Museographs: Mexican Painting of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The History Publication of World Culture

By Caron Caswell Lazar

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Feb 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781456616342

Book preview

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