The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a growth in the inland exploration of Latin America. The desire of travelers, mainly European scientists, artists, and writers, was not to settle new frontiers. Many of these regions were colonized, or, in some cases, had even become independent from European imperial powers. Rather, the goal of these explorers was to understand the area’s botany, topography, people, and traditions. The knowledge they acquired came mainly from first-hand experience, in keeping with the Enlightenment idea of empiricism, which valued the concrete and measurable.
Disseminating knowledge
The distribution of these observations through various media (including books, prints, photographs, and watercolors) had a significant effect on how Latin America was conceptualized both locally and internationally. Travel books, in particular, catered to a foreign readership that could only dream of visiting far away places. For example, in the early eighteenth century, French naturalists, geographers, and engineers on the La Condamine Expedition explored the northern parts of South America—particularly Ecuador—with the goal of measuring the arc of the equatorial meridian. La Condamine’s publications in Europe helped spur interest in exploration.
The Spanish priest and botanist José Celestino Mutis was also one of the earliest researchers to contribute to the scientific documentation of Latin America, in this case through the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada, which began in 1783. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Mutis traveled extensively, documenting with extreme accuracy the flora of Colombia, among them the Mutisia Clematis, commonly known as clematis and named after the explorer himself. Botanical watercolors of these finds were valued first and foremost for their scientific accuracy, but their elaborate composition and vibrant use of color also demonstrate a concern for artistic technique and aesthetics.
The Humboldt expedition
The most prominent explorer of Latin America during this time was the Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, who, together with French botanist Aimé Bonpland, surveyed the region from 1799 to 1804. Humboldt and Bonpland traveled more than 6,000 miles, through Venezuela, down the Orinoco River, through the Amazonian jungle, up towards Cuba, then back down to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, traversing the Andes, sailing the Pacific Ocean northward toward Mexico, then back to Cuba, and finally to France, with a stop in New York. From this exhaustive voyage emerged some of the most detailed maps of the area, as well as documentation of multiple new species of flora and fauna.
Equipped with a variety of scientific instruments including thermometers, compasses, telescopes, and microscopes, Humboldt’s aim was to scientifically document the unique topography of Latin America. But he also hoped to capture the emotional intensity of these mysterious territories: in his writings, words such as a “grandeur” and “marvel” appear alongside scientific measurements, demonstrating the extent to which Humboldt was both a scientist and a romantic.
Humboldt’s and Bonpland’s findings appeared in various publications, one of which was Views of the Mountain Ranges and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of America (Vues des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique) (1810-1813), featuring 69 engravings. The centerpiece of the publication, Chimborazo Seen from the Tapia Plateau, Ecuador (below), occupies the entirety of two pages. This landscape captures the geological and environmental diversity of the region—including the immensity of the volcano (the highest in Ecuador), the recognizable plants on site, and the variations in the terrain (from an arid climate in the foreground to a snowy peak in the background).
These engravings were composite views, meaning that they were based on various drawings of different sites. This reflects the general trend of the time: to present images of nature that were grounded in research, yet expressed visually in ways that were picturesque—a word that is usually understood as meaning “quaint” or “charming,” but which in this case has a broader meaning, referring to views of nature that were enhanced versions of reality. Humboldt’s journey and writings sparked a strong interest in Latin America, prompting explorers, artists, and scientists to travel there, Including the American painter Frederic Edwin Church, Italian geographer Agustin Codazzi, and British scientist Charles Darwin.
Re-conquest through science
Though they brought much new knowledge to light, the activities of these explorers in many ways represented a re-conquest of Latin America, an inevitable result of the fact that the mapping, representation, and documentation of the region and its people was largely pursued by Europeans rather than locals. Such expeditions by outsiders contributed to the idea that Europeans were the sole “creators” of scientific knowledge.
Even if some Latin Americans did pursue such projects, their views of the territory were shaped in part by European modes of thought and representation: the perspective of the outsider looking in. And despite the existence and growth of scientific interest among locals, explorers, for their part, still preferred to romanticize Latin America “as a primal world of nature, an unclaimed and timeless space occupied by plants and creatures (some of them human), but not organized by societies and economies; a world whose only history was the one about to begin.” [1]
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 126
Napoléon’s assault on the Bourbons in the Napoleonic Wars immediately transformed European politics, but it had a delayed effect on the Spanish colonies. Spanish American colonial elites took their time weighing the risks, and the majority of their junta members, both in Spain and in the Americas, first swore their loyalty to the absent Spanish king. In 1808, initial meetings with the viceroy of New Spain led to the establishment of an autonomous conservative junta in Mexico City, formed by creoles and peninsulares, who favored maintaining their loyalty to Spain at all costs. Representatives of New Spain, by far the richest Spanish colony, seemed to adapt to the junta system. However, in 1810, when peninsular judges deposed the viceroy and installed their own leader in the position, creole royalists were inspired to take full control of the government.
Between 1808 and 1810, a cycle of bad harvests and famine in Mexico had harmed Indigenous peasants and creole farmers. An economic recession that occurred at the same time led to high unemployment among mestizo silver miners. The effects of these downturns were worsened by the Act of Consolidation, passed by the Spanish government in 1804, demanding that the Catholic Church deposit its wealth with the government. Because the Catholic Church had loaned money to people who bought land or started businesses, in order to comply, it now had to ask that the loans be repaid in full. This hurt many creole merchants and landowners. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the first insurrection for independence in New Spain took the form of a violent multiethnic uprising, coming from the bottom layers of the social hierarchy and led by parish priests in mostly mestizo regions. Creole shopkeepers, professionals, minor political officials, and priests blamed the viceroyalty’s government for their problems.
Concerned with recent political changes and the plight of the poor and exploited, a well-educated creole priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla took the initiative to start a movement for independence (Figure 8.10). Although Hidalgo intended to deliver a blow to the status quo and called for radical action, he proclaimed the most conservative of motives. The revolution was to be fought in the name of Fernando VII and the Virgin of Guadalupe—the ultimate symbol of Mexican Catholic piety.
Figure 8.10Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla.This ca. 1880 portrait of the revolutionary priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla is by an unknown artist. An image of the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs on the wall behind him. (credit: “Don Miguel Hidalgo” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
When conservative political authorities in Mexico City learned of his plans, Hidalgo issued a declaration in the town of Dolores on September 16, 1810. In this Grito de Dolores (grito means “cry”), he called upon peasants and unemployed miners to overthrow the viceroyalty’s government. He demanded the abolition of slavery and tribute, the redistribution of wealth, and the return of land to the Indigenous people. Another key demand was respect for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who would later become the patron saint of Mexico. The Grito de Dolores proclaimed independence as its goal, but it was unclear about the means. Hidalgo’s plan envisioned a more tolerable form of government that provided benefits for the poor by seeking an end to abuses by the elite, but it lacked a program and effective leadership.
The tale of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Figure 8.11) is an expressive example of a symbol of Christian devotion, the Virgin Mary, transformed and adapted into a Mexican national emblem. According to the story of the Virgin, in 1531 she appeared to the Aztec peasant Juan Diego and spoke to him in his native language. Many Spanish clergy refused to believe Diego’s claims, and the Virgin of Guadalupe’s early worshippers seem to have been largely Indigenous people. Hidalgo proclaimed the Virgin to be the rebellion’s guardian and protector. Her image encouraged lower-class casta peasants to join the movement and fight under her banner. She was also later appropriated by creole nationalists as a uniquely Mexican saint in order to advance their nineteenth-century struggle for autonomy.
Figure 8.11Virgin of Guadalupe.According to legend, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who became the patron saint of Mexico, appeared to an Indigenous peasant named Juan Diego in 1531 and left this image of herself on his cloak as proof. (credit: “Virgin of Guadalupe” by Unknown/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Word of Hidalgo’s rebellion quickly spread among the desperate and dispossessed castas in the region, who could now vent their grievances against the colonial administration. Within a few days, the priest had enlisted thousands of recruits in his army, which at its height totaled around sixty thousand people, 55 percent Indigenous people and 20 percent of mixed race. Hidalgo’s forces thus totaled more than one-third of the population of the capital of New Spain. (Mexico City, the largest city on the North American continent in 1811, had a total population of almost 170,000 people.)
Hidalgo’s followers sacked several towns and committed other destructive actions, including carrying out a mob attack that killed the city elite of Guanajuato, who had barricaded themselves in the public granary for safety. In the face of this violent turn of events, creole and Spanish elites, even those who had originally supported Hidalgo, set aside their differences to protect their privileged positions—and their lives. In doing so, they resembled the creoles and peninsulares of Peru who had banded together to confront Túpac Amaru’s rebellion in the 1780s. In March 1811, royalist forces captured and executed Hidalgo. Yet his army marched on, and today he is remembered as the father of independence and one of Mexico’s greatest national heroes. September 16, the day of the Grito de Dolores, is Mexico’s Independence Day.
In 1812, another rural priest, José María Morelos y Pavón, from a poor mestizo family in southern Mexico, took charge of the independence movement (Figure 8.12). His army was organized, and he galvanized an insurrection of artisans and peasants. Closer to Indigenous people than even Hidalgo was, Morelos outlined clear sociopolitical objectives: an end to slavery and the casta system, abolition of Indigenous tribute, and institution of land reform. In 1813, at the apex of his military career, Morelos convened a wartime congress in the town of Chilpancingo that declared Mexico’s independence from Spain. The congress was also charged with producing a constitution, and to guide its efforts Morelos composed Sentiments of the Nation, a document outlining plans for social reforms (as well as the introduction of an income tax).
Figure 8.12José María Morelos y Pavón.This portrait was painted in 1812 by an unknown Mixtec Indian artist. The painting’s caption identifies Morelos as “captain of the armies of America.” (credit: “Retrato del excelentísimo señor don José María Morelos” by Museo Nacional de Historia/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Although the congress produced a constitution for the nation its members officially named Mexico, Morelos’s efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. He brought some order to a committed but largely undisciplined insurrection force, but he was not able to broaden his support base. He failed to persuade moderate creoles to join the cause, and mestizos continued to make up the majority of his supporters. In December 1815, royalist forces caught and executed him, bringing the first phase of the war for Mexican independence to an end.
It was the viceroyalty’s government, not the Spanish Crown, that fought both Hidalgo’s and Morelos’s rebellions in New Spain. That is, the royalist armies that met the revolutionary forces were 95 percent Mexican, mostly creole and mixed-race. The rebellions thus represented struggles in which the people’s loyalties were divided and the final outcome was not inevitable; Mexico was experiencing a revolutionary civil war. After Morelos’s death, his follower, the casta Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña, whose father supported the Spanish Crown and whose uncle served in the Spanish militia, continued guerrilla operations against Spanish authorities for several more years (Figure 8.13). While the patriots had not yet succeeded in getting enough people on their side, Spain’s hold on its colony was weakened even more. By 1820, the Viceroyalty of New Spain was relatively calm. Rebellion was about to break out again, however, as a result of events in Spain.
Figure 8.13Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña.This portrait was painted in 1850, nineteen years after Guerrero’s death, by the artist Anacleto Escutia. Guerrero served as the second president of Mexico from April 1 to December 17, 1829. (credit: “Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña” by Museo Nacional de Historia/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
In Their Own Words
Sentiments of the Nation
In 1813, José María Morelos y Pavón composed Sentiments of the Nation to guide the congress he had charged with writing a constitution for the new nation of Mexico. In this treatise, Morelos listed twenty-three points he believed would create a strong nation capable of protecting and meeting the needs of all its citizens. Some of these were familiar from revolutions in the United States and France. Many, though, specifically reflected the concerns of people living in Spanish America, such as protecting the Catholic Church. Here are some of Morelos’s points:
1. America is free and independent of Spain and all other nations, governments, or monarchies.
2. The Catholic faith is the sole religion, and no others will be tolerated.
4. Dogma is established by church hierarchy: the pope, bishops, and priests.
5. Sovereignty emanates from the people and is placed in a Supreme National American Congress, made up of representatives from the provinces in equal numbers.
6. Power is divided among appropriate executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
11. Liberal government is to replace tyranny with the expulsion of the Spaniards.
12. Laws should promote patriotism and industry, moderate opulence and idleness, and improve the lot and the education of the poor.
13. Laws should apply to all, with no privileges.
15. Slavery is prohibited forever, as are the distinctions of caste, with all being equal and only vice and virtue distinguishing one American from the other.
19. 12 December is to be dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe and celebrated.
22. The payment of tributes is ended; a tax of 5% or similar light amount will be levied.
—Don José María Morelos, “Sentiments of the Nation”
Which of the points listed here would appeal most to American Indians and mestizos? Which seem designed to address the concerns of creoles?
Which points protect the Roman Catholic Church? Why would Morelos include these directives?
Iturbide and the Plan de Iguala
In 1820, Spanish liberals succeeded in forcing Fernando VII to reinstate the liberal Cádiz Constitution of 1812. In New Spain, liberal creoles welcomed the implementation of this constitution because it reopened possibilities for their participation in government. However, the conservative creole elite could not accept the measures attacking the privileges of the Catholic Church and the military, in which many of them held positions. The Spanish king again proved his inefficiency in controlling the Spanish colonies, laying the ground for a second independence movement. This one was led by creoles with the goal of improving their status and power. Rather than making colonial society egalitarian, which had been the goal of Hidalgo and Morelos, the creole elite simply wanted to rule Mexico for themselves.
The creole elite—major landowners, military officers, and church officials—decided to declare independence from Spain and forged a very pragmatic partnership with the mestizo and Indigenous followers of Vicente Guerrero. The winning strategy was to be nationalism in the form of an intense pride in Mexican (as opposed to Spanish) identity, an identity defined by birthplace that creoles shared with Indigenous and mixed-blood people as well as the children of enslaved Africans. This mostly anti-Spanish nationalism allowed creoles to fight for independence but keep the social hierarchy more or less intact.
Agustín de Iturbide, a royalist creole officer who had distinguished himself in the campaigns against Hidalgo and Morelos, offered such a strategy. He formed an agreement with Guerrero, the man whose revolutionary movement it had been his duty to crush. Iturbide had the military force needed to win independence, while Guerrero had the support of Indigenous and mixed-race Mexicans, the majority of the population. Both shared the goal of independence from Spain.
On February 24, 1821, Iturbide announced the Plan de Iguala. This plan combined both conservative and radical views and was based on principles known as the Three Guarantees: independence, religion, and equality. Mexico was to be independent of Spain. Roman Catholicism was the official religion. Social equality and protection were to be provided for all residents of Mexico—whether born in the Americas or in Spain. The plan also called for a new imperial Mexican Crown, to be offered to a willing European royal, and the establishment of a regency during the waiting period before the new royal leader was named. To uphold the movement’s grounding principles, a new Army of the Three Guarantees (Ejército de las tres garantías) was formed under Iturbide’s command.
On September 27, 1821, a date marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Aztec Empire and the end of an eleven-year rebellious period, Iturbide made a triumphant entrance into Mexico City (Figure 8.14). With the support of the conservative creole elite and two powerful liberal insurgent leaders, Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria, he proclaimed Mexican independence. Mexico became a constitutional monarchy, which, according to the Plan de Iguala, protected the interests of both Spanish-born peninsulares and the church. At the town of Córdoba, Iturbide and the Spanish representative Viceroy Juan de O’Donojú y O’Ryan signed a treaty accepting the terms of the Plan de Iguala, with one adjustment. According to a new clause, in the absence of a European monarch, a local emperor could be chosen. Under this arrangement, eight months later in 1822, the newly elected congress confirmed Iturbide as Agustín I, constitutional emperor of Mexico.
Figure 8.14Agustín de Iturbide.In 1821, Agustín de Iturbide entered Mexico City as the victorious leader of the Army of the Three Guarantees. This unknown artist’s imagining of the event shows him being greeted by a largely creole crowd. (credit: “Agustin de Iturbide entrance to Mexico City on 27 September 1821” by Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
However, Iturbide’s reign was brief. His monarchy did not have popular support, and the royal requirements clashed with the fiscal realities of the new nation. In 1822, Iturbide dissolved the congress, a move that sparked uprisings on many fronts. In 1823, he abdicated in response to growing opposition and left for exile in England. Mexico became a republic, and a new constitution was drafted.
The Constitution of 1824 marked a compromise between liberal and conservative interests, with liberals favoring social reforms such as those championed by Hidalgo and Morelos, and conservatives concerned with protecting the status of elites and the church. Social equality was written into the constitution, with the exception of special judicial privileges given to the military and the clergy. The power to pass laws and to tax was given to the government of the Mexican states. Following the adoption of the new constitution, the liberal general Guadalupe Victoria became Mexico’s first president. When Iturbide changed his mind and decided to return from exile, he was captured as soon as he arrived at the port and was shot by the new republican troops. The sharp division between liberals and conservatives dominated Mexican political life for the rest of the nineteenth century.
Mexican Independence
by Dr. Maya Jiménez
Detail showing the allegorical figure representing Independence (center) flanked by Miguel Hidalgo (left) and general Agustín Iturbide (right). Anonymous, Allegory of Independence, 1834 (Museo Histórico Curato de Dolores, Guanajato, INAH)
The first two, and most notable, countries in the Americas to gain independence were the United States (1776), led by General George Washington, and Haiti (1804), led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. Other Latin American countries soon followed, with exceptions such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, embarking on their struggles for independence in the early nineteenth century. However, since territories were freed in sections with the ultimate goal of liberating an entire viceroyalty, the fight for independence came slowly and in stages.
Mexican independence
The Mexican struggle for independence began with the Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores). In September of 1810, Miguel Hidalgo, the parish priest of the small town of Dolores in central Mexico, uttered the country’s cry for independence. He called not only for liberation from Spain, but also for the end of slavery and the return of lands to the Indigenous inhabitants. A highly educated creole, Hidalgo had read the works of Enlightenment writers and had been an important community organizer in Dolores. While Hidalgo’s efforts led to both the stripping of his priestly title and his gruesome execution, his cry set in motion the Mexican fight for independence.
Antonio Serrano, Portrait of Miguel Hidalgo, 1831, 207 x 138.5 cm (Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City)
Hidalgo’s visual trademarks were his baldness and religious dress—both shown in Antonio Serrano’s Portrait of Miguel Hidalgo. He is depicted inside his study, minimally decorated with books, a desk, and a small reproduction of the Virgin of Guadalupe. While the library reflects Hidalgo’s erudition, the depiction of the iconic Virgin of Guadalupe alludes to both his faith and the image’s historical significance in the struggle for independence: Hidalgo marched with a banner decorated with the Virgin of Guadalupe, a foil to the Virgin of los Remedios, which was used by the Spanish loyalists. In this way, the Virgin of Guadalupe became a symbol of Mexican resistance and independence, and was featured on the earliest Mexican flag.
After Hidalgo’s failed attempts at instigating a revolution, José María Morelos, another revolutionary priest, and the army general Agustín Iturbide continued the struggle (Iturbide had originally fought for the Spanish royalists, but he switched sides following his dismissal from the armed forces due to accusations of unwarranted violence and misuse of funds). The Plan of Iguala, a proclamation which Iturbide authored together with the rebel leader Vicente Guerrero in 1821, proclaimed Mexico’s independence from Spain while reaffirming the country’s alliance with the Roman Catholic Church and establishing equal rights for both. On August 24, 1821, with the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba, Spain finally recognized the independence of the First Mexican Empire, led by none other than Iturbide himself.
Anonymous, Allegory of Independence, 1834 (Museo Histórico Curato de Dolores, Guanajato, INAH)
An allegorical history painting
In Mexico, historical narratives were often symbolically depicted, as in Allegory of Independence by an unknown painter. The seated figure, an allegorical (symbolic) representation of Independence, is adorned with Mexican accessories such as an Aztec (Mexica) feathered headdress; however, she also holds a Phrygian cap, a symbol of freedom usually associated with the French Revolution. She is flanked by the figures of Hidalgo (on the left) and Iturbide (on the right)—portrayed here as the fathers of Mexican independence. Hidalgo crowns Independence’s head with laurels (a classical sign of victory), while Iturbide breaks the chains of enslavement. In terms of her ethnicity, Independence appears closer to the depiction of Iturbide than to Hidalgo, whose skin tone reflects Amerindian ancestry, even though he was a creole (criollo). Hidalgo and Independence step on a figure who represents despotism, and who is being shooed away by the eagle, a symbolic reference to the Aztecs. Together, these symbols of Mexican independence articulate both a sense of pride in Aztec ancestry and an appreciation for European ideas of liberty. With their depictions of potently symbolic figures and themes, such paintings energized the struggles for Latin American independence and aided in the creation of national unity.
by Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Emmanuel Ortega
A conversation between Dr. Emmanuel Ortega and Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank about a retablo showing La Mano Poderosa, 19th century, paint on tin (New Mexico State University Art Museum, 9823)
Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Emmanuel Ortega, “Retablo of La Mano Poderosa/The All Powerful Hand,” in Smarthistory, February 15, 2022, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/retablo-all-powerful-hand/.
African religious culture in the Atlantic world
by Dr. Cécile Fromont
A watercolor painted around 1750 features an elite man from the Kingdom of Kongo, dressed with a red cloak and loincloth kneeling in front of a Christian church as a European friar performs a gesture of blessing. Behind him, warriors dance and people play music with a marimba (a percussion instrument made of gourd and thin wood planks), drums, and ivory trumpets made from elephant tusks, bringing sound to the event. The watercolor, painted by a Christian (Franciscan) missionary, showcases one of the Kingdom’s most important political ceremonies, called sangamento.
During sangamento, the elite of the Kingdom of Kongo, who, together with their kings had voluntarily converted to Catholicism around 1500 (after being introduced to the religion by Portuguese explorers), demonstrated in a danced ritual their allegiance to both their king and to the Catholic Church. Sangamento was performed on special occasions, such as on feast days or before going into battle. The choreography, clothing, and symbolism of sangamento mixed European and Kongo elements together in a unique Afro-Catholic performance. There, objects as well as political and spiritual practices that were once solely European and once solely central African, came together into a new whole: Kongo Christianity.
Syncretism
Scholars have called this process of combining two (or more) different religious traditions “syncretism.” [1] Through the trans-Atlantic slave trade (begun in the 15th century by the Portuguese), elements of central African syncretic religions, such as Kongo Christianity, were brought to places like Brazil, which received nearly half of all of the enslaved Africans abducted and transported across the Atlantic. Many enslaved Africans who were brought to the western hemisphere were taken from communities in the Kingdom of Kongo or neighboring areas such as Angola in west-central Africa and would have been familiar with Kongo Christianity. Other syncretic religions developed as a result of the slave trade, such as Haitian vaudou, and scholars now recognize that more modes of Afro-Atlantic spirituality developed and continue to exist in the Americas and in Europe today.
Carlos Julião, “Black King Festival,” last quarter of the 18th century (Brazil), watercolor on paper, in Riscos illuminados de figurinhos de brancos e negros dos uzos do Rio de Janeiro e Serro do Frio, Iconografia (C.I.2.8 in the collections of the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro)
Brazilian Congadas
Just a few decades after the watercolor of sangamento being performed in Kongo was painted, an officer in the Portuguese army named Carlos Julião created a series of images depicting men, women, and children of African origins or descent participating in a festival in Brazil. Julião had worked in many areas that were at the time under the colonial control of Portugal. In this painting, Julião pictures a Black king wearing a European-style crown, splendid clothes, and holding a golden scepter in his hand. He walks under a large umbrella to the sound of musical instruments, attended by two servants in uniforms. Though Julião did not give titles to his painting, scholars have recognized the event as part of celebrations within a community of Africans and Afro-descendants surrounding the coronation of their elected king and queen. These celebrations, called Congadas or Congados in Brazil, hark back to sangamento in the Kingdom of Kongo, and continue to take place in 21st-century Brazil. The colorful wraps around the lower bodies of the male figures, the feathered headdresses, the flags, and the instruments, such as the marimba and box scratcher held high by the man in blue cloth in Julião’s image, are all elements with parallels in the Kongo, pointing to the specific Central African dimension of this performance.
At the time Julião made this work, the men, women, and children depicted lived in Brazil within a slave society, an environment in which their African origins placed them at the bottom of the social hierarchies, whether they were enslaved or free. Yet, even in this social position, they planned and staged elaborate celebrations through which they claimed small but resonant spaces of freedom and resistance to enslavement and disenfranchisement through the coronation of their own kings and queens. Other regions of the Americas practiced (and some continue to practice) similar ceremonies, though with different names, including San Juan Congo in Venezuela, and Pinkster in 19th-century North America. [2]
This 18th-century watercolor therefore illustrates one version of an event with deep historical roots and broad geographic reach. Situated in areas under the control of different European colonial empires and in varied linguistic environments, the Black kings festivals share common origins in the desire from members of Afro-descendant populations to organize festive occasions and to create communities on their own terms.
Black confraternities and Black saints
Beginning in the 15th century, other Black communities came together for common purpose. A dozen years after the Portuguese arrived in the Kingdom of Kongo and two years after ships sailing under the patronage of the Spanish crown landed in the Caribbean, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas sanctioned Spain and Portugal’s claims over lands they “discovered” beyond Europe with the support of the Pope in Rome (“discovered” is used here with quotation marks because while it was the term Europeans long used to characterize their arrival in the Americas, the word does not accurately describe the event from the perspective of the region’s Indigenous populations). The Treaty of Tordesillas mandated that the Spanish and Portuguese convert the inhabitants of those lands to Catholicism. This would include the Indigenous populations as well as the enslaved Africans who would soon arrive in the Americas chiefly through the Atlantic slave trade.
Under these conditions, African men and women living free or enslaved in Europe and the Americas organized into religious communities known as confraternities or sodalities. [3] Members of these associations adhered to a set of rules, paid dues, and obeyed internal hierarchies. The principal aim of the confraternities was to organize members’ worship within the Church and their social life outside of it with a special emphasis given on burial rites considered of crucial importance for the deceased’s ability to secure the eternal life Christianity promised to the devout. The organizations could be exclusive to a particular gender, racial identity, or enslavement status.
Unidentified Afro-Brazilian artists, Saint Antonio de Catagerona, 18th century (Brazil), watercolor, “Compromiso da Irmandade de S. Antonio de Catagerona” (Oliveira Lima Library, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.)
The confraternities also commissioned artworks dedicated to saints which they displayed on the altars or in the churches they built through the sometimes considerable donations collected by and from their members. [4] Images of Black saints featured prominently in such spaces, as saints would be called upon to assist in both earthly and heavenly matters. For example, one of the brothers of the Brazilian Black Confraternity dedicated to Saint Antonio de Catagerona, (sometimes called Saint Antonio da Noto), illustrated the most important document of the association (its compromisso, or set of rules), with a watercolor image of the saint. [5] Here, Saint Antonio de Catagerona, who was born in North Africa and enslaved as a youth, is shown cradling the Christ child in his right arm. The vibrant depiction displays the intimate bond between a Black saint, in whose likeness the brothers could easily recognize themselves, and Jesus. It also serves as an image for the closeness between the brothers of the confraternity, God, and the Catholic Church. Other popular patron saints of Black confraternities in the era of trans-Atlantic slave trade were the Virgin Mary or saints associated through their biographies to Africa such as Saint Benedict of Palermo, born in Sicily of enslaved African parents, and Saint Iphigenia, an Ethiopian princess. [6]
Haitian Vodun
Elsewhere in the Black Atlantic, images of Catholic saints played a very different role in the spiritual practices of African and Afro-descendant devotees. Vodun, also known as vaudou, is a religion with roots in the Bay of Benin in west Africa in today’s countries of Benin and Togo (a region which also saw large numbers of people enslaved and transported to the Americas). Initiates of Vodun, which has branches stretching all around the Atlantic world, including in Haiti, also uses images of Catholic saints in their devotions, but recognize in those images non-Christian spirits and deities.
For example, Haitian vaudou devotees have found their deity Ezili Freda, the patroness of love and the fine things in life, in images of the Catholic Virgin of Sorrows, where Mary, the mother of Christ, is richly dressed as the queen of Heaven and dramatically holds her chest which is pierced with a sword (a symbol of the pain she suffered with the death of her son, Jesus, on the cross). [7] The brilliant crown, jewels, and flowing textiles of the dramatically pictured, beautiful woman in Catholic imagery lead vaudou devotees to recognize her as Ezili Freda, and vaudou artists to recreate the image in materials enhancing further her divine brilliance, such as the shimmering sequins and beads of a contemporary vaudou flag made by a Haitian artist from the city of Jacmel.
Artist from Jacmel (Haitian, 1950–85), Vaudou Flag, 1975–85, sequins and beads on burlap, satin backed, 81.28 x 80.01 cm (Accession Number 1999.031.002, previously Snite Museum of Art, now in the collection of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, Notre Dame)
Afro-Atlantic spirituality
The golden crown and scepter catching the light in the grand gestures of a Black king in 18th-century Brazil or the brilliant sequins manifesting the presence of a vaudou goddess in the guise of the Virgin Mary in 20th-century Haiti are two among the myriad visual testaments to the endurance and dynamism of Afro-Atlantic spirituality in its many forms. Syncretic religions, like Haitian vaudou, and Afro-Catholic rituals, such as Brazilian Congadas, are two parallel paths through which African spirituality found new expressions in the Americas, on the other side of the Middle Passage and despite the enduring, multivalent violence of enslavement and its aftermaths.
Even in the context of forced migration, life in enslavement, forced spiritual and cultural conversion, the history of African American religiosity is one of resilience, resistance, and creativity, as evidenced in Black confraternities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. These examples are eloquent witnesses to the prismatic creativity of Afro-Atlantic spirituality from the era of the Atlantic slave trade to today.
Notes:
[1] Melville J. Herskovits, The myth of the Negro past (New York: Harper, 1941). Melville J. Herskovits, “African gods and Catholic saints in New World Negro belief,” American Anthropologist, volume 39, number 4 (1937); Arthur Ramos, “As culturas negras no novo mundo,” Bibliotheca de divulgação scientifica, sob a direcção de Arthur Ramos (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1937).
[2] David M. Guss, “the selling of San Juan: the performance of history in an Afro‐Venezuelan community,” American Ethnologist, volume 20, number 3 (1993); Mesi Walton, “Afro-Venezuelan Cultural Survival: Invoking Ancestral Memory,” Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, volume 4, number 2 (2020); Jesús García, La Diaspora de los kongos en las Américas y los Caribes (Caracas: Dirección de Desarrollo Regional de la Fundación Afroamericana: Editorial APICUM: UNESCO, 1995), Government publication (gpb); International government publication (igp).
[3] Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). Jeroen Dewulf, “Pinkster: An Atlantic Creole Festival in a Dutch-American Context,” Journal of American Folklore, volume 126, number 501 (2013). Miguel Valerio, Sovereign Joy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[4] Miguel A. Valerio, “Architects of their own humanity: race, devotion, and artistic agency in Afro-Brazilian confraternal churches in eighteenth-century Salvador and Ouro Preto,” Colonial Latin American Review, volume 30, number 2 (2021).
[5] Erin Kathleen Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 145–46.
[6] Rowe (2019).
[7] Dana Rush, “Eternal Potential: Chromolithographs in Vodunland,” African Arts, volume 32, number 4 (winter 1999).
When poet and dramatist Derek Walcott was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Committee lauded his work for its “great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” Walcott, born on the island of St. Lucia in 1930, began writing poetry as a teenager. His poems are characterized by themes of religious devotion as well as the postcolonial implications of living in a community that was formerly a British colony. He first became known for his poetry collection published in 1962 entitled In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960. This volume of poems was characterized by his exploration of Caribbean history. In 1971, his poetic play Dream on Monkey Mountain won an Obie Award for its representation of West Indian life by weaving together strands of folklore, allegory, and fable. Walcott’s masterpiece is generally considered to be his long poem Omeros, published in 1990, which is a re imagining of The Iliad in a modern Caribbean setting. Walcott taught at the University of Alberta, Harvard University, and Boston University. He died in 2017 in St. Lucia.
Consider while reading:
What elements from Greek mythology do you see in this excerpt from Walcott’s Omeros?
How has Walcott adapted the story of The Iliad to a Caribbean setting?
In “The Bounty,” Walcott references both the mutiny on the ship The Bounty, and he also makes numerous references to Christian faith through mentions of John Clare. Do some research on both of these subjects to explore Walcott’s use of them in his poem.
Rich, rhythmically-based music practices combined with singing and dance are not uncommon in the Caribbean and South America. They are the results of various degrees of syncretism with West African music and dance. The shared history of slavery in this part of the world, in the context of European colonialism, helps tie this vast area together. Nevertheless, there are regional differences due to various kinds of responses by musicians, which are informed by diverse socio-cultural and historical circumstances. Afro-Cuban music is a case in point.
The Afro-Cuban music discussed in this video is rhythmically complex and associated with various religious chants and dance. The music’s connection to religion plays an important role in the retention of Afro-Cuban identity. Traditional Cuban rhythms associated with African-based religions – along with Western historical denigration of these religions – contributes to the importance of these instruments and practices as markers of traditional identity.
Magdelys Savigne
Born in Santiago de Cuba and based in Toronto, Canada, Magdelys Savigne is a percussionist, singer, and composer. She was classically trained in orchestral percussion at the University of Arts in Havana, Cuba. She learned to play the batá (which she demonstrates in the video) in the streets of Havana with some of the major exponents of the instrument. She composed and arranged for many bands and performing arts companies in Cuba. After moving to Canada in 2014 to record and tour with the well-known jazz musician Jane Bunnett and her Juno-award winning band Maqueque, Magdelys founded her own musical project OKAN. This band won a Juno in 2021 for the best world music album of the year. She has performed in venues and festivals all over the world such as The Blue Note and Birdland jazz clubs in New York, the Miami Jazz Festival, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Kennedy and Lincoln Centers in New York, Koerner Hall in Toronto, and the Sydney Opera House. “Mags” has been playing percussion for over 20 years and has been featured and interviewed many times on various radio and television outlets including the CBC, Jazz FM91 and CIUT 89.5FM.
During this video, Magdelys discusses her background, the role of gender in Afro-Cuban drumming, as well demonstrating the central instrument of Afro-Cuban drumming, the three-drum set, batá. She also demonstrates various rhythms and chants and their relation to Afro-Cuban deities. She discusses the instrument’s make-up and playing techniques, their connection to religion and social practices, the role of improvisation, the music’s connection to dance, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the role of the clave (the instrument and rhythms). She ends the session with a discussion of the cajón, another important percussion instrument used in Afro-Cuban music.
The Caribbean, and particularly Cuba, has produced some of the most internationally influential urban popular music to come out of Latin America. This music is heavily indebted to the strong African presence in the region and the interaction of African and European musicians.
Various important Cuban genres evolved during the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the danzón, derived from the European contradanza. Both are demonstrated and discussed by Hilario Durán in the video. Originally, the danzón was performed by large orchestras of European percussion, wind and stringed instruments, or European salon instrumentation—flute, piano, bass, violins—accompanied by Cuban percussion. By the end of the 19th century, however, Afro-Cuban and European musical elements had been combined in the danzón. Black danzón bands added greater syncopation into the more restrained European style, and often concluded a piece with a rhythmically animated section comprising improvised solos. This improvised section resembles the montuno, the second more animated section of one of Cuba’s most influential of genres, the son.
The Cuban son is an Afro-Hispanic genre with two major sections. The first section, like so much Latin American mestizo (ethnically or culturally mixed) music, is in strophic form with a sequence of verses, or verses and refrain. The second part is the montuno section, which exhibits African musical principles more clearly. The montuno involves call-and-response singing over a short harmonic ostinato (short continually repeated phrase). The performance becomes more rhythmically animated, and instrumental improvisation comes to the fore. Hilario Durán demonstrates these features of a montuno.
The instruments used to play sones earlier in this century combined European or mestizo stringed instruments such as the tres (a small Cuban guitar variant with three courses of two or three strings each) with Afro-Cuban percussion. The rhythmic underpinning was the clave pattern. By the 1930s, the son had become the most popular dance genre in Havana, and it was soon to have a major impact internationally in the 1940s and 1950s.
Another important source for Cuban popular music was the Afro-Cuban rumba guaguanco. It shares features with and parallels the development of son yet sounds more directly African because of the instrumentation. By the late 19th century, rumba guaguanco was performed by a lead singer and chorus accompanied only by drums and rhythm sticks. Like the son, the rumba guaguanco has two main sections. Typically, after a brief vocal introduction, the main verses and chorus refrains are sung in the first part followed by a montuno: a call-and-response section in which the chorus repeats a single melodic phrase in alternation with the lead singer’s improvisations.
From core styles such as these, Cuba has given birth to a whole range of genres that have had a profound effect internationally including the mambo, cha-cha-cha, the bolero, and later styles of rumba. The clave pattern can be heard in popular music styles throughout the world.
Also, from the lineage of the son, salsa music has currently become one of the most widely diffused urban popular styles in Latin America. Originally developing in Caribbean diaspora communities of New York, salsa has spread to cities throughout North and Latin America with centres of activity in Miami, Los Angeles, Caracas, and Cali.
Hilario Duran
Cuban born Hilario Durán grew up in Havana in a musical family. He began working as a professional musician in Cuba’s Los Papa Cun-Cun Ensemble and in a variety of musical formats. In the 70’s, Durán was chosen by star Cuban musician, Chucho Valdés as his successor in Cuba’s most modern big band, Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna. He has toured worldwide and performed with Dizzy Gillespie and Michel Legrand, among many others. For nine years he was pianist/keyboardist, arranger, and musical director for the well-known band led by Arturo Sandoval. He immigrated to Canada in 1998 and lives in Toronto.
He is a Grammy-nominated and multi-Juno award winner, a Canadian National Jazz Award winner, and the recipient of the 2007 Chico O’Farrill Lifetime Achievement Award from Latin Jazz USA for his outstanding contributions to Afro-Cuban Jazz and Latin Jazz. He teaches at Humber College in Toronto.
Hilario discusses his career as a musician in Cuba and discusses and demonstrates some of the major urban popular music styles in Cuba, as well as various forms and practices such as montuno, clave, contradanza, danzón, rumba, and timba. He also describes changes in Cuban popular music.
Jorge González Camarena, Presencia de América Latina, 1964–65, acrylic, 35.2 x 6 m (Universidad de Concepción, Chile; photo: Farisori, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Why is it important to study Latin American art today?
Richard Evans, Portrait of Henry Christophe, King of Haiti, c. 1816, oil on canvas, 34¼” x 25½” (University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus)
The study of Latin America and Latin American art is more relevant today than ever. In the United States, the burgeoning population of Latinos—people of Latin American descent—and consequently the rise of Spanish (and Spanglish) speakers, Latino musical genres, literature, and visual arts, require that we better understand the cultural origins of these diverse communities. Even beyond our borders, Latin American countries continue to exert influence over political and economic policies, while their artistic traditions are every day made more and more accessible at cultural institutions like art museums, which regularly exhibit the work of Latin American artists. In many ways, Latin American and Latino culture is an inescapable reality; thus, it is up to us, for the benefits of appreciation and integration, to tackle the difficult question of what it means to be from Latin America.
For many of us, Latin America is not an entirely foreign concept—in fact, our knowledge of it is most likely defined by a particular country, food, music, or artist, and sadly, it is also sometimes clouded by cultural stereotypes. What many of us often overlook is the diversity of what it means to be Latin American and Latino. Interestingly, Latin America is not as different from the United States as we tend to think, since we both share in the history of conquest and imperialism, albeit from different perspectives. Thus the study of Latin American art should not necessarily be thought of as a narrative that is entirely separate from that of the United States, but rather as one that is shared.
Félix Parra, Episodes of the Conquest: Massacre of Cholula, 1877, oil on canvas, 65 x 106 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte (INBA), Mexico City; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Latin America broadly refers to the countries in the Americas (including the Caribbean) whose national language is derived from Latin. These include countries where the languages of Spanish, Portuguese, and French are spoken. Latin America is therefore a historical term rooted in the colonial era, when these languages were introduced to the area by their respective European colonizers. The term itself, however, was not coined until the nineteenth century, when Argentinean jurist Carlos Calvo and French engineer Michel Chevalier, in reference to the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico in 1862, used the term “Latin” to denote difference from the “Anglo-Saxon” people of North America. It gained currency during the twentieth century when Mesoamerican, Central American, Caribbean, and South American countries sought to culturally distance themselves from North America, and more specifically, from the United States.
Today, Latin America is considered by many scholars to be an imprecise and highly problematic term, since it prescribes a collective entity to a conglomerate of countries that remain vastly different. In the case of countries that share the same language, their cultural bond is much stronger, since, despite their potentially different pre-conquest origins, they continue to share collective colonial histories and contemporary postcolonial predicaments. Spanish-speaking countries are therefore known as Spanish America or Hispanoamérica, while those that were colonized by the Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal fall under the broader category of Iberoamérica, thus including Brazil. In addition to these Latin-derived languages, Indigenous tongues like Quechua, spoken by more than 8 million people in South America, are still preserved today. When discussing countries such as French-speaking Haiti and Spanish-speaking Mexico, the similarities become much harder to articulate.
Oswaldo Guayasamín, The Workers, oil on canvas, 1942, oil on canvas, 170 x 170 cm (Fundación Guayasamín, Quito, Ecuador)
That said, the collective experiences of the conquest, slavery, and imperialism—and even today, those of underdevelopment, environmental degradation, poverty, and inequality—prove to be an undeniable unifying force, and as the artworks of these countries demonstrate, the idea of both a collective and local experience exists among the selected countries. For the purposes of clarity, the term Latin America is used loosely, whether referring to the pre- or post-conquest era. At the same time, however, this term will be challenged in order to demonstrate both the limitations and benefits of thinking of Latin American art as a shared artistic tradition.
It is anachronistic to discuss a Latin American artistic tradition before independence, and as a result, pre-Columbian and colonial art are discussed according to specific regions. However, it is best to approach the art of the 19th and 20th centuries as a whole, in large part due to the emergence of Latin Americanism and Pan-Americanism (a twentieth-century movement that rallied all American countries around a shared political, economic, and social agenda). Contemporary artists working in a globalized art world and often times outside of their country of origin give new meaning to what it means to not necessarily be a Latin American artist but rather a global one.
Geography
Deity Figure (Zemi), c. 1000, Dominican Republic, wood, shell, 68.5 x 21.9 x 23.2 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
While the countries of Latin America can be categorized by language, they can also be organized by region. Before 1492 C.E., the regions of Mesoamerica, the Isthmus (or Intermediate) Area, the Caribbean, and the Andes shared certain cultural traits, such as the same calendars, languages, and sports, as well as comparable artistic and architectural traditions. After colonization, however, the borders shifted somewhat with the creation of the viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, New Granada, Río de la Plata, and Brazil. After independence (and still today), the countries stretching from Mexico to Honduras form part of the region of Mesoamerica (also known as Middle America since the Greek word “meso” means “middle”). Parts of Honduras and El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, which lie to the south of Middle America, make up Central America, while all the countries to the south of Panama form part of South America. The Caribbean is sometimes considered part of Central America or, at times, entirely excluded. The United States also factors into this discussion of Latin American art—through the work of Latino, Chicano, and Nuyorican artists.
Lastly, it is important to note that when discussing specific Latin American countries, the geographical scope in question will correspond to the current, rather than former borders. While these linguistic and geographical parameters lend clarity to the study of Latin American art, they often obscure cultural differences that are not border-specific. The coastal cultures of Colombia and Venezuela, for instance, are closer to those of the Caribbean than to their mainland counterparts. This is reflected not only in the similar climate, diet, and customs of these particular areas, but also in their artistic production. The islands of the Caribbean, however, are also a geographical region (delineated by the Caribbean Sea), thus the distinction between regions depends on how and where you draw the borders—reminding us of the flexibility and variety of labels that can be employed to describe the same region.
Gold metallurgy originated in South America before spreading northward toward Panama and Costa Rica around 500 C.E., and arriving in Mesoamerica in 900 C.E. Diquís artist, Bat-Nosed Figure Pendant, 13th–16th century, gold, Costa Rica (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
A similar distinction occurs in South America, where cultures vary greatly not necessarily across countries, but rather according to geographical landmarks, the two most prominent of which are the Andes Mountains and the Amazon Rainforest. Stretching from Chile to Venezuela, the Andes traverse the western portion of South America. At impressive heights and in snow-covered peaks, the Andean cultures of South America share irrigation techniques, textile traditions, and native languages, such as Quechua, that continue to this day. The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, is contained mostly in Brazil, although it stretches into the bordering countries of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Just these two landmarks, without mentioning the Pacific and Atlantic coastal cultures of South America, reveal the geographical, and thus cultural diversity of the area. Latin America is a useful, but by no means perfect term to describe a vast expanse of land that is historically, culturally, and geographically diverse.
From networks of exchange to a global trade network
From as early as the pre-Columbian era, there existed networks of exchange among the early civilizations of Latin America, through trade networks that stretched from Mesoamerica to South America. Limited by technology and transportation, forms of Indigenous contact were mainly restricted to the American continent. With the arrival of European conquistadores (Spanish for “conquerors”), the panorama changed entirely. Starting in the sixteenth century, and now exposed to Africa, through the transatlantic slave trade, and Asia, through the trade network of the Manila Galleon, Latin America entered into an era of global contact that continues to this day.
The Manila Galleon trade brought Japanese screens to Mexico, inspiring locally made objects like this. Folding Screen (biombo) with the Siege of Belgrade (visible) and Hunting Scene (reverse), c. 1697–1701, Mexico, oil on wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, 229.9 x 275.8 cm (Brooklyn Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Oscar Niemeyer, National Congress, 1956–60, Brasília, Brazil (photo: Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
With the nineteenth-century struggles for independence, collaborations across countries increased, not to mention alliances were formed, that, although unsuccessful, nevertheless tried to articulate the idea of a collective Latin American entity. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, namely as a result of socio-political transformations, migration, exile, and diaspora (the dispersion of people from their homeland), travel became a trademark of modern art, further contributing to the internationalism of Latin American art. As a result of these networks of exchange, which began before colonization and continue to this day, Latin American art is difficult to categorize. It is, in fact, hybrid and pluralistic, the product of multi-cultural conditions.
It is critical to also consider the negative impact of the artificial insertion of Latin American art into Western and non-Western narratives. While the term “Western art” refers largely to Europe and North America, whose artistic tradition looks back to the classicism of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the term “non-Western art” includes everything else. This distinction has plagued Latin American art, since—except for pre-Columbian art—it mostly fits in the category of Western art history. This categorization, however, is debatable, with some scholars positing that Latin American art is a non-Western artistic tradition that owes more to its pre-Columbian roots than to its European influences. Often, when Latin American art is discussed in a Western context, it is usually presented as derivative of European or North American art, or simply treated as the “other,” meaning different from the artistic mainstream.
This notion can be countered by exposing the many ways that artists adopted, rather than imitated, these outside influences, and by demonstrating the manner through which these forms of exchange were reciprocal—rather than unilateral—as is usually discussed. A case in point can be seen in the work of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who are usually included in textbooks on either Western or Modern art, but whose presence is marginalized in comparison to their European and North American counterparts.
Frida (Frieda) Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931, oil on canvas, 100.01 x 78.74 cm (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
A survey of non-Western art would surely include Indigenous Latin American art, but it might not include any artworks from the sixteenth century (conquest) onwards. As a result—and depending on the context in which you study Latin American art—one can end up with an entirely different and fragmented view of its artistic tradition. This is even made more complicated when considering the artistic selections in the pre-Columbian and colonial sections versus those in the Modern sections, as evidenced by the number of ritual objects (considered artworks as a result of their aesthetic qualities and craftsmanship).
Only from the broader perspective of Latin American art can individual artistic traditions be better appreciated. The plurality of meaning and the inability to neatly title or categorize Latin American art is precisely what makes this area of study so unique, and therefore interesting. A living and constantly evolving field of study, Latin American art will continue to surprise you with its multifaceted and multilayered history.
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 costumbrismo paintings). 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, Levite Woman from the Ephraim Mountains, 1899, oil on canvas, 139 x 198.5 cm (National Museum of Colombia, Bogotá)
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.
Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
by Dr. Maya Jiménez
José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico (Valle de México), 1877, oil on canvas, 160.5 x 229.7 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City), photo: Steven Zucker, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0
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.
Detail of José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico (Valle de México), 1877, oil on canvas, 160.5 x 229.7 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City), photo: Steven Zucker, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0
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.
José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico (Valle de México), 1877, oil on canvas, 160.5 x 229.7 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City), photo: Steven Zucker, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0
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.
Eugenio Landesio, El valle de México desde en cerro del Tenayo, 1870, oil on canvas, 126 X 190 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City), photo: Steven Zucker, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0
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), photo: Steven Zucker, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0
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
Rafael Troya, Cotopaxi, 1874, oil on canvas, 93 x 161 cm (Museo ‘Guillermo Perez Chiriboga’ del Central de Ecuador)
Frederick Edwin Church, Cotopaxi, 1862, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 215.9 cm (Detroit Institute of Arts), photo: Steven Zucker, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0
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
Francisco Oller, Landscape with Royal Palms, c. 1897, oil on canvas, 46.9 x 34.9 cm (Ateneo Puertorriqueño)
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.
Esteban Chartrand, Cuban Landscape, 1879, oil on canvas (Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, Havana, Cuba)
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.
The challenge of the nude in 19th-century Latin American painting
by Dr. Maya Jiménez
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)
Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538, oil on canvas, 119.20 x 165.50 cm (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)
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. [5]
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.
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.
Manuel Vilar, Tlahuicole, the Tlaxcaltecan General, Fighting in the Gladiatorial Sacrifice, 1851, plaster, 216 cm high (Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City); a conversation between Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Steven Zucker
Spanish-born sculptor Manuel Vilar created a plaster cast of Tlahuicole, the Tlaxcaltecan General, Fighting in the Gladiatorial Sacrifice in 1851 while working at the the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, the first art academy in the Americas. This sculpture was the first at the Academy to explicitly depict the pre-Hispanic past. Vilar used the Neoclassical style (which was based on Greco-Roman art) to portray a heroized warrior from Mexica and Tlaxcalan history.
Tlahuicole was a warrior who was captured by the Mexica (Aztecs) during a flowery war against Tlaxcala. He was forced to fight, but successfully defeated the many warriors tasked with battling him. He was pardoned and was then asked to join the Mexica army. Tlahuicole refused to fight for the Mexica, and instead accepted that he would die in ritual sacrifice.
At the time Vilar created this plaster cast other artists, authors, and historians (among others) were beginning to look to the Mexica past (and more broadly the pre-Hispanic past) in new ways to help to forge a Mexican identity in the mid-to-late 19th century. The subject of Vilar’s idealized Tlahuicole was not necessarily intended to be an accurate depiction of past events, but was an appropriation of the Indigenous past to aid in shaping what was occurring in the 19th century. Vilar and other academic artists after him often looked to the historical Indigenous past rather than turn to contemporaneous Indigenous people and stories. Using the visual language of Neoclassicism was also a way to “classicize” the Indigenous past—what art historian James Oles notes was one way of “‘civilizing the barbarian’ (in the same way that such words as ‘pyramid’ and ‘stela’ classicized pre-Hispanic ruins).” [1] This became more common in the nineteenth century after 1860.
Vilar’s sculpture was never cast in bronze as he had intended.
Parra uses a 16th-century friar to comment on 19th-century events, as artists began to make a new art for a new nation.
A conversation between Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Dr. Beth Harris in front of Félix Parra, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 1875, oil on canvas, 263 x 356.5 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City)
José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico from the Santa Isabel Mountain Range
by Dr. Emmanuel Ortega
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)
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, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Academy of San Carlos
Did you know that the first art school in the Americas was established in Mexico City in the late eighteenth century? Creole artists (of European descent born in the Spanish Americas) in preceding decades had failed to convince the Spanish king to create a pedagogical artistic institution. Nevertheless, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Royal Academy of San Carlos (Real Academia de San Carlos) was established. It was modeled after the Art Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, and consequently, a new chapter of Mexican art history began.
Site of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City since 1791 (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Pure landscape
This important school fostered Romantic and Neoclassical aesthetics through previously unexplored genres of painting. For example, beginning in the nineteenth century, students emerging from the new school at the Academy began to illustrate local vistas of the Valley of Mexico. The development of these images offered the perfect opportunity for artists to explore the Romantic qualities of “pure landscape,” which in Mexico, through the teachings of the Italian professor Eugenio Landesio, emerged as a popular genre in the Academy. However, and as observed in Velasco’s The Valley of Mexico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel (above), the valley represented much more than a mere opportunity to practice this newly established genre of painting. This imagery offered an opportunity to highlight symbols of patriotism valuable to a newly independent society.
Eugene Landesio, The Valley of Mexico from the Hill in Tenayo, 1870, oil on canvas, 150.5 x 213 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City)
After the 1821 war of independence (from Spain), Mexico sought to establish its identity through artistic endeavors. The development of the practice of national landscape painting was part of the dictator López de Santa Anna’s efforts to re-establish the art academy after decades of neglect following the formation of Mexico as an independent nation. The Italian artist Eugenio Landesio (who was a well-regarded artist in Mexico) was appointed as the academy’s professor of perspective and landscape painting in 1855. His mentorship and his experience uniting ancient and contemporary Roman historical subjects in his canvasses forever changed the history of Mexican landscape painting.
The volcanic peaks Popocatepetl and Iztacchihuatl (detail), 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, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Monumentality
While Eugenio Landesio and his contemporaries had created similar landscapes of the Valley, Velasco presented a monumentality and an open quality to his images that surpassed compositions such as El Valle de Mexico desde el Cerro del Tenayo (above) created by his Italian mentor only a few years earlier. Velasco’s compositions united pre-Hispanic symbols and contemporary national sentiments. For example, the white peaks that predominate his vistas are the Popocatepetl and Iztacchihuatl volcanoes. For centuries the land’s romantic topology has captured the imagination of Mexicans. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish to the Valley of Mexico in 1519, these two volcanoes were the main characters of a legendary ill-fated love between an Aztec princess (Iztacchihuatl, or “white woman”) and a courageous warrior (Popocatepetl, or “smoking mountain”).
Basilica of Guadalupe (bottom left), edge of Lake Texcoco (middle ground) and Mexico City (detail), José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico from the Santa Isabel Mountain Range, 1875, oil on canvas, 137.5 x 226 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Towards the composition’s background, the spectator can admire the receding waters of Lake Texcoco and the contours of Mexico City. The ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was founded in the middle of this lake in 1325. This was a familiar site for Velasco, given that the artist’s home was located at the foot of the small hill shown in the middle of the canvas. This unassuming hill was also an important sacred colonial site where the Virgin of Guadalupe first appeared to the indigenous man Juan Diego in 1531. The artist is known to have painted in this location many times. This version of The Valley of Mexico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel is perhaps the most celebrated of a dozen or so images with the same subject done by the artist between 1875 and 1892. At one point, the brushstrokes that form the peaks of the snow-covered volcanoes, the rock formations and other details were done from memory, making it possible for the artist to change and manipulate the details of the landscape as he saw fit.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Riesengebirge Mountains, 1835, oil on canvas, 73.5 x 102.5 cm (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)
German Romanticism
The Valley of Mexico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel can be viewed as a re-interpretation of the common late eighteenth-century German subject, “pastoral idylls,” where a sense of poetic harmony and daily life were united. In the tradition of artists such as Casper David Friedrich (above) and Joseph Anton Koch, Velasco introduces his figures (below) not as mere staffage, or accessories enhancing the rest of the artwork, but as key components behind the composition’s poetics. Similar to his German predecessors, Velasco explored the romantic relationship between human figures and the scenery they inhabit. Two indigenous individuals are presented in transit from the city to the country, reflecting a romantic, yet difficult socio-economic relationship between people and their ancestral land. The figures’ indigenous garments intrinsically relate to the national iconography displayed throughout the image. In the words of the German poet Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, the figures in a landscape must represent “a humanity reconciled with itself . . . nature purified, raised to its highest moral dignity…the ideal beauty applied to real life.” [1] Velasco has produced an image where national pride, romantic poetry, and daily life blend to transform the Valley of Mexico into a Romantic masterpiece.
Figures in foreground (detail), José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico from the Santa Isabel Mountain Range, 1875, oil on canvas, 137.5 x 226 cm (Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, Mexico City, photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Overall, The Valley of Mexico from the Hillside of Santa Isabel represents an important period in the development of Mexico’s national identity and an important chapter in the history of Mexican art. Velasco’s landscapes became symbols of the nation as they represented Mexico in several World Fairs. The union of romantic European sensibilities and the historical allegories observed in his compositions won him important recognition in Chicago, Paris, and Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century.
Source: Dr. Emmanuel Ortega, “José María Velasco, The Valley of Mexico from the Santa Isabel Mountain Range,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed July 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/velasco-the-valley-of-mexico/.
20th c. Latin America
Mexican Muralism: Los Tres Grandes—David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco
by Dr. Doris Maria-Reina Bravo
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Dates in Mexican History or the Right for Culture, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), 1952–56, Mexico City (photo: Fausto Puga, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934, fresco, 4.85 x 11.45 m (Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
José Clemente Orozco, Destruction of the Old Order (detail), 1926 (National Preparatory School, Mexico City; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
José Clemente Orozco, Catharsis (partial view), 1934 (Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City)
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.
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Torment and Apotheosis of Cuauhtémoc (detail), 1950–51 (Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts)
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.
The History of Mexico: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace
by Megan Flattley
Diego Rivera, “From the Conquest to 1930,” History of Mexico murals, 1929–30, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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]
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Paula Soler-Moya, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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.
Diego Rivera, “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” detail featuring Karl Marx, History of Mexico murals, 1935, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Wolfgang Sauber, CC BY-SA 3.0)
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.
North wall: Diego Rivera, “The Aztec World,” History of Mexico murals, 1929, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Gary Todd, CC0)
The North Wall
Quetzalcoatl, detail, Bernardino de Sahagún and collaborators, Florentine Codex, vol. 1, 1575–1577 (Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy)
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.
Annotated image of the north wall: Diego Rivera, “The Aztec World,” History of Mexico murals, 1929, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Gary Todd, CC0)
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.
West wall: Diego Rivera, “From the Conquest to 1930,” History of Mexico murals, 1929–30, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: xiroro, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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.
Annotated image of the west wall: Diego Rivera, “From the Conquest to 1930,” History of Mexico murals, 1929–30, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: drkgk)
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.
Annotated lower section of the west wall: Diego Rivera, “From the Conquest to 1930,” History of Mexico murals, 1929–30, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: drkgk)
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.
Eagle on cactus (detail), Diego Rivera, “From the Conquest to 1930,” History of Mexico murals, 1929–30, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Sarahh Scher, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Mexican flag
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.
Annotated upper section of the west wall: Diego Rivera, “From the Conquest to 1930,” History of Mexico murals, 1929–30, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: drkgk)
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.
South wall: Diego Rivera, “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” History of Mexico murals, 1935, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Cbl62, CC0)
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.
Annotated image of the south wall: Diego Rivera, “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” History of Mexico murals, 1935, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Cbl62, CC0)
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.
Frida Kahlo wearing a necklace with a red star and hammer and sickle pendant (detail), Diego Rivera, “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” History of Mexico murals, 1935, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Jen Wilton, CC BY-NC 2.0)
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.
Negative social forces—showing capitalist corruption and greed (detail), Diego Rivera, “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” History of Mexico murals, 1935, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Carlos Villarreal, CC BY-NC 2.0)
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.
Diego Rivera, “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” detail featuring Karl Marx, History of Mexico murals, 1935, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (photo: Wolfgang Sauber, CC BY-SA 3.0)
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.
José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank, 1940, fresco, six panels, 275 x 91.4 cm each, 275 x 550 cm overall (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
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.
Detail, José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank, 1940, fresco, six panels, 275 x 91.4 cm each, 275 x 550 cm overall (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
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
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Echo of a Scream, 1937, enamel on wood, 121.9 x 91.4 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
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.
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas), 1939, oil on canvas, 67-11/16 x 67-11/16″ (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City)
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.
Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940, oil on canvas, 40 x 27.9 cm (Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico City)
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).
Frida Kahlo, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree), 1936, oil and tempera on zinc, 30.7 x 34.5 cm (Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico City)
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
Frida Kahlo, detail with hemostat, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas), 1939, oil on canvas, 67-11/16 x 67-11/16″ (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City) (photo: Dave Cooksey, CC: BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
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.
Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas), 1939, oil on canvas, 67-11/16 x 67-11/16″ (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City)
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.
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.
Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931, oil on canvas, 100.01 x 78.74 cm (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
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).
Frida Kahlo, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree), 1936, oil and tempera on zinc, 30.7 x 34.5 cm (Museum of Modern Art)
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.
Left: Frida Kahlo, Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931, oil on canvas, 100.01 x 78.74 cm (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); right: Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas), 1939, oil on canvas, 67-11/16 x 67-11/16″ (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City)
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.
Frida Kahlo, Details of The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas), 1939, oil on canvas, 67-11/16 x 67-11/16″ (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City)
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.
Nikolas Muray, Frida Kahlo painting The Two Fridas, 1939, photograph, 16 x 20 inches
“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.”
Hector Hyppolite, Ogou Feray also known as Ogoun Ferraille
by Dr. Tamara Díaz Calcaño
Hector Hyppolite, Ogou Feray also known as Ogoun Ferraille, c. 1945, oil paint on Masonite (The Museum of Everything, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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
Hector Hyppolite, Ogou Feray also known as Ogoun Ferraille (detail), c. 1945, oil paint on Masonite (The Museum of Everything, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
Hector Hyppolite, Ogou Feray also known as Ogoun Ferraille (detail), c. 1945, oil paint on Masonite (The Museum of Everything, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
Santiago on Horseback, 16th century, polychromed and gilded wood, Mexico (Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City, Mexico)
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.
Hector Hyppolite, Ogou Feray also known as Ogoun Ferraille (detail), c. 1945, oil paint on Masonite (The Museum of Everything, London; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Hector Hyppolite, Damballah La Flambeau, 1946–48, oil on board, 30 x 24 inches
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 Ferayalso 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.
Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, 1942–43, gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 239.4 x 229.9 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; photo: Kent Baldner, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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
Wifredo Lam, The Jungle (detail) (Museum of Modern Art, photo: Kent Baldner, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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
Conrado W. Massaguer, Visit Cuba, postcard, 1941
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.
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/.
Wifredo Lam, The Eternal Presence
by Dr. Mey-Yen Moriuchi
Wifredo Lam, The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro García Caturla), 1944, oil and pastel over papier mâché and chalk ground on bast fiber fabric, 85 1/4 x 77 1/8 inches (Rhode Island School of Design Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
Wifredo Lam, La Fruta Bomba, 1944, oil on canvas, 154.7 x 125 cm (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid)
The Horse
Wifredo Lam, The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro García Caturla), detail, 1944, oil and pastel over papier mâché and chalk ground on bast fiber fabric, 85 1/4 x 77 1/8 inches (Rhode Island School of Design Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
Han Gan, Night-Shining White, c. 750, Tang Dynasty, China, ink on paper, 30.8 x 34 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Religious syncretism
Wifredo Lam, The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro García Caturla), detail, 1944, oil and pastel over papier mâché and chalk ground on bast fiber fabric, 85 1/4 x 77 1/8 inches (Rhode Island School of Design Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
Wifredo Lam, The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro García Caturla), detail, 1944, oil and pastel over papier mâché and chalk ground on bast fiber fabric, 85 1/4 x 77 1/8 inches (Rhode Island School of Design Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.
Wifredo Lam, The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro García Caturla), 1944, oil and pastel over papier mâché and chalk ground on bast fiber fabric, 85 1/4 x 77 1/8 inches (Rhode Island School of Design Museum; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
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.