Painted Saints from New Mexico
From ArtDaily.org, 4 July 2009:
A Century of Retablos: The Janis and Dennis Lyon Collection of New Mexican Santos, 1780–1880
Josyln Art Museum, Omaha, NE, 5 July 5 — 4 October 2009
Catalogue by Charles Carrillo and Thomas Steele (Hudson Hills, 2007), $60, ISBN:978-1555952730
A rich tradition of religious painting flourished in New Mexico during the Spanish colonial period prior to 1912. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, self-taught painters in New Mexican villages established workshops to produce devotional images called retablos. These colorful narrative panels consisted of images of Christian saints painted on wood, earning for their creators the title of santeros — or saint makers. These small paintings were sold to devout believers who displayed them in home altars to honor their patron saints. Virtually hundreds of saints were represented, each invoked to remedy a different situation.
The exhibition A Century of Retablos: The Janis and Dennis Lyon Collection of New Mexican Santos, 1780–1880 at the Joslyn Art Museum, July 5 through October 4, introduces retablos to museum audiences and teaches about the methods of creating these beautiful panel paintings.
A Century of Retablos is organized by the Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue have been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts through its ‘American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius’ program.
A Century of Retablos features 93 wooden panels, all created during the colonial period, from one of the finest private collections of retablos in the world (click here for an exhibition checklist). The Janis and Dennis Lyon collection encompasses the breadth and depth of the retablo tradition. This exhibition provides the first opportunity for the Lyon collection of retablos to be available for public viewing.
This exhibition is groundbreaking in its approach. Previously unconsidered questions and the biographies of various santeros are explored, as well as the relationships among artists, workshops, and patrons. The research by Charles Carrillo, Ph.D., and Father Thomas Steele, S. J., is the basis of this effort. Carrillo is an accomplished anthropologist who is well respected in his field and has been widely published over the past 20 years. He is also a leading contemporary santero. Father Steele is a highly regarded author and social historian who studies Hispanic life in early New Mexico. Together, their research sheds new light on the social history and artistic significance of colonial retablos, examining not only the physical and aesthetic nature of the decorative panels, but also the ways these objects were used in churches and as private devotional objects. (more…)
Assessing the Glow of ‘Blake’ and ‘Brilliant Women’
Recent pieces from CAA.reviews address exhibition publications on William Blake at the Petit Palais in Paris and bluestockings at the National Portrait Gallery in London:
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Catherine de Bourgoing, ed., William Blake: Le Génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Petit Palais and Musée de la Vie Romantique, 2009), 256 pages, €39 (9782759600779)
Exhibition schedule: Petit Palais and Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris, April 2–June 28, 2009
Meredith Davis writes that
This overdue exhibition was expansive and thorough, if not inspirational; it was beautifully installed in the Petit Palais’s well-appointed special exhibition rooms, but the roughly thematic groupings were at times opaque or barely articulated. Arguably, Blake is as much a poet as a visual artist, and with a museum show such as this, one inevitably favors the visual dimension of his art over the literary. Typically problematic in this sense are his “Illuminated Books.” Among his most important works, these hand-printed manuscripts are miniscule in some cases; many, including his Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789–94), were certainly not meant to be presented as individual framed sheets of paper, but rather as objects to be cradled in one’s hands or lap, like a book of hours or diary. . . .
Despite such inherent difficulties, the exhibition succeeded in creating several intimate spaces and in offering a comprehensive presentation of Blake’s range. Blake’s long absence from France was remedied, and French audiences did get a broad view of Blake’s world. However, it is not certain that they came away from the exhibition with anything like a clear vision of his art (to the extent that such a thing is possible). The exhibition did not begin with an introductory wall text as one typically finds in a similar exhibition in the United States. Instead viewers were launched straight into a series of modestly scaled rooms, arranged around major works, themes, or historical benchmarks. In some ways the exhibition seemed to take a cue from Blake himself. . . .
Michael Phillips’s excellent catalogue essay, “William Blake Graveur Visionnaire,” provides some much-needed and detailed information on Blake’s printing processes. Phillips offers a lucid discussion of Blake’s technical innovations in printmaking, as well as discusses the symbolic significance the medium took on for Blake, pointing out how the artist drew parallels, for example, between the corrosive action of the acid on the plate (in etching) and a similar corrosion of the soul. The catalogue’s overall format mirrors the exhibition itself in its avoidance of linear narrative, choosing again a thematic and multi-vocal presentation of the artist. It does not provide a roadmap to the exhibition in any sense, but is a stand-alone volume with high ambitions. There are, in all, a total of thirty essays in the volume, some of them as short as five hundred words, all of them in French. While some essays are informative, others seem to end abruptly, or to focus on esoteric topics. Nonetheless, this approach clearly demonstrates the many dimensions of Blake’s work, as well as the range of current approaches to it.
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Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Pelz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 160 pages; 84 color illustrations; 64 b/w illustrations, cloth $50 (9780300141030)
Exhibition schedule: National Portrait Gallery, London, March 13–June 15, 2008
Wendy Wassyng Roworth writes that
Brilliant Women is not a catalogue; however, all the works in the exhibition are splendidly illustrated, many in high-quality color or as full-page reproductions. Portraits of the bluestockings, their associates, and followers, along with engravings, drawings, caricatures, and Wedgwood plaques provide an abundance of visual material not usually available in studies of literary figures. Intended primarily for general readers and exhibition visitors, Brilliant Women does not break major new ground but offers an excellent overview of the bluestocking phenomenon. However, the authors’ focus on visual representations of learned women in portraits, book illustrations, and other pictorial forms and their analyses of how and why bluestockings were depicted by both admirers and critics makes this study useful for scholars of eighteenth-century art, literature, and history. This consideration of visual imagery contributes to a larger understanding of the vital role women played in the eighteenth-century republic of letters through their images as well as their works in ways that textual accounts alone cannot achieve. Whether disparaged and mocked in caricature, elevated as allegorical personifications, or portrayed as graceful ladies in fashionable dress, these images call attention to the complex identities of intellectually ambitious women.
Settecento Enlightenment
From the Polo Museale Fiorentino website:
Marco Ricci, "Riunione musicale," before 1708 (Florence: Galleria dell'Accademia)
Splendour and Reason: Art in Eighteenth-Century Florence
(Il fasto e la ragione: Arte del Settecento a Firenze)
Uffizi, Florence, 30 May — 30 September 2009
Francesco Carradori, "Bacchus and Ariadne," 1776 (Florence: Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina)
With the extinction of the Medici dynasty in 1743, Florence did not lose its prestige as capital of culture and the arts, thanks to the government of the Lorraines, who gave the city the international profile required by Enlightenment policies. This exhibition is the first overall panorama of the principal artistic events of the eighteenth century in Florence. We are speaking of 120 paintings, sculptures, art objects and furnishings of the great, public and private commissions, works from the entire century, which in a spectacular vein record the changes in taste from the late Baroque period to Neoclassicism.
The show starts with the commissions made by Cosimo III and the Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, which opened the city to “foreign” artists like Sebastiano Ricci and Giuseppe Maria Crespi. They favoured sculpture (with personalities like Giovan Battista Foggini and Massimiliano Soldani Benzi), and developed the manufacture of tapestries and semiprecious stones. In this context, the families of the Florentine aristocracy performed a very conspicuous role: the Gerinis for the diffusion of the veduta, the Ginoris for the famed manufactory of porcelain of Doccia, the Corsinis for their constant relations with pontifical Rome. All these episodes contributed to defining the image of a vital and modern city, crossroads of many experiences and a workshop of original artistic productions.
Pompeo Batoni, "The Education of Achilles," 1746 (Florence: Galleria degli Uffizi)
With the extinction of the Medicis, Peter Leopold of Lorraine brought the European version of Rococo and Neoclassicism to Tuscany, along with the reformist spirit that accompanied the theories of the Enlightenment even in the figurative arts. A new elite of patrons thus took shape in Florence, also made up of its foreign residents (the Englishman Horace Mann, for example). It was also thanks to them that Florence became a mandatory lap of the grand tour. The Tuscan artists received advantages, especially the modern painters of vedutas (landscapes) (including the naturalised Englishman Thomas Patch and Giuseppe Zocchi). Foreign visitors preferred the repertory of gallantries and vedutas translated into semiprecious stones by the renovated Opificio dei Siriès. The Grand Duke proved to be a protector of the arts. He reformed the by-laws of the Academy where prominent artists like Pietro Pedroni, Innocenzo Spinazzi, and Francesco Carradori worked. He stimulated the worksites of the grand-ducal residences – first and foremost, the Pitti Palace and the Villa at Poggio Imperiale – and spurred the study of antiquity,
transferring the spectacular group sculpture of the Niobe from Rome to Florence.
Catalogue edited by Carlo Sisi and Riccardo Spinelli, 352 pages, ISBN 9788809743755
In this climate of civic and cultural fervour, the Frenchmen François-Xavier Fabre, Bénigne Gagnereaux, Louis Gauffier and Jean-Baptiste Desmarais came to Florence, driven from Pontifical Rome after the murder of the diplomat Nicolas de Basseville. With them came the international version of neoclassicism, thus contributing to the “reform” of the portrait, the veduta, and the historical painting, on the eve of the instatement of the Napoleonic court (1799).
The exhibition is curated by Carlo Sisi and Riccardo Spinelli. The catalogue is available through Michael Shamansky, at artbooks.com.
[All images are taken from the exhibition website; click here for more information]
Built by Numbers
This exhibition just closed at Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science; it opens at the YCBA in February. The following description comes from the latter’s website:
Compass & Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750
Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, 16 June — 6 September 2009
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 18 February — 30 May 2010
The spread of Renaissance culture in England coincided with the birth of architecture as a profession. Identified as a branch of practical mathematics, architecture became the most artistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the arts. During this time, new concepts of design based on geometry changed how architects worked and what they built, as well as the intellectual status and social standing of their discipline.
Catalogue edited by Anthony Gerbino and Stephen Johnston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
Compass & Rule examines the role of mathematics in architectural design and building technology, highlighting the dramatic transformation of English architecture between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The exhibition brings together some of the finest architectural and scientific material from the early modern period, including drawings of St. Paul’s Cathedral, an astrolabe commissioned for Queen Elizabeth I, and architectural drawings by King George III. Also on view will be nearly one hundred drawings, paintings, printed books and manuscripts, maps, and other unique mathematical instruments that illustrate the changing role of both the architect and the profession 1500 to 1750.
An illustrated catalogue edited by exhibition curators Anthony Gerbino, architectural historian and Senior Research Fellow of Worcester College, University of Oxford, and Stephen Johnston, Assistant Keeper at the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford, will accompany the exhibition.
Thomas Wright’s Menagerie & Gervase Jackson-Stops
Thomas Wright, The Menagerie, Horton Park, Northamptonshire, 1750s (Photo: Bruno de Hamel, "Architectural Digest: Chateaux and Villas," 1982)
Earlier in the week, An Aesthete’s Lament included a posting on The Menagerie, the Grade II listed building acquired by Gervase Jackson-Stops (1947-95) in the 1970s. After a three-year studentship at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jackson-Stops joined the National Trust, first as a research assistant and then (starting in 1975) as an architectural advisor. It’s difficult to overstate his importance for the organization. As noted in numerous obituaries — including those from the Society of Antiquaries of London, The Independent, and Architectural History (available through JStor) — he played important roles in the Trust’s acquisition of Canons Ashby House, Kedleston Hall, and Fountains Abbey. His commitments to restoration were evinced not only at Stowe but also at his personal labor of love, The Menagerie.
Horton Hall, destroyed 1936
This mid-eighteenth-century banqueting house, by Thomas Wright (1711-86), at Horton Park, Northamptonshire is actually just one of just thirteen listed buildings attached to the property (the main house, Horton Hall, was destroyed in the 1930s). The Horton Park Conservation Group (HPCG) was founded in 2008 to campaign for the ongoing conservation of the park and these structures. The park is likely to receive increased attention over the next two years as Wright’s three-hundredth birthday approaches.
The Menagerie appears in Paige Rense, Architectural Digest: Chateaux and Villas (Knapp, 1982); Timothy Mowl and Claire Hickman, Historic Gardens of England: Northamptonshire (History Press, 2008), and Chippy Irvine, The English Room (Bullfinch Press, 2001). For details regarding visits, see The Menagerie website.
Finally, no evocation of Jackson-Stops is complete without mention of his role in organizing the seminal Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1985-86). For his work on the show, he received the Presidential Award for Design in 1986 and was made an Officer of the British Empire (O.B.E.) — all before turning 40! A full list of publications, including dozens of contributions for Country Life, can be found at the end of the obituary compiled by Oliver Garnett and Tim Knox for Architectural History 39 (1996): 222-35.
[The photograph of The Menagerie comes from An Aesthete’s Lament; the print of Horton Hall comes from the website of the Horton Park Conservation Group. Thanks to both.]
Marguerite Gérard in Paris
From Hôtels Paris Rive Gauche:
Marguerite Gérard: Artiste en 1789 dans l’atelier de Fragonard
Cognacq-Jay Museum, Paris, 10 September – 6 December 2009
This exhibition concentrates on the astonishing, little-known work of Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837), who was the sister-in-law of the great painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806). Having moved to Paris in the mid-1770s — living in Fragonard’s apartment in the Louvre — she became the painter’s student and subsequent collaborator.
Becoming a recognised female painter in the society of the era was not simple at all. Knowing this, Marguerite made some clever marketing moves, taking advantage of the wobbling Old Regime to carve a niche for herself in this newly-formed society. Soon, her portraits, often donated to her models, carried her name far and wide, helping to make her well known and sought after.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Marguerite Gérard, "The Stolen Kiss," (St. Petersburg, Hermitage)
The exhibition has sixty portraits and drawings borrowed from all over Europe and the United States. As well as the work of Marguerite Gerard and Fragonard, including one seminal collaborative effort, the exhibition will also show contemporary portraits which explain the artist’s sources and the success of the fashion of intimist portraits that took hold at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ending with the arrival of photography. A catalogue will also be published to accompany the exhibition.
The exhibiton Marguerite Gérard: artiste en 1789 dans l’atelier de Fragonard runs from 10th September to 6th December 2009 at the Musée Cognacq-Jay.
Watteau at the Met
Press release from the Met:
Watteau, Music, and Theater
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 September – 29 November 2009
Catalogue ed. Katharine Baetjer (Yale University Press)
Watteau, Music, and Theater, the first exhibition of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s paintings in the United States in 25 years, will demonstrate the place of music and theater in Watteau’s art, exploring the tension between an imagery of power, associated with the court of Louis XIV, and a more optimistic and mildly subversive imagery of pleasure that was developed in opera-ballet and theater early in the 18th century. It will demonstrate that the painter’s vision was influenced directly by musical works devoted to the island of Cythera, the home of Venus, and to the Venetian carnival, and will shed new light on a number of Watteau’s pictures.
Made possible by The Florence Gould Foundation, the exhibition will feature more than 60 works of art, consisting of major loans of paintings and drawings by Watteau and his contemporaries from collections in the United States and Europe. The balance of the paintings will be drawn from the Metropolitan Museum’s collections, together with most of the works on paper, and all of the musical instruments, gold boxes, and ceramics. Watteau, Music, and Theater will honor Philippe de Montebello, Director Emeritus of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Watteau, “The French Comedians,” 1720–21, (New York: Metropolitan Museum)
Born in 1684 in Valenciennes in the Hainault (French, but formerly part of the Spanish Netherlands), Jean-Antoine Watteau is widely considered the most important artist in early eighteenth-century France. A solitary, ill-educated, self-taught, largely itinerant figure, he was a supremely gifted painter and draftsman whose surviving works of art are his testament. Most of them are so-called fêtes galantes, idyllic scenes that have no specifically identifiable subject. Only one of Watteau’s paintings, The Embarkation for Cythera (1717), was publicly exhibited in his lifetime. Watteau died in 1720 at the age of 36 after a long illness. While relatively little is known about Watteau, an expanding body of literature relating to Paris opera-ballet, plays, and the less formal and more traditional seasonal théâtres de la foire relates to specific works in the exhibition, and these can now be mined more deeply to examine the artist’s life and work.
Among the many highlights of Watteau, Music, and Theater will be the Metropolitan Museum’s Watteau paintings Mezzetin and French Comedians; the Städel Museum’sThe Island of Cythera; Pleasures of the Dance from the Dulwich Picture Gallery; Love in the French Theater and Love in the Italian Theater, both from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin; and The Alliance of Music and Comedy (private collection), which has not been on view in any museum in decades.
The exhibition will mark the first time the painting La Surprise (private collection) will be seen in a museum. Lost for almost 200 years and presumed to have been destroyed, La Surprise was rediscovered last year in a British country house and later sold at auction. (more…)
Gemmae Antiquae, Part II
From the website of the Hermitage:
The Fate of One Collection
500 Carved Stones from the Collection of the Dukes of Orléans
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, ongoing exhibition
Gillas, "Head of Olympic Zeus of Phidias," sardonyx, 1st Century BCE (Hermitage)
On October 30, 2001 an exhibition entitled The Fate of One Collection: 500 Carved Stones of the Collection of the Dukes of Orléans opened in the Golden Room of the Winter Palace. The exhibition continues the series of temporary exhibits dedicated to famous European collections, the foundation of the Hermitage art collections. The exhibition showcases 500 gems, dating from the 4th century B.C. to the mid-18th century, which represents one-third of the collection of the Dukes of Orléans.
In 1787 Catherine the Great ordered to acquire from Louis Philippe Joseph of Orléans the collection of 1500 gems of the familial collection of the Dukes of Orléans, representatives of the junior branch of the French royal dynasty.
The collection’s central exhibit is the collection of Heidelberg Castle gems. The collection was started by Count Palatine Otto-Heinrich (1502-1559). Antique gems comprise the largest part of the Heidelberg Castle collection. It includes rare pieces of the Hellenic epoch and pieces dating back to
masters of Republican and Augustine Rome and the time of Soldier Emperors.
"Jupiter, Mercury and Cupid, Mars and Neptune Surrounded by Zodiac Signs," 16th-century Italy (Hermitage)
In 1685 the collection was inherited by Elisabeth-Charlotte, Princess Palatine, who married Duke Philippe of Orléans. Thanks to this dynastic marriage the Gemmae Study passed on to the Dukes of Orléans. Elisabeth-Charlotte continued adding to the collection, and acquired the gems representing different stages of ancient glyptics, including works by famous masters, such as Aulus, Rufus, Sostrates, and Trypho. A larger part of the works dates back to Renaissance and Baroque epochs.
In 1741 the grandchild of Elisabeth-Charlotte, Duke Louis III of Orleans, acquired the Paris collection of carved stones, which had belonged to Pierre Crozat, one of the most famous collectors in Europe. Of special interest in his collection are the cameos of the pure Byzantium style. A large collection of entails and cameos demonstrates the glyptics of Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands of the 15th – early 18th centuries. Among the masterpieces of the European portrait is the portrait of Henry II of France by A. Cesati, poetized by Giorgio Vasari.
"The Fate of One Collection: 500 Carved Stones from the Room of Duke of Orleans."
Among the Dukes of Orléans, last owners of the gem collections, there were no such art connoisseurs as Elisabeth-Charlotte and Pierre Crozat. However, during this time rare Etruscan scarabs and gems of the 15th – 18th centuries were added to the collection along with several glyptic portraits, talismans and grillae (human heads and animal bodies). Sassanian Iran and European Renaissance are represented by one work each.
The exhibition includes descriptions, catalogs of collections and engravings, dedicated to gems of the Dukes of Orléans, and pictures of castles and palaces where the collection was kept at various times. Sections of the exhibit reconstructing separate collections of the 16th – early 18th centuries, which belonged to the Dukes of Orléans, are highlighted. Slavia Publishers presents The Fate of One Collection. 500 Carved Stones from the Room of Duke of Orleans. Introduction is by Y. O. Kogan and O. Y. Neverov.
[Credits: Images and text (with minor spelling modifications) taken from the Hermitage website]
Gemmae Antiquae, Part I
From the Getty Villas’s website:
Carvers and Collectors: The Lasting Allure of Ancient Gems
Getty Villa, Los Angeles, 19 March – 7 September 2009
Jeffrey Spier, Ancient Gems and Finger Rings: Catalogue of the Collections (Getty Museum, 1993), ISBN 978-0-89236-215-8 ($70)
Gems from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum (For individual identifications, click on the image)
The beauty of carved gemstones has captivated collectors, connoisseurs, and craftsmen since antiquity. Precious markers of culture and status, gems were sought by Greek and Roman elites as well as modern monarchs and aristocrats. This exhibition features intaglios and cameos carved by ancient master engravers along with outstanding works by modern carvers and works of art in diverse media that illustrate the lasting allure of gems. . . .
In antiquity, gems were engraved with personal or official insignia that, when impressed on wax or clay, were used to sign or seal documents. Carved gems were valued not only for their distinctive designs, but also for the beauty of their stones, some of which were believed to have magical properties. From the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, rulers, nobles, and wealthy merchants sought and traded classical gems, and carvers produced replicas and forgeries.
Augustin de Saint-Aubin after Charles-Nicolas Cochin II, engraving in François Arnaud, Description des principales pierres gravées du cabinet de S.A.S. Monseigneur le duc d'Orléans. . . (Paris, 1870) The Getty Research Institute 85-B16748
Sumptuous engraved catalogues of gem collections were published in the days before photography. Like the gems they illustrated, these volumes functioned as luxury objects. The engravings in these books sometimes improve upon the already excellent carving of the gems themselves. Louis Philippe d’Orléans (1725–1785), the great-grandson of King Louis XIV of France, published his gem collection in an elaborately engraved volume dedicated to his cousin King Louis XVI. The frontispiece, shown here, depicts the duke himself and also represents the superiority of gems over other art forms: in the foreground, two cupids inspect the contents of drawers pulled from a large gem cabinet, while symbols of architecture, sculpture, and painting are relegated to the upper right and lower left corners. . . .
Since the Renaissance, gem carvers have attempted to equal and surpass their ancient counterparts. Because of the high demand for classical gems, some carvers, dealers, and collectors sought to pass off modern works as ancient. Some even forged the signatures of famous Greek and Roman carvers. No scientific method exists for proving the antiquity of gems, and quality is no proof of authenticity. Thus it is usually some deviation in style or imagery that reveals a piece to be modern. . . .
Engraved Gem, signed by Giovanni Pichler or Luigi Pichler, ca. 1750-1850
Austrian carver Antonio (Johann Anton) Pichler worked in Rome in the 1700s copying ancient gems. His son Giovanni also became an accomplished gem carver, as did Giovanni’s half-brothers Giuseppe and Luigi and Giovanni’s son Giacomo. Luigi was the most renowned: he received commissions from the Vatican and the French and Austrian courts to carve both classical and contemporary subjects. This intaglio is modeled after a famous relief of Antinous (the beloved of the Roman emperor Hadrian) housed in the Villa Albani, Rome. The fact that the gem is signed “Pichler” in Greek indicates no intention to deceive but rather an emulative spirit, the artist vying with his ancient predecessors.
[Text and images from the Getty Villa exhibition website]
New World Missions
From the San Antonio Museum of Art website:
The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain
San Antonio Museum of Art, 17 October 2009 – 3 January 2010
Saint Francis of Assisi, seventeenth century, carved, polychromed, and gilded wood, 51” high (Tepotzotlán, Mexico: Museo Nacional del Virreinato)
Antonio de Torres, “Saint Francis Xavier Baptizing the Nations of the World,” ca. 1720 (Mexico City: Museo del Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola Vizcaínas)
The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain is the first exhibition to explore the rich artistic legacy of the Franciscan and Jesuit mission churches in northern Mexico and the American Southwest. An integral part of Spain’s colonization of the New World, the missionary enterprise was integral to the crown’s effort. Franciscans arrived in Mexico shortly after Cortes’s capture of Tenochtitlan, Mexico to spread Christianity and were soon joined by the Dominicans, then the Augustinians, and, later, by the Jesuits. From shortly after the Conquest until Mexico obtained its independence from Spain in 1821, hundreds of missions were founded by the Franciscans and Jesuits in northern reaches of the Viceroyalty, in present-day states of Durango, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California in Mexico; and California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida in the United States. Nearly all of these Franciscan and Jesuit missions were richly decorated with paintings, sculpture, furniture, liturgical objects and liturgical vestments which have received little critical public attention. Many of the works were made by the most prominent artists in Mexico City and elsewhere in New Spain, while others came from Europe and as far away as Asia. Indigenous artists also made works of art found in the missions. In short, there are extensive visual remains of a spiritual and cultural undertaking that was, although part of an immense worldwide effort, quite nearly unique to the New World. The exhibition will include approximately 125 objects from collections in Mexico, the United States, and Europe, including many from the missions themselves, most of which have never left their original locations.
The fully illustrated catalogue in Spanish and English will contain essays by prominent historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and art historians for the U.S. and Mexico. They discuss the art and architecture of the missions; native and Pre-Columbian art and cultures and the reception of European-based art brought to the missions; contrasts in native and Spanish conceptions of space and their impact on Spanish-Indian relations at the missions; the cultural and linguistic diversity of indigenous people of northern New Spain and their effect on missionaries’efforts; and the later impact of the missions on art, literature, and film in the U.S. and Mexico.
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[The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain (El arte de las misiones del norte de la Nueva España, 1600–1821) was on view at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City earlier this summer. It will travel to the San Antonio Museum of Art, October 17 to January 3, 2010, followed by the Museo de Historia Mexicana, Monterrey; the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, Baja California; and the Oakland Museum of California. The exhibition is co-curated by Michael Komanecky and Clara Bargellini of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. The July issue of Magazine Antiques featured an instructive article by Michael Komanecky, along with fifteen photographs. The two images used here are from that slideshow.]
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