Interior Artwork
Contreras's sculptures were requested and paid for by the Mexican government as official efforts to portray the nation. However, inside the Mexican pavilion were other paintings, sculptures, and images that, though not officially sponsored, were also linked directly or indirectly—either by location or by theme—with the national values that the government promoted. Among the various Mexican artistic objects exhibited in Paris, two items were especially welcomed by the French media: Velasco's landscape-painting school, and some canvases with pre-Hispanic motifs. However, it is difficult to believe that late-nineteenth-century foreign art critics would have bothered to look at Mexican paintings so closely had it not been for the convincing inducement of money paid by the Mexican government.
According to art critic Léon Cahun, Mexico, unlike the rest of America, had an original artistic school that depicted both its natural beauty and its heroic history. He especially liked the scene from national history in which "a Mexican orator is seen speaking, before the Senate of Tlaxcala, against the alliance with Cortés." He was also impressed by Velasco's works: "Yes, there is a landscape-painting school in Mexico, and a school that does not owe anything to anyone, that does not imitate anyone, that has been formed by itself, by looking at the marvelous vegetation of the [Mexican] valleys." According to Cahun, Velasco's works differed from those of Corot or Rousseau—who were then in the vanguard of French landscape painting—in the same way
Image not available.
15.
Poster for Jesús Contreras's company, Fundición Artística Mexicana.
Source: Jesús Contreras's personal papers,
reproduced courtesy of Carlos Contreras. (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)
that "Mexico differs from the countryside of the Seine valley."[66] Cahun believed that in Velasco's painting Mexico achieved what modern art was all about: a unique but universal style.
The Mexican art exhibit was composed mainly of paintings by Velasco, which combined various emphases: tropical or exotic natural beauty, historical allegories of the official historiography, and modernism through technological advances (especially railroads, the epitome of late-nineteenth-century modernism). As representations of natural beauty, these canvases reflect the naturalist scientific concerns of the era. As art historian Juan de la Encina argued in the 1940s, Velasco's work represents the national achievement of a preimpressionist but postromantic positivist naturalism. This process began with official efforts in the midnineteenth century to hire experts to teach aspiring Mexicans how to render representations of the national territory and history (for which purpose the Italian landscape painter Eugenio Landesio was employed). The process was accelerated by the flowering of natural history, geology, anthropology, and archaeology as scientific and objective views of nature.
As portraits of Mexican modernity Velasco's paintings were postcards that served both for the popularization of technology and as international propaganda for the coexistence in Mexico of tropical backwardness and modernity. In particular, the depiction of bridges and railways served as striking contrasts to the wildness of the landscapes. The canvases were thus genuine advertisements for the industrial transformation of Mexico, however slight. They also responded to pragmatic economic interests; that is, before the appearance of photography, and even with the advent of the camera, railroad companies and industries paid to have artistic vistas of their roads and buildings created.[67]
No one rivaled Velasco's expertise in the various aspects of landscape painting. Velasco managed to make himself indispensable as a masterful depicter of a scientific, nationalist, and modern era. His technical expertise allowed him to achieve the objectivity and accuracy that realism and scientism required,[68] and his pragmatic and nationalistic imagination allowed him to satisfy different representational needs, both his own and those of his clients.
Undoubtedly, by the early 1890s Velasco's type of landscape naturalist painting had already seen its best moments, at least by European standards. However, it continued to be produced and appreciated.[69] More importantly, for the industrialized world, landscape painting was a sharp ideal contrast with life in many industrial cities and towns. Canvases such as Velasco's were bucolic visions of a paradise lost. For Mexico's modern national image Velasco's landscape painting constituted also a twofold exercise. First, it was precisely that: a bucolic scenario with a tropical mixture that could furnish a contrast with the newly industrialized world. But it was also a symbolic, flashlike,
and easily learnable report on the state of the nation expressed in a common cosmopolitan language. It wooed emigration, investment, and international confidence through the depiction of nature, progress, and history.[70]
Among the paintings Velasco exhibited in Paris were two general views of the valley of Mexico, a view of Guelatao (Oaxaca), various waterfall scenes from Orizaba (Veracruz), two views of the Canada de Metlac , and Ahuhuétes from Chapultepec. In all of these paintings the natural, pure, fertile, or tropical aspects of Mexico were emphasized. Also included were the national symbols and icons of the official nationalist ideology, presented as part of an overall realist impression. For, as Cahun argued, "Velasco knows how to make the trees and the mountains live and speak in his own country of Mexico, that is clear: I do not know what he would do in France. . .. No one is a real writer except in his own language. . .. M. Velasco is a genuine painter, and his painting is the robust and healthy child of his native soil."[71] Thus one of the paintings of the valley of Mexico included some scenes of manners and customs, and the other featured an eagle and a nopal cactus. Guelatao was not only part of Oaxaca, Díaz's beloved state, but also the birthplace of Benito Juárez, the Porfirian-sponsored member of the Mexican pantheon. The painting of the bridge of Metlac pictured a railroad crossing the Mexican tropics, thus placing an emphasis on Mexican progress.[72] Velasco painted various views of railroads in Metlac, which he exhibited in Paris 1889 and 1900—such as Cañada de Metlac (1897), Puente curvo del Ferrocarril Mexicano en la Canada de Metlac (1881), and Canada de Metlac (1881).
Velasco was not the first to paint the valley of Mexico, but he was the first to combine realism in painting with scientific accuracy, a combination that echoed the interaction of national and international trends. He was a naturalist who had studied zoology and botany in the national school of medicine, from which resulted various paintings reproduced in La Naturaleza , the journal of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural. His realist view thus harmonized easily with the scientific objectivity of a positivist era. In addition, Velasco's scientific objectivism went beyond the realm of nature to gain inspiration from historical and anthropological accounts. As Ramirez argues, whereas Velasco used scenes of manners and customs in his romantic beginnings, he gradually moved toward greater proficiency in realistic representations and drew his inspiration from historical themes.[73] Comparing the view of the valley of Mexico exhibited by Velasco at the 1876 Philadelphia fair with the one presented at the 1878 Paris world's fair (both of which were also displayed in 1889), Ramirez has shown how the genre scenes of the former gave way in the latter to a grandiose panorama in which an eagle flies, with prey in its fangs, toward a nopal. This change made of Velasco's landscape painting a real national emblem: the city, surrounded by unpolluted wilderness, and the national symbol flying (see Fig. 16).
Velasco began to paint railroads in 1869, and in Paris 1889 he exhibited
Image not available.
16.
José María Velasco, Valle de México desde el cerro de Santa Isabel (1877).
Source: Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City;
reproduction authorized by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes,
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico.
(Photograph by the Museo Nacional de Arte)
two views of the Metlac barranca (see Fig. 17). Since the late 1870s, railroads in landscape paintings had been all too common, for a steel track over wild and untamed nature was unequaled as a symbol of progress. However, by the 1880s Velasco's vistas were echoed by numerous photographic images. At the 1889 Paris fair the Ferrocarril Nacional Mexicano exhibited thirty-four photographic views, and the Ministry of Economic Development displayed photographs of the Mexico-Veracruz railroad.[74] When the Mexican government promoted the national image of progress, it requested that private companies send photographs of their latest projects, and the requests were answered with the efforts of some of the best photographers available. Nonetheless, most of the landscape photographs were taken by foreigners.[75] Among the most renowned photographers of Mexican railroads was the American William Henry Jackson. He was hired by the Compañía del Ferrocarril Central and came to México to work in 1882, 1891, and 1893. Jackson was one of the most prestigious photographers of the American West, an important personality among those who fashioned symbolic images of American nationalism. In Mexico he had the same motivations that inspired
Image not available.
17.
José María Velasco, La Cañada de Metlac (Citlaltepec) (1897).
Source: Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City;
reproduction authorized by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes,
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico.
(Photograph by the Museo Nacional de Arte)
his pictures of the American West: "to celebrate the technologization of wilderness" and to show "its availability to tourists."[76] He photographed railroads in exactly the same way that Velasco painted them.[77]
However great the effort to mirror reality, naturalist and realist paintings were inescapably ideal and subjective. The camera, in contrast, seemed to be "a near magical device for defeating time, for endowing the past with a present it had previously had only in memory."[78] However, in the late nineteenth century, although photographs put past and present together in instant flashes easily and cheaply available, they were considered mere testimonies, not art.[79] In 1889 the objectivity of the photographic image, though powerful, did not possess the authority of an artistic-scientific representation. A Velasco painting included what photography was able to produce, together with the subtleties of color and perspective that inspired his renderings (that is, aesthetic, nationalistic, and moral elements).[80]
Photography itself was used at this time to depict much more than railroads. The sculptures of the facade of the Aztec Palace contrasted with the numerous photographs of Mexican Indians that were displayed within the structure. For instance, the government of Colima sent various photographs of Indians from Colima; the photography studio of Valleto sent numerous
portraits of cartas de presentación (calling cards); the state of Morelos sent twenty-two photographs of Tlahuica idols; and Yucatán, twenty-six photographs of antiquities. The Mexico City collection included portraits of tipos populates made by the photographic establishment Cruces y Compañía (also known as Cruces y Campa), pictures that had had a great reception at the 1876 Philadelphia fair.[81] This type of view helped to create a portable image of the exotic for both national and international consumption.[82]
Photography was considered "The Pencil of Nature," and its objectivity was believed to be beyond style.[83] The existence of photography was itself proof of modernity, whether it portrayed a railroad or a tipo popular . Paintings, in contrast, had to construct the modern forms through their style and content. That is, whereas photographs could serve as objective reports to prove that Mexico was capable of receiving immigrants and foreign investment, they were not evidence of Mexico's cosmopolitan culture. Once again, to be modern and nationalist was above all a matter of style, and only such painters as Velasco succeeded in this difficult task. Therefore, until the beginning of the twentieth century, his works were indispensable components of both Mexico's presence at world's fairs and the construction of the image of a modern nation as a whole. For, as art historian Justino Fernán-dez has argued, very few artists could make Mexico look the way Velasco did: in his works Mexico was itself being like Europe.[84]
The Contreras sculptures and the entire facade of the Mexican building were echoed by numerous paintings with pre-Hispanic motifs: El Senado de Tlaxcala by Rodrigo Gutiérrez, Xochitl presenta al rey Tépancalzin el pulque by José Obregón, Funerales de un Indígena by José Jara, together with a replica of the Cuauhtémoc monument. Although pre-Hispanic-oriented paintings had been rendered previously, after 1870 works in this vein acquired ideological value for the Porfirian regime as well as some national and international artistic recognition.
One of the most noted of these paintings was El Senado de Tlaxcala (see Fig. 18). The author, Rodrigo Gutiérrez, had exhibited a painting in the classical style at the 1884 New Orleans fair,[85] but he had changed his source of inspiration by treating pre-Hispanic motifs, though in identical classicist fashion. El Senado de Tlaxcala was in fact painted at the request of the wealthy lawyer and historian Felipe Sánchez Solis, who needed the image for his general collection of pre-Hispanic antiquities.[86] The painting depicted a Roman-style senate with Tlaxcalan Indians discussing whether to join Cortés's venture against the Aztecs. Likewise, a canvas by José Obregón, known as El descubrimiento del pulque (originally painted in 1869), was also commissioned by Sánchez Solis, and it depicted the Tula's ruler, Tecpancaltzin, in the act of receiving from Xochitl the pulque beverage extracted from maguey (see Fig. 19). Obregón had a classical academic training, generally devoted to biblical topics. His incursion into pre-Hispanic motifs was especially wel-
Image not available.
18.
Rodrigo Gutiérrez, El Senado de Tlaxcala (1875).
Source: Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City;
reproduction authorized by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes,
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Arte. (Photograph by the Museo Nacional de Arte)
comed in the 1880s, when both El Senado de Tlaxcala and El descubrimiento del pulque were purchased by the Mexican government for exhibition at world's fairs and on other special occasions.[87]
These two paintings were emblematic of an official sanction of the Indian past. As with the facade of the Aztec Palace, the paintings sought to order, classify, and civilize knowledge of the Indian past in such a way as to make it accessible and worthy of respect. Reproductions were included in numerous textbooks, including México a través de los siglos . However, in the relationship between artistic-historical depiction of this sort and history and archaeology, the aim was not historical accuracy but rather a mimetic mutual convenience: patriotic history and archaeology procured with these paintings useful representations to reinforce their stories; and these paintings obtained from history and archaeology the inspiration for every detail.
El descubrimiento del pulque echoed the clamor that surrounded the fashioning of a national culture, whose most important speaker was Ignacio
Image not available.
19.
José Obregón, El descubrimiento del pulque (1869).
Source: Fomento Cultural Banamex,
from the collection of the Banco Nacional de México. (Photograph by Rafael Doniz)
Manuel Altamirano. According to Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Xochitl was a virgin who, accompanied by her father Papantzin, presented "the honey of the maguey" to Tecpancaltzin, then ruler of the Toltecs.[88] Xochitl was so beautiful that Tecpancoltzin seduced her, procreating a son who eventually became a ruler. But in the painting, as art historian Justino Fernández observed, Tecpancoltzin was portrayed as a Hellenic Apollo, and Xochitl as a Greek princess. This story of love, beauty, and power could not be better suited to the Western romantic spirit of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Indian past was thus civilized through a classical romantic filter.
Contemporaries were aware of the fact that this type of artistic representation took excessive liberties with historical data. Graphic artistic representations of history, because they were considered art, were not criticized for maneuvering reality in order to display not truer and more accurate versions but the most effective visual impressions of historical events. Objectivity was less important than were didactic and artistic effectiveness. Thus, whereas French critics considered El descubrimiento del pulque as an authentic and vivid
representation of the Aztec past, Altamirano acknowledged that the painting was a bit conventional. He pointed out that the Xochitl of Obregón's canvas was not an Indian woman at all: the artist took as his model "for the graceful Xochitl not a bronze-skinned Indian mistress, but a beautiful mestiza whose light swarthy complexion revealed the mixing of European blood." For Altamirano, the image of old Indians in the canvases were too modern, but he believed that El descubrimiento del pulque , "as an ensayo in national painting . . . deserves the best compliment."[89] That is, in developing a national image, every single effort was an ensayo and that was what was expected.
However, the paradox between accuracy and effectiveness echoed a larger incongruity: the Mexican elite's contradictory consideration of the Indian past and present. Ironically enough, what Xochitl offered the Toltec ruler was pulque, an Indian alcoholic beverage that Mexican criollos considered an important cause of Indian degeneration. In this regard, El descubrimiento del pulque embodied the Porfirian elite's ambivalence toward Mexican Indians: on one hand, the epic past in which a princess presents a king with a respectable alcoholic beverage; on the other, the repugnant present situation of the Indians' addiction to pulque. This last factor was noticeable not only in the disapproval of pulque displayed by the urban elite but also in scientific treatises. Medical studies of the effects of pulque on the so-called popular classes discovered a particular sort of "Mexican pathology" that was distinct from cirrhosis. Some of these studies—for example, the one by Francisco Altamirano—were exhibited in Paris in 1889. A natural proclivity to alcoholism was believed to be present among Indians.[90]
Despite these scientific reservations, since the 1884 New Orleans fairs, pulque was depicted (and also distributed) as an exotic beverage. In the same way that in 1884 a pamphlet on pulque was prepared,[91] in Paris 1889, in Obregón's painting, pulque was romanticized into a benevolent and acceptable beverage, not only through its depiction as part of a "past past" but also through the subtle inclusion of a common nineteenth-century erotic motif: the myth of the sexually desirable Amazon-like woman.[92]