The Colonial-Art Revolution

In the United States, the art made in Spain’s Latin American colonies used to be considered artistically minor and politically incorrect. Now, as intellectual trends coincide with demographic realities, it’s on the cutting edge of art history—and the wish lists of top museums

Excerpt:

The promise, mystery, and challenge of colonial Latin American Art are luring not only a growing number of graduate students but also veteran art historians who built their careers in European art. They’re scrutinizing Baroque altarpieces, pictographic codices, and portraits of leaders guiding their new society into the future and of kings from the Aztec and Inca past. They’re poring over Brazil’s devotional sculpture, Venezuela’s upscale furniture, the Madonnas of New Mexico’s missions, and Andean textiles in which the lion cavorts with the jaguar amid figures from Roman myth and the Bible. They’re untangling dense ornament drawn from Japanese screens, Flemish prints, African ivories, Philippine mother-of-pearl, Mudejar motifs, and flora and fauna from all over the known world.

“It’s an intellectually vibrant field with a whole new set of issues, objects, problems,” says Tom Cummins, chair of Harvard’s department of the history of art and architecture and an expert in pre-Columbian and colonial art. “There are hierarchies so deeply embedded in art history that you can’t generate new questions if you continue with the old models.”

Read more in ARTnews, April 2010.