to Deppe’s multiple roles, intentions, and patrons: the “natural history” specimens he collected were clearly aimed at a different audience than his landscape paintings. Deppe was not only an artist, but a trader, a naturalist, a horticulturalist, and an ethnology collector, so he catered to a diverse clientele, including private collectors of Romantic landscape painting and European ethnology museums with an interest in acquiring and displaying American objects. His work also ap

Priest and trader (detail), Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832, oil on canvas, 42 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches (collection of Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library)

An inhabited landscape

By the 1830s, inhabitants of the missions had extended beyond the Spanish Franciscan priests and the Native populations. In the left foreground, a priest interacts with a trader. Mission activities ranged from religious to agricultural to economic: raising cattle, trading, housing and entertaining travelers, and producing goods such as citrus fruits, wine, soap, hides, and olive oil. Deppe presents the converted Tongva as laborers and producers who are essential to the mission’s modern economy.

Figures in front of kiiy (detail), Ferdinand Deppe, The Mission of San Gabriel, Alta California in May 1832, oil on canvas, 42 3/4 x 33 1/2 inches (collection of Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library)

In front of the kiiy, a Don (a Spanish settler or former soldier awarded a land grant) converses with a Tongva man. Though there is stark contrast between the nude Native and the finely dressed European, the significance of their exchange is expressed through their sturdy male bodies, upright postures and positioning in the right foreground.

Four Tongva women stand and sit on a mat next to the kiiy, while a child crawls toward the group accompanied by a dog. In contrast to the men, the women’s bodies are curvilinear, and one of them is placed with her back to the viewer, which creates the sense that they are comfortably involved in their own conversation. They wear European-style white blouses and their bayetas (skirts) create circular shapes on the rectangular mat. The placement of the women on the ground or leaning on the date palm serves to physically and symbolically connect them to the land. The visual association of women—particularly Native women—with the natural world and men with culture/civilization was typical in both 19th-century U.S. American and Mexican landscape traditions.

Theodoor Galle (after Johannes Stradanus) “The Discovery of America,” from Nova Reperta, c. 1600, engraving, 27 x 20 cm, published by Philips Galle (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

While Deppe’s San Gabriel landscape certainly draws from a range of 19th-century artistic, scientific, and philosophical discourses drawn from European Enlightenment ideas about man and nature, it is not far removed from early European representations of the peoples they encountered in the Americas. For example, in Theodoor Galle’s 1600 engraving of “The Discovery of America,” Native people wearing feathered headdresses abound in lush, bountiful landscapes, and Indigenous female bodies (representing America) contrast with authoritative European male figures. In Deppe’s image, more than two hundred years after Galle’s, the women’s gestures—slightly open arms, shy upward glances, bodies gently leaning towards the standing male figure—continue to indicate supposed Native receptivity to European power.

California’s first oil painting?

Today, Deppe’s landscapes are touted in state promotional literature as the first oil on canvas paintings produced in and depicting California. In actuality this painting belongs to the history of the art of Mexico. They were produced when Alta California was a part of the Republic of Mexico, and there are indications that while Deppe made sketches onsite in San Gabriel, he completed the painting in Mexico City.

By the time of Deppe’s visit, Mexico had declared its independence from Spain and taken control of the missions. During the years 1833–36, the missions and most of their land was seized from the Franciscans and sold off to Mexican rancheros and private citizens, despite the Mexican government’s original intent to return the land to Native Californians. Deppe may have captured the last glimpse of San Gabriel before its secularization in 1834. The viewer is led to believe that the artist has painted his actual observation of the southern California landscape at this transitional moment, but his chosen subject matter and formal choices reveal an imagined mission landscape—one still very much tied to a European colonial project.

 

José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico from the Santa Isabel Mountain Range (Valle de México desde el cerro de Santa Isabel),1875, oil on canvas, 137.5 x 226 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City)  URL: https://youtu.be/abc1Y4X-id8

Siqueiros and Mexican history

At the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City visitors enter the rectory (the main administration building), beneath an imposing three-dimensional arm emerging from a mural. Several hands, one with a pencil, charge towards a book, which lists critical dates in Mexico’s history: 1520 (the Conquest by Spain); 1810 (Independence from Spain); 1857 (the Liberal Constitution which established individual rights); and 1910 (the start of the Revolution against the regime of Porfirio Díaz). David Alfaro Siqueiros left the final date blank in Dates in Mexican History or the Right for Culture (1952–56), inspiring viewers to create Mexico’s next great historic moment.

The revolution

From 1910 to 1920 civil war ravaged the nation as citizens revolted against dictator Porfirio Díaz. At the heart of the Revolution was the belief—itself revolutionary—that the land should be in the hands of laborers, the very people who worked it. This demand for agrarian reform signaled a new age in Mexican society: issues concerning the popular masses—universal public education and health care, expanded civil liberties—were at the forefront of government policy.

Mexican muralism

At the end of the Revolution the government commissioned artists to create art that could educate the mostly illiterate masses about Mexican history. Celebrating the Mexican people’s potential to craft the nation’s history was a key theme in Mexican muralism, a movement led by Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco—known as Los tres grandes. Between the 1920s and 1950s, they cultivated a style that defined Mexican identity following the Revolution.

The muralists developed an iconography featuring atypical, non-European heroes from the nation’s illustrious past, present, and future—Aztec (Mexica) warriors battling the Spanish, humble peasants fighting in the Revolution, common laborers of Mexico City, and the mixed-race people who will forge the next great epoch, like in Siqueiros’s UNAM mural. Los tres grandes crafted epic murals on the walls of highly visible, public buildings using techniques like fresco, encaustic, mosaic, and sculpture-painting.

One of the earliest government commissions for a post-Revolution mural was for the National Preparatory School, a high school in Mexico City affiliated with UNAM. During the 1920s Los tres grandes and other artists completed works throughout the school’s expansive exteriors and interiors.

Destruction of the old order

Orozco painted nearly two dozen murals at the school including Destruction of the Old Order, 1926. It depicts two figures in peasant attire who watch nineteenth-century neoclassical structures fracture into a Cubist-like pile, signaling the demise of the past. Just as Siqueiros’s UNAM murals anticipate an unrealized historic event, the “new order” implied in Orozco’s work is the world these men will encounter once they turn to face the viewer. These anonymous men are unlikely heroes given their modest attire, yet they represent a new age where the Revolution has liberated the masses from centuries of repression.

Murals for the Palace of Fine Arts

In 1934 the government inaugurated the Palace of Fine Arts Mexico City, which soon became the nation’s most important cultural institution. The Palace’s Museum, Mexico’s first art museum, opened the same year with works by two of Los tres grandes: Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934, a recreation of Man at the Crossroads (painted at Rockefeller Center and destroyed the year before), and Orozco’s Catharsis, 1934.

The title of Orozco’s painting dates to 1942, when an art historian speculated that the fire at the top of the composition symbolized catharsis, and thus “the only possibility of saving and purifying civilization” as it succumbed to the excesses of moral depravity. The laughing central figure jerks the viewer into an immoral world, where the malevolent aspects of modern life—senseless warfare, destructive technology, and prostitution—run rampant.

In Torment and Apotheosis of Cuauhtémoc, 1950–51, another mural at the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, Siqueiros explores the violent period of the Conquest. In this mural Spanish soldiers torture the Mexican tribal leader for information on the location of the treasure they seek. The Mexican motherland, symbolized by the blood-stained female figure, stretches her arms protectively over his still figure. Siqueiros’ penchant for sinewy limbs, showcased in the UNAM murals and exemplified here in the bodies of Cuauhtémoc and his praying companion, underscore the tension in this encounter.

The Mexican Revolution was a watershed moment in the twentieth century because it marked a true break from the past, ushering in a more egalitarian age. With its grand scale, innovative iconography, and socially relevant message, Mexican muralism remains a notable compliment to the Revolution. The way the muralists reoriented history, recovered lost stories, and drafted new narratives continues to stir audiences and inspire artists, like the Chicano muralists that emerged in the U.S. Southwest. The fact that their in-situ masterpieces can still be seen publicly in Mexico and beyond is a testament to their relevance, popularity, and the power of their didactic message.

Source: Dr. Doris Maria-Reina Bravo, “Mexican Muralism: Los Tres Grandes—David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/mexican-muralism-los-tres-grandes-david-alfaro-siqueiros-diego-rivera-and-jose-clemente-orozco/.

How is history told?

Typically, we think of history as a series of events narrated in chronological order. But what does history look like as a series of images? Mexican artist Diego Rivera responded to this question when he painted The History of Mexico, as a series of murals that span three large walls within a grand stairwell of the National Palace in Mexico City. In Rivera’s words, the mural represents “the entire history of Mexico from the Conquest through the Mexican Revolution . . . down to the ugly present.”[1]

In an overwhelming and crowded composition, Rivera represents pivotal scenes from the history of the modern nation-state, including scenes from the Spanish Conquest, the fight for independence from Spain, the Mexican-American war, the Mexican Revolution, and an imagined future Mexico in which a workers’ revolution has triumphed. Although this mural cycle spans hundreds of years of Mexican history, Rivera concentrated on themes that highlight a Marxist interpretation of history as driven by class conflict as well as the struggle of the Mexican people against foreign invaders and the resilience of Indigenous cultures.

A new national identity

In the immediate years following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the newly formed government sought to establish a national identity that eschewed Eurocentrism (an emphasis on European culture) and instead heralded the Amerindian. The result was that Indigenous culture was elevated in the national discourse. After hundreds of years of colonial rule and the Eurocentric dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the new Mexican state integrated its national identity with the concept of indigenismo, an ideology that lauded Mexico’s past Indigenous history and cultural heritage (rather than acknowledging the ongoing struggles of contemporary Indigenous people and incorporating them into the new state governance).

José Vasconcelos, the new government’s Minister of Public Education, conceived of a collaboration between the government and artists. The result were state-sponsored murals such as those at the National Palace in Mexico City.

Why murals?

Rivera and other artists believed easel painting to be “aristocratic,” since for centuries this kind of art had been the purview of the elite. Instead they favored mural painting since it could present subjects on a large scale to a wide public audience. This idea—of directly addressing the people in public buildings—suited the muralists’ Communist politics. In 1922, Rivera (and others) signed the Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, arguing that artists must invest “their greatest efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people.”[2]

Diego Rivera, History of Mexico murals, 1929–30, frescos in the stairwell of the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City

Rivera had to design his composition around the pre-existing built environment of the National Palace. Rivera painted in the historical buon fresco technique, in which the artist paints directly upon wet plaster that has been applied to a wall resulting in the pigment being permanently fused to the lime plaster. Such murals were common in pre-conquest Mexico as well as in Europe.

In the case of The History of Mexico, this meant creating a three-part allegorical portrayal of Mexico that was informed by the specific history of the site. Today the National Palace is the seat of executive power in Mexico, but it was built atop the ruins of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II’s residence after the Spanish Conquest of the capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521. The site then served as the residence of the conquistador Hernán Cortés and later the Viceroy of New Spain until the end of the Wars of Independence in 1821. This site is a potent symbol of the history of conflict between Indigenous Aztecs and Spanish invaders.

The North Wall

The Aztec World, the title of the mural on the North Wall, features Rivera’s first large-scale rendering of Mesoamerica before the Spanish invasion—here focused on the Aztecs (the Mexica). Rivera’s representation of the deity Quetzalcoatl (“feathered serpent”), seated in the center of the composition wearing a headdress of quetzal feathers—draws on imagery from colonial-era sources, in particular, an image of Quetzalcoatl from the Florentine Codex.

Against the backdrop of the Valley of Mexico (where Tenochtitlan and now Mexico City are located), Rivera renders a Mesoamerican pyramid and various aspects of Aztec life. He represents figures grinding maíz (corn) to make tortillas, playing music, creating paintings, sculpture, and leatherwork, and transporting goods for trade and imperial tribute.

Despite Rivera’s great admiration for pre-Conquest civilizations (he was a great collector of pre-Columbian art) he did not uncritically portray the Aztec world as utopian. In addition to rendering scenes of agriculture and cultural production, The Aztec World shows laborers building pyramids, a group resisting Aztec control, and scenes of the Aztecs waging the wars that created and maintained their empire. Rivera demonstrates the Marxist position that class conflict is the prime driver of history—here, even before the arrival of the Spaniards.

The West Wall

On the West Wall and in the center of the stairway, visitors are confronted with a chaotic composition titled From the Conquest to 1930. The wall is divided at the top by corbels from which spring five arches.

Across the top, In the outermost sections, Rivera represents the two nineteenth-century invasions of Mexico—by France and the United States respectively. From left to right, the three central sections depict: the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, figures associated with Independence and the Mexican Revolution, and the Constitution of 1857 (during the presidency of Benito Juárez) and the War of Reform. These historical events are somewhat distinguishable thanks to the arches that separate the scenes.

In the lower section of the mural however, there is no such distinction between, for example, scenes of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, the subsequent destruction of Mesoamerican painted books (now called codices), the arrival of Christian missionaries, the destruction of pre-Columbian temples, and construction of new colonial structures—emphasizing the interrelated nature of these events.

An eagle standing on a nopal cactus at the very center of the wall, mirrors the insignia at the center of the Mexican flag. These historical scenes have been compressed and flattened on the picture surface resulting in a dense visual mosaic of intertwining figures and forms. The lack of deep space in the composition makes it difficult to distinguish between different scenes, and results in an allover composition without a central focus or a clear visual pathway. This cacophony of historical figures and flurried action overwhelms viewers as they walk up the stairs.

Given the breadth of the wall space, Rivera had to make critical decisions about which historical figures and narratives to include. Rivera’s formal choices—the flattening of the pictorial space, the nonlinear organization, and the monumental scale of the figures—create a non-hierarchical composition. These formal choices support Rivera’s decision to represent not just the historically well-known and recognizable figures, such as the independence fighter Miguel Hidalgo, revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (who holds a flag with the words tierra y libertad, or land and liberty), or the first Indigenous president Benito Juárez, but also anonymous workers, laborers, and soldiers. As Rivera later noted,

“Each personage in the mural was dialectically connected with his neighbors, in accordance with his role in history. Nothing was solitary; nothing was irrelevant.”[3]

The artist’s portrayal of the interconnection of social struggle throughout Mexico’s history and the non-hierarchical representation of the historical figures reflects his Marxist perspective.

The South Wall

Rivera’s politics become more evident on the South Wall, titled Mexico Today and Tomorrow, which was painted years later in 1935. Mexico Today and Tomorrow depicts contemporary class conflict between industrial capitalism (using machinery and with a clear division of labor) and workers around the world.

The narrative begins in the lower right and progresses upward in a boustrophedonic pattern (here, a reverse S-curve), similar to the compositional layout of pre-Conquest Mesoamerican painted manuscripts (such as the Codex Nuttall). In the lower section Rivera depicts campesinos (peasant farmers) laboring, urban workers constructing buildings, and his wife Frida Kahlo with a number of school children who are being taught as part of an expansion of rural education after the Revolution.

Following the narrative up, Rivera represents—using a pictorial structure unique to this wall—negative social forces such as high-society figures, corrupt and reactionary clergy, and the invasion of foreign capital—here represented by contemporaneous capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who was attempting to secure access to Mexican oil at the time.

To the right, workers are being oppressed by police wearing gas masks, yet just above this scene a figure in blue emerges from a mass of uprising workers, their fists raised in the air against the backdrop of downtown Mexico City. The narrative culminates in a portrait of Karl Marx who is shown pointing wearied workers and campesinos towards a “vision of a future industrialized and socialized land of peace and plenty.”[4] Unlike the non-linear composition of the West Wall, here Rivera expresses his vision for the future of Mexico, a winding path that leaves oppression and corruption behind.

An alternative history

So what type of history has Rivera told us and how did he tell it? Is he the sole narrator? The History of Mexico was painted in a governmental building as part of a campaign to promote Mexican national identity, and yet, the mural cycle is not necessarily didactic. Rivera could have created a much simpler representation of Mexican history, one that directed the viewer’s experience more explicitly. Instead, the viewer’s response to this visual avalanche of history is to play an active role in the interpretation of the narrative. The lack of illusionistic space and the flattening of forms creates a composition that allows the viewer to decide where to look and how to read it. Moreover, the experiential and sensorial act of moving up the stairs allows the viewer to perceive the murals from multiple angles and vantage points. There is no “right way” to read this mural because there is no clear beginning or end to the story. The viewer is invited to synthesize the narrative to construct their own history of Mexico.

See also:

Learn more about Rivera’s murals, including Man Controller of the Universe, Sugar Cane, and the Detroit Industry murals.

Source: Megan Flattley, “The History of Mexico: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace,” in Smarthistory, September 22, 2020, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/mexico-diego-rivera-murals-national-palace/.

Humanity

José Clemente Orozco painted the mural Dive Bomber and Tank in front of visitors at The Museum of Modern Art in 1940. The fresco was made in conjunction with the exhibition, “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art,” and Orozco captivated his audience over a frantic ten-day period through his performance and his powerful imagery.

Against the backdrop of World War II and the infamous blitzkriegs of the Nazis, Orozco depicted the effects of modern warfare on humanity. Interestingly however, and because weapons of war dominate most of the composition, any hint of the human figure is lost, except for three human legs that sprout from the debris, and upon close inspection three metallic human faces—or masks—chained to the debris. These faces are buried under large, heavy, industrial weapons, that include tank treads and the disassembled parts of a bomber. Through this superimposition, Orozco makes clear the triumph of war over humanity, or as he put it “the subjugation of man by the machines of modern warfare.” [1]

Abstraction

For all the certainty of this statement, there is significant ambiguity in the painting. The upturned legs could be those of helpless victims or those of the bomber pilots. The artist purposely leaves these questions unanswered, offering little narrative detail or visual clarity. Indeed Orozco claimed that these panels could be arranged in any order (a Surrealist strategy), and not necessarily in sequential order (as they are usually shown at MoMA). As a result of their interchangeability, the panels each function independently though collectively they create multiple abstract compositions.

His interest in abstraction distinguished Orozco from his closest contemporaries, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros (together these muralists were known as Los Tres Grandes, “the three great ones”). These abstract tendencies can be seen in Dive Bomber and Tank in the relative lack of detail, expressionist brushstrokes, repetition of form, and monochromatic palette.

The attention to the circular forms of the chain links and metallic bolts, and the rectangular shape of the tank treads create a composition that is at once representational and abstract. The fact that these forms are disconnected from each other, a result of the dismembered state of the bomber and tank, and the logistical arrangement of the panels, render the mural even more abstract.

War

While Orozco stated that this mural had “no political significance,” war was the dominant reality in 1940 and focused the attention of other artists at the time. Pablo Picasso had documented the effects of the Spanish Civil War in his painting Guernica in 1937—the same year that David Alfaro Siqueiros painted the powerful Echo of a Scream. Picasso’s Guernica had been on exhibit at MoMA from late 1939 to January 1940 and the Siqueiros had been in MoMA’s collection since 1937. Together these artists articulated a clear anti-war message that rivaled the more traditional heroic narratives common in history painting. Devoid of the geographical specificity that characterized Picasso’s Guernica, Orozco—like Siqueiros—represented a condemnation of war that can be easily applied to any place or people, fitting given that violence was now world-wide. The fact that Dive Bomber and Tank lacks any specific political symbols or historical details makes the mural that much more universal.

See also: Learn more about Latin American modernisms in a Reframing Art History chapter.

Source:  Dr. Maya Jiménez, “José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/orozco-dive-bomber-and-tank/.

Sixty, more than a third of the easel paintings known by Frida Kahlo are self-portraits. This huge number demonstrates the importance of this genre to her artistic oeuvre. The Two Fridas, like Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair, captures the artist’s turmoil after her 1939 divorce from the artist Diego Rivera. At the same time, issues of identity surface in both works. The Two Fridas speaks to cultural ambivalence and refers to her ancestral heritage. Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair suggests Kahlo’s interest in gender and sexuality as fluid concepts.

Kahlo was famously known for her tumultuous marriage with Rivera, whom she wed in 1929 and remarried in 1941. The daughter of a German immigrant (of Hungarian descent) and a Mexican mother, Kahlo suffered from numerous medical setbacks including polio, which she contracted at the age of six, partial immobility—the result of a bus accident in 1925, and her several miscarriages. Kahlo began to paint largely in response to her accident and her limited mobility, taking on her own identity and her struggles as sources for her art. Despite the personal nature of her content, Kahlo’s painting is always informed by her sophisticated understanding of art history, of Mexican culture, its politics, and its patriarchy.

The Two Fridas

Exhibited in 1940 at the International Surrealist Exhibition, The Two Fridas depicts a large-scale, double portrait of Kahlo, rare for the artist, since most of her canvases were small, reminiscent of colonial retablos, small devotional paintings. To the right Kahlo appears dressed in traditional Tehuana attire, different from the nineteenth century wedding dress she wears at left and similar to the one worn by her mother in My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) (1936).

Whereas the white dress references the Euro-Mexican culture she was brought up in, in which women are “feminine” and fragile, the Tehuana dress evokes the opposite, a powerful figure within an indigenous culture described by some at the time as a matriarchy. This cultural contrast speaks to the larger issue of how adopting the distinctive costume of the indigenous people of Tehuantepec, known as the Tehuana, was considered not only “a gesture of nationalist cultural solidarity,” but also a reference to the gender stereotype of “la india bonita.” [1] Against the backdrop of post-revolutionary Mexico, when debates about indigenismo (the ideology that upheld the Indian as an important marker of national identity) and mestizaje (the racial mixing that occurred as a result of the colonization of the Spanish-speaking Americas) were at stake, Kahlo’s work can be understood on both a national and personal level. While the Tehuana costume allowed for Kahlo to hide her misshapen body and right leg, a consequence of polio and the accident, it was also the attire most favored by Rivera, the man whose portrait the Tehuana Kahlo holds. Without Rivera, the Europeanized Kahlo not only bleeds to death, but her heart remains broken, both literally and metaphorically.

Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair

In opposition, the painting Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair boldly denounces the femininity of Two Fridas. In removing her iconic Tehuana dress, in favor of an oversized men’s suit, and in cutting off her braids in favor of a crew cut, Kahlo takes on the appearance of none other than Rivera himself. At the top of the canvas, Kahlo incorporates lyrics from a popular song, which read, “Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.” In weaving personal and popular references, Kahlo creates multilayered self-portraits that while rooted in reality, as she so adamantly argued, nevertheless provoke the surrealist imagination. This can be seen in the visual disjunctions she employs such as the floating braids in Self Portrait with Cropped Hair and the severed artery in Two Fridas. As Kahlo asserted to Surrealist writer André Breton, she was simply painting her own reality.

See also:

Frida Kahlo: Embracing Her Masculinity on ArtUK

Faces of Frida, Google Cultural Institute

Source:  Dr. Maya Jiménez, “Frida Kahlo, introduction,” in Smarthistory, October 31, 2019, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/frida-kahlo-introduction/.

Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera​, 1931, oil on canvas, 39-3/8 x 31″ / 100.01 x 78.74 cm (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)  URL: https://youtu.be/n2HWkDrorRg

This was painted in San Francisco during the artist’s first trip outside of Mexico. She accompanied her husband Diego Rivera who was painting in the United States and would, at the end of the year, be the subject of a retrospecive at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The banderole carried by the bird above the artist states: “Here you see us, me, Frieda Kahlo​, with my beloved husband Diego Rivera, I painted these portraits in the beautiful city of San Francisco, California, for our friend Mr. Albert Bender, and it was the month of April of the year 1931.” Note: Kahlo changed her German name, Frieda, to Frida.

Source: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera​,” in Smarthistory, November 23, 2015, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/frida-kahlo-frieda-and-diego-rivera/.

Indelible marks

Facial hair indelibly marks the self-portraits of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. In an era when women still wore elaborate hairstyles, hosiery, and attire, Kahlo was a rebellious loner, often dressed in indigenous clothing. Moreover, she lived as an artist during a period when many middle-class women sacrificed their ambitions to live entirely in the domestic sphere. Kahlo flouted both conventions of beauty and social expectations in her self-portraits. These powerful and unflinching self-images explore complex and difficult topics including her culturally mixed heritage, the harsh reality of her medical conditions, and the repression of women.

The double self-portrait The Two Fridas, 1939 features two seated figures holding hands and sharing a bench in front of a stormy sky. The Fridas are identical twins except in their attire, a poignant issue for Kahlo at this moment. The year she painted this canvas she was divorced from Diego Rivera, the acclaimed Mexican muralist. Before she married Rivera in 1929, she wore the modern European dress of the era, evident in her first self-portrait (left) where she dons a red velvet dress with gold embroidery. With Rivera’s encouragement, Kahlo embraced attire rooted in Mexican customs.

Dress

In her second self-portrait (left) her accessories reference distinct periods in Mexican history (her necklace is a reference to the pre-Columbian Jadite of the Aztecs and the earrings are Spanish colonial in style) while her simple white blouse is a nod to peasant women.

The portraits from the 1930s reflect Kahlo’s growing penchant for indigenous attire and hair-styling, as is evident in Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931 and The Two Fridas. Yet Kahlo never abandoned dressing her subjects and herself in mainstream, European dress; her female relatives wear non-indigenous clothing in My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree), 1936 (below).

In this painting, the bridal dress Kahlo’s mother wears is reminiscent of the white, stiff-collared dress the artist wears in The Two Fridas. Indeed, the grotesque view into each woman’s insides is heightened by the virginal whiteness of both dresses.

In her brief lifetime, Kahlo painted about two hundred works of art, many of which are self-portraits. With the exception of a few family trees, the double-portrait with Rivera and The Two Fridas represents a departure in her oeuvre. If a self-portrait by definition is a painting of one’s self, why would Kahlo paint herself twice? One way to answer this question is to examine The Two Fridas as a bookend to the 1931 portrait, Frieda and Diego Rivera. Though this painting was meant to celebrate the birth of their union, their tentative grasp seems to reflect Kahlo’s misgivings about her husband’s fidelity. By contrast, the double self-portrait, though laden with suffering, exhibits resilience.

Anatomy of Two Fridas

The two Fridas clasp hands tightly. This bond is echoed by the vein that unites them. Where one is weakened by an exposed heart, the other is strong; where one still pines for her lost love (as underscored by the vein feeding Rivera’s miniature portrait), the other clamps down on that figurative and literal tie with a hemostat.

Human anatomy is often graphically exposed in Kahlo’s work, a topic she knew well after a childhood bout with polio deformed her right leg and a bus accident when she was eighteen years old left her disabled and unable to bear children. She would endure 32 operations as a result. Kahlo utilized blood as a visceral metaphor of union, as in the 1936 family portrait (above) where she honors her lineage through these bloody ties. She returns to this metaphor in The Two Fridas though with the added impact of two hearts, both vulnerable and laid bare to the viewer as a testament to her emotional suffering.

“I am the person I know best”

Photographs by artists within her milieu, like Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Imogen Cunningham, confirm that Kahlo’s self-portraits were largely accurate and that she avoided embellishing her features. The solitude produced by frequent bed rest—stemming from polio, her near-fatal bus accident, and a lifetime of operations—was one of the cruel constants in Kahlo’s life. Indeed, numerous photographs feature Kahlo in bed, often painting despite restraints. Beginning in her youth, in order to cope with these long periods of recovery, Kahlo became a painter. Nevertheless, the isolation caused by her health problems was always present. She reflected, “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

See also:

Frida Kahlo, an introduction

Frida Kahlo at the Tate

Watch a video on Frida Kahlo’s Frieda and Diego Riviera (1931)

Source: Dr. Doris Maria-Reina Bravo, “Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas),” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/kahlo-the-two-fridas-las-dos-fridas/.

Who is this man with a sword and a machete in his hands surrounded by symbols and objects that seem to float around him, including a table with a flaming chalice. He wears boots, a military-style coat above an orange vest, and tall red hat adorned with black symbols. His face is rather inscrutable, with an unfocused gaze and a slightly scowling mouth. He is Ogou Fer, also known as Ogou Feray, an important loaof the Haitian Vodou pantheon. The artist, Hector Hyppolite, created many paintings like this one that are tied to Vodou, for the burgeoning Haitian art market of the 1940s.

Vodou as subject and inspiration

Vodou remains a popular religion in Haiti. Its origins are diverse, and it developed initially among the enslaved population during the Spanish and French colonial periods. Like other Afro-Caribbean religions (such as santería in Cuba), Vodou is characterized by syncretism (an amalgamation of different religions). Vodou’s rich visual and ritual culture builds on Fon, Yoruba, Kongo, Mbundu, and Mondongue religious beliefs from West and Central Africa and on Spanish and French Catholicism. People from Africa, or of African descent who were forced into the practice of Catholicism in the Caribbean made associations between Christian holy figures and the deities and narratives of their own religions. This was a way to continue practicing their original beliefs in secret while maintaining strong links to their African culture under the severe restrictions caused by slavery and colonial society. With time, this practice resulted in Haitian Vodou as a unique religious system.

Vodou acquired national significance during and after the Haitian Revolution, in part because it was credited with sparking the enslaved population’s involvement in the uprising. In the following centuries, Vodou was both esteemed and vilified. For example, in the 19th century, the autocratic president Faustin Soulouque publicly associated himself with the practice of the religion and sought its official acceptance. Then in the early 20th century anti-superstition campaigns were led by the government and the Church to eradicate its practice. All the while, Vodou continued as an important religious and cultural practice among the general Haitian population. Finally in 1946, it was properly legalized and became a popular subject of artistic production.

The artist, Hector Hyppolite, was a third generation houngan (Voudou priest) and was intimately familiar with the religion’s practice and imagery. He was a self-taught artist who specialized in decorative and religious art for use in oum’phors (Voudou temples). He became well-known in Haiti and internationally during the second half of the 1940s. Due to his relationship with the Centre d’Art in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, he also produced works based on Vodou imagery for a market that attracted buyers and collectors from Europe and North America. It is likely that Ogou Feray also known as Ogoun Ferraille, was made for this audience, and the French Surrealist André Breton, bought this work from Hyppolite on his visit to Haiti in late 1945 and early 1946.

The painting

Besides the weapons he carries, Ogou Feray is easily identifiable by the drum that carries his name on the right portion of the composition and because he wears red, his color. Hyppolite took considerable liberty in the representation of loas (spirits or deities) but there are elements of the composition that point to this figure’s status and identity. [1] As a loa, he is linked with warfare, reason, and wisdom. [2] Military imagery and fire often accompany his representation and here we see swords, axes, and a burning lamp. Traditionally conceived as the loa who works with iron, Ogou Feray is also associated with blacksmiths.

The prevalence of weapons, and military associations may be what led to Ogou Feray being linked with Saint James the Greater; a syncretic association related to the representation of James as the Moor-slayer (Santiago Matamoros). In this representation the saint is often shown in armor, riding a horse, and raising a sword to slay his foe. St. James the Great is the patron of Spain and his cult was popular in the Spanish Americas since the beginning of colonization. Armed angels and defensive saints were common throughout the Spanish Americas, with images of the Archangel Michael and St. James the Great popular as defenders of Christianity and Christians themselves. This was also the case in what would later become the nation of Haiti and may point to the early appearance of the syncretized Ogou Feray in the region.

Many objects surround Ogou Feray in this painting (filled cups and vases, crosses, playing cards, and more). These objects and those on the table may allude to the type of offerings left at his altar. Offerings are often presented by the believer when wanting to ask a favor, when fulfilling a promise, or simply to please the loa. The snake that seems to float over the table may reference Danbhalah Wédo, a high-ranking deity in the Vodou pantheon. Danbhalah Wédo is a serpent-god, often represented as a great snake or as a figure with a head and upper chest of the human and the body of a snake.

The style of the work is representative of what became known as Haitian primitivism. Primitivism as an artistic trend developed in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century that rejected traditional aesthetic and formal conventions often associated with art academies and fascinated many in the European vanguard. The term was often used to describe non-Western art that was seen as authentic and uncorrupted while also naïve. It also was often used to refer to the style of self-taught and folk artists and to the work produced in non-industrial societies. We can see some of this in Ogou Feray, in the lack of depth in what seems to be an interior space and the flatness in the representation of Ogou Feray’s figure.

The making of Haitian primitivism

In 1944, the American artist and teacher DeWitt Peters opened the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince with the support of the writer Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and other local intellectuals and artists. Its goal was to offer art education and create a space for exhibitions and the sale of Haitian art to a local and international audience. It was there that Breton bought this painting. In its early years it sought primarily to showcase popular Haitian art, with work by artists such as Hyppolite, Philomé Obin, Rigaud Benoit, and Castera Bazile. Popular subjects included historic scenes and figures linked to the Revolution. Vodou was another prominent subject and source of inspiration—even among artists who were not practitioners of the religion.

The institution’s directors sought to attract international artists and create links with other Caribbean nations. People like the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire and Cuban painters Wifredo Lam and René Portocarrero visited the Centre in its first few years. The works showcased at the Centre, with their cultural and political subject matter and naïve style, became associated with notions of an authentic Haitian art. This is something that put the Centre at odds with mainstream and modernist Haitian artists, many of whom were formally trained and whose work was stylistically in dialogue with the international avant-garde movements. [3]

The concept of Haitian primitivism can be understood as a foreign interpretation of popular Haitian art. In its early period, the Centre created a narrative partly fed by foreign misconceptions of Haiti and the modernist fascination with Primitivism. Commercially this worked well for many of the artists connected with the Centre. Nevertheless, the production of popular artists who had been painting for decades before the Centre was founded, points to the long-established artistic tradition in the country.

Ogou Feray also known as Ogoun Ferraille encapsulates much of what made Hyppolite’s work so popular. A busy and bright composition that pulled from his vast catalog of Vodou imagery, which played a great role in attracting the attention of collectors and the international avant-garde. During his short but intense career, he became one of the most internationally famous artists from Haiti and saw his work purchased by European and North American artists and collectors, including MoMA’s Director René d’Harnoncourt. This all happened in the span of some three years, from 1945 to his sudden death from a heart attack in 1948.

Source: Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño, “Hector Hyppolite, Ogou Feray also known as Ogoun Ferraille,” in Smarthistory, January 4, 2023, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/hector-hyppolite-ogou-feray-also-known-as-ogoun-ferraille/.

In The Godfather Part II Michael Corleone has the impeccable timing of visiting Cuba on the eve of the 1959 Revolution that would overthrow the corrupt government of Cuba’s leader at the time, Fulgencio Batista. Corleone’s stay in Havana—marked by business meetings with American corporations and trips to casino-resorts and cabaret shows—highlights the excesses that led to the dramatic fall of that regime during the film’s New Year’s Eve party. More than fifteen years earlier, when Wifredo Lam painted The Jungle (1943), Cuba had already spent over four decades at the mercy of United States interests.

Wifredo Lam remains the most renowned painter from Cuba and The Jungle remains his best known work and an important painting in the history of Latin American art and the history twentieth-century modernism more broadly. In the 1920s and 30s, Lam was in Madrid and Paris, but in 1941 as Europe was engulfed by war, he returned to his native country. Though he would leave Cuba again for Europe after the war, key elements within his artistic practice intersected during this period: Lam’s consciousness of Cuba’s socio-economic realities; his artistic formation in Europe under the influence of Surrealism; and his re-acquaintance with Afro-Caribbean culture. This remarkable collision resulted in the artist’s most notable work, The Jungle.

A game of perception

The Jungle, currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has an undeniable presence within the gallery: the cluster of enigmatic faces, limbs, and sugarcane crowd a canvas that is nearly an 8 foot square. Lam’s bold painting is a game of perception. The artist haphazardly constructs the figures from a collection of distinct forms—crescent-shaped faces; prominent, rounded backsides; willowy arms and legs; and flat, cloddish hands and feet. When assembled these figures resemble a funhouse mirror reflection. The disproportion among the shapes generates an uneasy balance between the composition’s denser top and more open bottom—there are not enough feet and legs to support the upper half of the painting, which seems on the verge of toppling over. Another significant element within Lam’s game of perception is how he places the figures within an unorthodox landscape. Lam’s panorama excludes the typical elements of a horizon line, sky or wide view; instead this is a tight, directionless snapshot, with only the faintest sense of the ground.

One part of the flora in this scene—sugarcane—is alien to the jungle setting suggested by the painting’s title. Sugarcane does not grow in jungles but rather is cultivated in fields. In 1940s Cuba, sugarcane was big business, requiring the toil of thousands of laborers similar to the cotton industry in the American South before the Civil War. The reality of laboring Cubans was in sharp contrast to how foreigners perceived the island nation, namely as a playground. Lam’s painting remains an unusual Cuban landscape compared to the tourism posters that depicted the country as a destination for Americans seeking beachside resorts. While northern visitors enjoyed a permissive resort experience, U.S. corporations ran their businesses, including sugar production. Though Cuba gained independence from Spain at the end of nineteenth century, the United States maintained the right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs, which destabilized politics on the island for decades.

European Modernism and Santería

During the interwar period in Paris, Lam befriended the Surrealists, whose influence is evident in The Jungle. Surrealists aimed to release the unconscious mind—suppressed, they believed, by the rational—in order to achieve another reality. In art, the juxtaposition of irrational images reveal a “super-reality,” or “sur-reality.” In Lam’s work, an other-worldly atmosphere emerges from the constant shifting taking place among the figures; they are at once human, animal, organic, and mystical.

This metamorphosis among the figures is also related to Lam’s interest in Afro-Caribbean culture. When the artist resettled in Cuba in 1941, he began to integrate symbols from Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion that mixes African beliefs and customs with Catholicism, into his art. During Santería ceremonies the supernatural merges with the natural world through masks, animals, or initiates who become possessed by a god. These ceremonies are moments of metamorphosis where a being is at once itself and otherworldly.

No cha-cha-cha

Lam created a new narrative within the Cuban imagination: rooted in the island’s complex history, his work was an antidote to the picturesque frivolity that mired the nation in stereotype,

[…]I refused to paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro [sic] spirit […] In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. I knew I was running the risk of not being understood either by the man in the street or by the others. But a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.[1]

The Jungle is both enigmatic and enchanting, and has inspired generations of viewers to liberate their imaginations.

See also:

This work at the MoMA

This work through MoMA Learning

Source:  Dr. Doris Maria-Reina Bravo, “Wifredo Lam, The Jungle,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/lam-the-jungle/.

Who are these strange mutant creatures? What is happening in this densely filled composition? In this monumental painting, Wifredo Lam leaves no corner unfilled. We are presented with three imposing anthropomorphic figures that stand and confront the viewer curiously. Overlapping bodies and limbs make it difficult to distinguish the figures and their attributes. The monochromatic color palette fuses the figures and the background into a compressed, claustrophobic space. There is no place to move, no place to hide.

An homage

The multicultural surrealist artist Wifredo Lam was born to a Chinese father and Cuban mother of African and Spanish descent and raised in Cuba. His early travels to Europe exposed him to modernist styles, and important friendships with Pablo Picasso and André Breton secured his place among the Parisian avant-garde. Additionally, Lam traveled to Martinique, where he encountered Aimé Césaire and was exposed to his writings on Negritude, a movement that affirmed the value of black culture, heritage, and identity. Lam’s hybrid animal-human figures and fragmented, flattened compositions draw from a variety of sources, including his Afro-Cuban culture, his experimentation with Surrealist techniques like automatism and cadavre exquis, as well as his interests in Chinese cultural and aesthetic traditions.

Lam dedicated The Eternal Presence to the Cuban composer Alejandro García Caturla, who had been murdered four years earlier at the age of 34. In his musical compositions, Caturla blended elements of European and African culture, becoming a leader of Afrocubanismo, which was an artistic and social movement that focused on the recognition and assimilation of African cultural features present in Cuban society. This blending of cultures resonated with Lam’s artistic objectives. The Eternal Presence depicts a majestic, ambiguous creature in the center accompanied by two fantastical, mythical beings. This triad of figures is still, as if in a trance-like state. The thick palm-tree fronds in the background recall Cuba’s tropical climate and are featured in many of Lam’s paintings, like Fruta Bomba from 1944.

The Horse

The figure on the left of The Eternal Presence is a femme-cheval, or female-horse, figure. Lam had begun introducing horse-like motifs into his work in the 1940s, inspired by the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería that blends  Yoruba spirituality with some aspects of Roman Catholicism.

Within an Afro-Cuban context, the horse figure can be interpreted as an incarnation of an orisha (divine spirit) and its presence refers to the process of being possessed during sacred ceremonies. In Santería rituals, the practitioner is referred to as a “horse” and undergoes a spiritual transformation. [1]

In Chinese culture the horse has a long history of pictorial and poetic representation and may have held personal significance for Lam. Horses were particularly revered in China because of their military and political usefulness, as well as their role in the mythology of early China.

As close kin to dragons and supernatural beings, horses were also believed to have spiritual meaning and were known to guide believers on heavenly journeys. Represented in ornamental bronze masks, jade figurines, terracotta sculptures, ink wash paintings, and poetry, horses were a predominant subject throughout China’s history.

The Chinese had a notable presence in Cuba since the nineteenth century when Lam’s father immigrated. [2] As the youngest child, Lam had a special relationship with his father. Lam fondly remembered when his father would create silhouettes of horses galloping across the walls during Chinese festivals. [3]

In The Eternal Presence, the feminine femme-cheval figure wears a wide-brimmed hat and high heels and her striking curves resemble figures seen in other paintings from the period, such as Lam’s renowned The Jungle from one year earlier. Her horse-mask protects and guides her on a spiritual journey.

Religious syncretism

The figure on the right holds a knife and a “palo congo,” the weapon of Changó, the warrior and master of thunder whose sacred power is symbolized by a double-edged axe. In Santería, Changó is an orisha that is often syncretized with Saint Barbara or Saint Jerome. Religious and artistic fusion surrounded Lam.

The Chinese deity Sanfancón is an example of a syncretic form of worship that developed combining Chinese with Afro-Cuban and Christian traditions. The deity is the synthesis of the orisha Changó with the cult of Kuan Kong and Saint Barbara. [4] The right-most Changó figure, who peers outward as his distorted body seems to emerge out of the thick palm-fronds that surround him, could also be interpreted as Sanfancón.

Lam’s second wife, German scientist Helena Holzer, noted that upon their arrival in Havana in 1941, the couple would visit bookstores in Old Havana discovering books on Oriental philosophies and alchemy. [5] These Oriental philosophies enriched their conversations and influenced Lam’s subject matter. Holzer and Lam discussed the symbolism of the number three in different cultures. In Chinese philosophy, the two opposing forces Yin (dark, feminine) and Yang (bright, masculine), combine with Tao, the path that is in harmony with nature.

The number three in the I Ching is the symbol “Chun” which represents birth and new beginnings emerging from chaos. Three in the Holy Trinity is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, indicative of life, sacrifice, and forgiveness.

Following these conversations, Lam began painting compositions with three figures, such as The Eternal Presence and The Wedding (1947). Holzer explains the subject matter of The Eternal Presence as

… a trinity representing the bird of love and the weapon of destruction (the opposites Yin and Yang) flanking the supreme Tao in the center. [6]

Referencing life, sacrifice, and new beginnings, the painting is an appropriate homage to his late friend Cartula. The central Tao figure with a multiple horned head also evokes the orisha Elegua, the deity of roads and paths. He is portrayed frontally with two oversized arms that cross his body. His darker upper body recedes into the background, while his lower body suggests a surrealist doubling of forms.

On the one hand, the light-filled space could be the figure’s legs draped in a robe. His right hand holds a plate with a face. On the other, the unfilled shape suggests a hunched-back figure. The perspective is disorienting and the conflation illegible, allowing for a multiplicity of interpretations. The eyes peer forward as if inviting the viewer to speculate on the potential meanings of this intriguing image.

In the eye of the beholder

Lam’s figures stem from and connote transcultural meanings drawing on the various spiritual and artistic ideas that surrounded him. He merged Afro-Cuban Santería, the tropical vegetation of his native land, the Chinese philosophies of the Yin, Yang, and Tao doctrine, and alchemical teachings into his visual representations. The latter exposed him to the belief that sublimation could be achieved through transmutations, that spiritual and intellectual elevation were intertwined with the imagination.

Lam viewed art as a dialogue between the viewer and the figures on the canvas. He believed that art could evoke multiple responses that could change from one day to the next depending on one’s mood. This is enhanced by the multiplicity of his symbolism, where one motif might infer various, diverse meanings, drawing on his multicultural heritage, influences, and interests.