Museographs: Mexican Painting of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Caron Caswell Lazar

Description

If you are searching for a succinct yet thorough introduction to Mexican painting in the modern age, you have arrived. Spanning more than 150 years of history, Mexican Painting: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is academically formidable, yet captivating and accessible to every reader.

Learn the role that the Academy of San Carlos played in dictating tastes and in reforming public arts of architecture, portraiture, and decorative painting. Delve further into the debate between the established, conservative nineteenth-century Academy, and a newly emerging and more liberal twentieth-century Academia de Belles Artes designed to reflect a rise in secularization and an abandonment of traditional faith. Witness the inception of art criticism and gallery openings, the development of plein air technique and the integration of Art Nouveau.

This issue contains beautiful plates including the renowned Dance in Tehuantepec by Diego Rivera and the Candelabrum of Oaxaca by Jose Maria Velasco. It provides a consummate survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican painting in a scholarly and an artistic sense.

Sujets

• Hispanic American
• Art
• American

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 02 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456616342
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

MUSEOGRAPHS
Mexican Painting
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
 
by
Carôn Caswell Lazar

Copyright 2013 Carôn Caswell Lazar,
All rights reserved.
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1634-2
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
The Museographs monographs are publications of The Lazar Group, Incorporated
 
Museographs Titles:
 
Japanese Satsuma Pottery
Contemporary African-American Folk Art
Shaker Design
Mexican Painting of the 19th & 20th Centuries
The Sioux
Appalachian Handicrafts
The Cherokee
The Art of Islam: A Survey
The Old City of Jerusalem
Illuminated Manuscripts
Mexican Folk Art
Kanien’kehaka
Art, Myth, Legend and Story
The Art of the Celts
MEXICAN PAINTING Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Historic Overview
 
The story of painting in Mexico, as New Spain, is one of continual change. The changes begin early on with the wrenching departure from the art forms of the pre-Columbian roots and their replacement with the styles of the Spanish court as the church and King’s representatives imposed themselves on the native peoples of Mexico and its untamed wilderness.
 
During the seventeenth century the growing class of Criollos , Spaniards born in New Spain, who were dissatisfied with a distant and dictatorial crown, began to search for and formulate a new distinct identity for themselves and Mexico. While these descendents of the conquistadors received the wealth of Spanish heritage, they resented the crown’s successful control and regulation of the activities and economy of the flourishing society that they were producing. Afraid of revolution, the crown compromised with the colonists by granting them limited exploitation over the Indians and natural resources upon which they had become increasingly dependent. One stinging stipulation of this informal compromise barred Criollos from all high civil offices.
 
Although their economic wellbeing was not noticeably affected, the Criollos were humiliated by the second-class citizenship conferred upon them in their homeland. The unhappiness they felt with the foreign, distant government, unsympathetic to their contributions, began a sentiment of unrest that resulted in the emergence of a new nationalistic pride in Mexican history. This pride was evidenced in all the arts, but most predominantly in literature and painting. The journey to modem Mexican painting had begun.
 
 
The Nineteenth Century
 
The founding of the Academy of San Carlos, in 1781, marks the true beginning of nineteenth-century Mexican art. And — just as it begins twenty years early — nineteenth century influence continues until 1911, overlapping into the next century with the advent of the first Modernist cycle. The nineteenth century is marked by four successive stages of development and artistic change. They are: Classical Ruptures and Continuations (1785-1835), Romanticism (1826-1870), the Advent of Realism (1870-1900) and the Beginnings of Modernism (1890-1911).
 
 
Classical Ruptures and Continuation (1785-1835)
 
This time turned the artistic sentiment away from the Mexican Baroque style, which had flourished in the eighteenth century, and turned toward Neoclassicism. The Academy of San Carlos which was sponsored by the Bourbons, Spain’s ruling family, had teachers recruited from Spain. Their mission was to be a “ministry of taste.” Though met with some resentment because of their foreign origins, the Academy successfully influenced the arts most associated with public life: architecture, sculpture, official portraiture and decorative painting.
 
The major academic teacher of painting during this time was Valencian Rafael Jimeno y Planes (1759-1825) who arrived in Mexico in 1793. Jimeno produced paintings of staggering grace and expressiveness, and although he had a long career teaching at the Academy, none of his students was able to match his convincing and expressive portraits. José María Vásquez (b. 1756), a student of the Academy since its beginning, came closest to his teacher’s acuity. Unfortunately, his portraits of the noble ladies and children of New Spain were hampered by the Mexican tradition of including legends recording the subjects’ status. These elements, which clients were unwilling to give up, give his paintings a more provincial air rather than that of the high art produced by his Jimeno.
 
Jimeno was also the premier history painter of his time, a genre at the top of the academic hierarchy. Interestingly, many of Jimeno’s murals are more closely related to the last century’s Baroque and Rococo styles than the contemporary Neoclassicism ideal. In this they are typical of the artistic eclecticism of Spanish America during the Age of Enlightenment. This same eclecticism was even more prevalent in the works of artists who had never left Mexico — nor often even the regions where they were born.
 
 
Romanticism (1826-1870)
 
Of the several currents that make up Romanticism, two were most enthusiastically embraced in Mexico: first, the depiction of local reality; landscapes, customs and types where the intent was to highlight the specific and unusual instead of the universal and eternal central to Neoclassicism; second, the search for inspiration in the history and styles of the past, especially if a parallel could be drawn to momentous events in the present.
 
During the 1820s and 1830s European artists traveled through Mexico recording all that they found to be different, exciting and picturesque about this exotic land.