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Description: The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820
~This exhibition and the accompanying catalogue are the product of a broad and, for the central organizing team, delightful collaboration with international colleagues, as diverse and complexly interlinked as the contents of the exhibition itself.
PublisherPhiladelphia Museum of Art
PublisherYale University Press
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Preface
This exhibition and the accompanying catalogue are the product of a broad and, for the central organizing team, delightful collaboration with international colleagues, as diverse and complexly interlinked as the contents of the exhibition itself.
Philadelphia has of course had a long history of relationships with Latin America, with trade connections dating back to the seventeenth century. Alexander von Humboldt stopped here in 1808 following his journeys throughout northern South America and Mexico to have his portrait painted by Charles Willson Peale, who accompanied him to Washington to introduce him to Mr. Jefferson; and the widow of Augustin de Iturbide, once emperor of Mexico, retreated to Philadelphia following her husband’s execution in 1824 and is buried in a local churchyard. The engineer Robert H. Lamborn left part of his extensive collection of Mexican colonial art (with a few Peruvian objects as well) to the then Pennsylvania Museum in 1903, and it was through a week-long visit with her students from the national university of Mexico in 1974 that I met (in what was really my first encounter with a serious scholar in this area) the remarkable Elisa Vargaslugo de Bosch, who gently explained to us the value and nature of our own collections. Part of this group of paintings had been shown as a temporary exhibition at the museum by Anne d’Harnoncourt in 1969, when she was a junior curator, and it was really, with the spur of Katherine (Katie) Crawford Luber, then a curator in the European Painting Department, that we were able to give a permanent home to a selection of the Lamborn collection in a reinstallation of, interestingly, the European galleries in 1992, supported by the Kleberg Foundation, who were among the first to offer financial help to the present project. And it was in conversations with Katie that the fundamental notions of this exhibition—a completely pan-American colonial survey—took form, and much of the initiative to approach the J. Paul Getty Trust in 2001 to help underwrite our own travel but still more importantly, the formation of an international team of scholar/advisors (see Acknowledgments), was her doing, the successful results of which are truly the foundation for the shape and breadth of the project as now realized.
The Lamborn pictures offer a rather small slice of the quality and range of colonial art but gave us a central base from which to act. Bigger encounters—sometimes at a level close to epiphanies—fed our ambitions. The colonial section of the 1990–91 Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, done by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City, was for many of us a major eye-opener of the levels of achievement possible in this little-explored passage in the history of world art. Many will note the all-too-obvious overlap with the Mexican selection here and of that ambitious show more than fifteen years ago, which we made without apology since it simply underscores the prescience and insights of the organizers of that project. A trip to Madrid in 1999 by Katie and myself, in the company of Roberta Huber (a major colonial painting collector), to see the brilliant Los Sighs de Oro organized by Jonathan Brown, Joaquin Bérchez, and Luisa Elena Alcala, gave us the courage to follow, in a pan-national fashion, Latin colonial art, just as an early trip to Brazil sponsored by the Lampadia Foundation set our determination to extend our boundaries outside those of viceregal Spain to encompass the Portuguese colonies as well. Diana Fane’s Converging Cultures at the Brooklyn Museum in 1996, which then traveled to Phoenix and Los Angeles, laid for us many of the essential premises of our own project, reinforcing our bias to include art in all mediums and thereby confront some of the conventional wisdoms about “high and low” or even Old and New Worlds.” Brazil: Body and Soul, organized by Edward J. Sullivan at the Guggenheim Museum in 2001, particularly its very thoughtful and choice colonial selection, outlined (more ambitiously than we could here) many of the essential elements of exploring this area. Most recently, the last two rooms of the Aztecs show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, given over to works of art postdating the conquest, with its unprecedented gathering of codices and featherwork, was a complete revelation.
Add to this those first visits to the Plaza of San Francisco in Quito, the cathedral in Cuzco, the Aleijadinhos at Congonhas, sculptures in La Merced in Guatemala City, the dizzying (indeed from the altitude) miles of Holguin paintings in Potosí, and on and on. The pleasure and education of being a kind of New World “Grand Tourist” over the past four years have given us an overview (riddled with slights and prejudices certainly) that I hope is immediately evident in the unapologetic celebratory nature of this show.
Which is not to say that we are in any way ahead of the curve in our enterprise. Anyone who has followed, over the past two decades, the burgeoning scholarship, particularly in history, musicology, and anthropology, with art history running to keep up, on colonial Latin America, with progressively more intense research and exhibition activity, will immediately grasp the essential passivity—in the sense of the reception of increasing waves of new discoveries and insights—of our present efforts. For example, it was at a weekend symposium at the King Juan Carlos I Center at New York University that I first met Marjorie Trusted, the sculpture curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Marilynn Thoma, an important collector of Andean colonial painting. And it was through our happy engagement with Nancy Farriss and her students in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, particularly during their periodic meetings called “Colonial Dialogues,” that we have been able, along with the efforts of the Getty-supported advisory committee, to follow the direction and energies of colonial studies in general, while asking for lots of specific advice.
Ours is a completely synthetic experiment, an attempt to step back and view three hundred years of art-making over a vast geographic area from a horizontal viewpoint. This is not to diminish the wisdom and concrete importance of more vertical (i.e., national) approaches, which, in the large, have been the primary source for much of the object selection and scholarship involved here. But it seemed a time when a different perspective, even in a transient exhibition that will have the brief life of a little more than a year, could allow for reflections on the importance of the works of art on view in relationship to one another and their implications (in this context) well beyond the immediate concerns of art history.
Our thanks to the many who have contributed substantially to this book and to the formation of the exhibition are listed elsewhere, but we would be remiss not to close here with the specific mention of our immediate colleagues who have made this adventure so pleasurable: Paloma Porraz Fraser and Ery Camara at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City, Ilona Katzew and Bruce Robertson at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Adrian Locke at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (which unfortunately had to drop out as a participating partner near the close of the exhibition planning), and most especially Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt and Mark Castro in Philadelphia.
Joseph J. Rishel
The Gisela and Dennis Alter Senior Curator of European Painting and Sculpture before 1900 Philadelphia Museum of Art