Latin American art on the eve of independence
Latin American themes
At the turn of the 19th century, while stiff and haughty portraits of aristocrats were still commissioned, the genre of self-portraits by native-born painters also emerged, leading to works that reveal a more informal, human quality. A fine example of this tradition is a pastel (an informal, spontaneous medium much favoured by Rococo artists) self-portrait by José Luis Rodríguez de Alconedo from 1810. He depicted himself as a mestizo, with tousled hair and an open-necked shirt. His torso, in half-length, is turned in a different direction from his head, which looks spontaneously out at the viewer. This posture, in combination with his disheveled dress, captures an informality much desired by Rococo artists, but it also reflects his identity as a Mexican. Soon after painting this self-portrait, he died in the war for independence.
Signaling their willingness to go beyond the traditional commissions provided by the church and the government, Latin American painters increasingly created scenes of daily life in New Spain in its half-century before independence. In paintings created to document the viceroys’ travels, these artists began to depict actual Latin American landscapes in the background, rather than idealized backdrops. Other works began to depict pure landscape and require no narrative pretext—whether religious or political—as justification. Artists such as Antonio Pérez de Aguilar also began to depict common forms of earthenware and blue-and-white majolica in their bodegones (kitchen still lifes). The land and daily life of Latin America were thus increasingly becoming legitimate subject matter.
One of the more interesting genres to emerge from the period was the portrait that examined ethnic “types.” About 1725 Juan Rodríguez Juárez had created the first documented set of so-called “caste paintings,” which used 16 different scenes to show the effects of the intermarriages of indigenous people, enslaved Africans, and Europeans. This genre gained popularity on the eve of independence, when the different strata of colonial society were depicted in several series called castas created by artists who often chose to remain anonymous. The paintings represent the intermarriage of different “races” and assign terms to refer to each “caste,” or variety of mixture. Colonial legal restrictions on intermarriage are mocked in these paintings, which show people ignoring the law. The more ethnically mixed couples produce offspring with ironic names like “throwback” and “hanging in the air”; these motley families behave poorly and live in humble surroundings. One might expect the Spaniards, who were after all still the ruling class, to be presented in a dignified manner, yet “pure” Africans and Indians are also depicted as beautifully dressed and decorous. Castas often labeled the local products and animals, further highlighting the exoticness of the scene. Even though these households are more allegorical than historical, their painted backdrops, clothing, and lifestyles are believable renderings of 18th-century colonial life.
Latin American identity—a reality deeply enmeshed with such cultural and ethnicity issues—was further explored by contemporary artists in South America on the eve of independence. A South American variant on castas appeared in Quito in 1783, when Vicente Albán created idealized portraits of indigenous and Latin American-born Spanish people in their typical costume. In his set of six paintings titled Fruits of Ecuador, both people and fruits are labeled. Similarly, about 1790–1800 an anonymous artist from Bolivia rendered pairs of different ethnic groups and social classes in their distinctive indigenous dress from the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (which had been formed in 1776 to include what is now Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina). This interest in Latin American culture would be taken up by the costumbristas in the period after independence (see costumbrismo).
State-sponsored art and Neoclassicism
As colonial Latin America thus began to develop its own traditions and culture, the Spanish and Portuguese became increasingly estranged from their colonies. In order to remedy this situation and to learn about his realm and document the range of animals, plants, landscapes, and humans in the empire, the Spanish king Charles III commissioned explorations by Spaniards and other Europeans. The first such exploration was the Botanical Expedition in New Granada (now Colombia) under the direction of Celestino Mutis from 1784 to 1817. This was followed by Antonio del Río’s archaeological expedition to Mayan and other pre-Columbian ruins in Mexico from 1786 to 1787. Alejandro Malaspina sailed up the western coast of North America from 1789 to 1794. Finally, Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and explorer, commanded the most extensive expedition, exploring all the Americas between 1799 and 1804. Draftsmen accompanying these expeditions made many illustrations highlighting the unique qualities of Spain’s soon-to-be independent colonial empire.
Spain attempted to discipline the increasingly independent, riotous colonial American arts by establishing the Royal Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City in 1783. The king sent Spanish artists to be the instructors of each area: architecture, sculpture, medal casting, and various types of painting. The first director of the academy was the Spaniard Antonio Gil, a medal designer who influenced the creation of coinage in Mexico. The painting instructor was Rafael Ximeno y Planes, best known for his airy, pale murals, including one in the dome of Mexico City Cathedral (now destroyed) and one in the chapel of the School of Mines illustrating the legendary appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to an Indian convert now canonized as St. Juan Diego.
The Neoclassical style, which combined conscious Greco-Roman references with a return to the calmer, balanced, and more-rational forms of antiquity, became popular among Iberian academics in the period before the wars of independence; its clear connection to European history was no doubt appealing to Iberian rulers seeking to reassert their presence in the colonies. The most impressive Neoclassical artist associated with the academy in Mexico City was Manuel Tolsá, who at first taught sculpture and later served as the second director of the academy. Tolsá’s major surviving sculpture is the equestrian bronze statue of Spain’s King Charles IV, once situated in the central square of Mexico City. This larger-than-life-size Neoclassical work, cast in 1803 in a size not equaled in the art of the colonial period, conveys the command and benevolence of the king, who looks like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his toga. Similarly Neoclassical is Tolsá’s central retable in Puebla Cathedral, which is a clear, perfectly circular construction supported by Doric columns (on which are seated a number of polychrome wooden angels).
In the Mexican mining state of Guanajuato at the turn of the 19th century, the architect Francisco Eduardo Tresguerras, born in Mexico and self-educated from architectural books, proved to be also a painter of considerable talent. His self-portrait recalls that of his Spanish contemporary Francisco de Goya in its severe coloration, absence of background, and unflattering realism. In addition to designing the church of El Carmen for Celaya, his birthplace, Tresguerras painted the murals for one of its side chapels; these display geometric stylization and composition rendered in muted primary colours.
About this time (1808–21), while Portugal itself was occupied by Napoleonic troops, the Portuguese moved the royal family and court to their colony in Brazil. In 1816 the monarchy brought over a group of French academicians for an artistic mission to make Rio de Janeiro an appropriate capital. Two such imports were the brothers Auguste-Marie and Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, each of whom had a separate task: Auguste-Marie created Neoclassical busts of the emperor and generals—a format from the Roman tradition—while Nicolas made Neoclassical oil paintings of Rio, with an emphasis on realistic details and the New World’s great expanse of space. Nicolas also rendered impressive history paintings, depicting moments such as the arrival of the princess Leopoldina from Europe. In this and other paintings by academic artists of the period, human figures assume their accurate scale in relationship to their surroundings, rather than a dramatizing heroic proportion. These works were intended to reflect the stability and order imposed on the world by “enlightened” European rulers.
Such attempts to establish colonial control over the Spanish and Portuguese Americas were no longer effective, however—in the arts or otherwise—and so, at the beginning of the 19th century, Latin America moved toward independence.
Postindependence, c. 1820–the present
At the turn of the 19th century, a variety of conditions in Spanish and Portuguese America inspired fights for independence. In the second half of the 18th century, the Spanish Bourbon kings had increasingly decentralized the governance of the colonies, which brought a new “creole” class (people of Spanish descent born in the Americas) to power; these Latin Americans felt increasingly capable of governing themselves. At the same time, ethnic and cultural mixing had advanced to a point at which a large segment of society was of mixed ancestry, and these citizens increasingly demanded more opportunities than those afforded them in the various colonial arrangements. These conditions, in combination with the collapse of the monarchies brought on by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and Portugal in 1807–08, set the stage for wars of independence in Latin America. Between 1808 and 1826 all of Spanish and Portuguese America—except Cuba and Puerto Rico—became free from Iberian rule. In the years after liberation, Latin American artists would explore both their own indigenous traditions and those inherited from Europe, eventually creating an influential and distinctive Latin American art.
Nation building, c. 1820–c. 1900
Neoclassicism
In the 18th century the monarchies had imposed Neoclassicism on their main Latin American colonies in order to connect them to Europe and support the ruling establishment. After the wars of independence, however, this relationship became complicated. Neoclassicism continued to be propagated by some government-run academies, although the style was often used to depict indigenous themes.
For example, the Spaniards who had run the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City had either died or returned to their native land during the war of independence. The academy was finally left in the charge of Manuel Tolsá’s star pupil, Pedro Patiño Ixtolinque, whose mother’s family name (Ixtolinque) reveals his indigenous heritage. His works include América (1830), a Neoclassical marble allegorical female figure, which he rendered with the same plumed Tupinambá headdress mentioned earlier but with European rather than Indian features. (Ultimately, the academy he headed had to close for lack of financial support from the state, which was then involved in numerous civil skirmishes.)
The Neoclassical style continued to be used in some major government commissions. Mexican dictator General Porfirio Díaz commissioned Mexican artists to create a monument dedicated to Aztec emperors (erected in 1887). Within this monument the top statue, representing the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc, is placed on a base recalling both the architecture of Mitla and a rusticated Roman order. This heroic figure, raising a spear, wears a togalike cloak and a panache of feathers horizontally along his skull, like an Etruscan or Trojan warrior. While both items of dress are derived from the Codex Mendoza, their placement and style suggest Classical, not indigenous, traditions. Low-relief bronze plaques by different sculptors were inserted into the base to represent historical scenes of the time of the conquest, from the arrival of the Spaniards to the torture of Cuauhtémoc. Similarly, the Catalan artist Manuel Vilar inaugurated an interest in indigenous themes in his sculptures of Indian leaders such as Tlahuicol, whom he portrayed in plaster in 1851, using an overly muscular style reminiscent of the Hellenistic Greek Laocoön group. Once again, although the subject was pre-Columbian, the technique was Neoclassical.
Yet in the 16 new republics formed after the wars of independence, self-taught painters, many of whom are anonymous, commemorated their heroes and the great events of their recent history in a simplified “popular” Neoclassical style, flatter and cruder than academic Neoclassicism. These artists rendered historical scenes such as battles from a normal human vantage point, with little rhetorical emphasis through either size or lighting. In accordance with Neoclassical tenets, figures in such scenes were small and subordinate to the dominant horizontals of the land and the architecture; lighting was usually even, almost flat; and the depiction of details was realistic, often with a clearly recognizable local character. In these works human faces had recognizable portrait details, and clothing was accurate to the period. Natural environments were often more generalized (unless they were in fact the subject matter).
The Salas family of Ecuador exemplified such popular Neoclassicism in their work. Each of these artists presented a sharp, clear-eyed view of their homeland, with backgrounds abstractly simplified to direct the viewer’s attention only to their human subjects. In 1829 the Salas patriarch, Antonio, took time away from his usual subject matter (saints) to paint the bust of the liberator Simón Bolívar in sharp, linear detail against a neutral background. His son Rafael depicted the general Mariano Castillo standing in his gilt-braided black military uniform against a golden background. Rafael’s older half-brother, Ramón Salas, created a series of crisply linear watercolours depicting the common people of Ecuador, showing individuals such as an indigenous water carrier.
In the 1820s José Gil de Castro, known as “the Mulatto,” rendered the heroes of Peruvian independence in a precise but boldly flattened and brightly coloured documentary style with little emotional expression. These works often reflect the colonial portrait formula of including a shield with documentary information in the lower corner of the painting. Mexican folk painters in regional centres of the 19th century also used this hard-edged and emotionally cold Neoclassical technique to portray the local bourgeoisie, sometimes in straight portraits, as seen in the work of José María Estrada of Guadalajara in the first half of the century, and sometimes in ex-votos (small religious paintings illustrating miracles), as seen in the work of Hermenegildo Bustos of Guanajuato in the second half of the century.
Romanticism
In Europe at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, Romanticism influenced many forms of expression and thought. Characterized by an emphasis on the subjective and irrational, Romanticism rejected the order and harmony of Classicism and Neoclassicism and often focused on “exotic” foreign lands. In the visual arts, this frequently meant using dramatic, often lush effects of light and colour to portray exotic scenes or powerful landscapes.
Foreign travelers
The Romantic style was first introduced into Latin America by foreign travelers, who were eager to see for themselves the distant lands that had captured world attention by breaking away from their weakened colonial European masters after the Napoleonic wars. Bavarian artist Johann Moritz Rugendas began his South American journey in Brazil (1821–23). From 1831 to 1834 he lived in Mexico, and he then settled in Chile from 1834 to 1845, when he also painted in Argentina and Peru. Rugendas was unique in moving from one country to another but similar to other European artists in his search for the striking, the asymmetrical, the sublime, and the beautiful in Latin America. In addition, his painterly brushstroke, dynamic composition, and bright colours strongly recall the Romantic style that was then popular in European painting, where it was best exemplified by his acquaintance the French painter Eugène Delacroix. Rugendas’s sketchy, painterly style embodies the true spirit of the Romantic movement most clearly in his small oil sketches in preparation for major canvases, few of which were executed.
Many foreign artists transmitted the beauty, excitement, and distinctiveness of the newly independent countries to European audiences hungry for Romantic imagery. Jean-Baptiste Debret, a member of the French artistic mission to Brazil in 1816, drew sketches of a variety of Brazilians, which he published in Paris as lithographs from 1834 to 1839. Other foreign artists in Latin America included Daniel Egerton, an Englishman in Mexico who rendered dramatic landscapes in the British Romantic tradition; Karl Nebel, a German who showed—primarily through his lithographs—the variety of social and ethnic populations across Mexico; Edward Mark, an English foreign-service officer stationed in Colombia, whose amateur watercolours render not only landscapes and people but also flora and fauna; Frederic Edwin Church, an American painter of the Hudson River school who went to Ecuador to document the land and by chance witnessed the dramatic eruption of the volcano Cotopaxi; and Martin Johnson Heade, an American landscape painter who traveled to Brazil and Jamaica to study hummingbirds and orchids and ended up revealing a microcosm of the tropics in his paintings. In addition to educating Europeans regarding aspects of Latin American culture, such work was also important to native-born Latin Americans. In fact, the government-sponsored Comisión Corográfica in New Granada continued the work of Mark in its geographic survey of 1850–59, when several artists built upon his example and rendered the great variety of people, landscapes, flora, and fauna of what is now Colombia.
