Onward From Olmec

By ROBERT HUGHES

"Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries," which opens to the public this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is the biggest show of art to leave Mexico in 50 years. There is no mystery about why it is happening. Mexico has, as the flacks say, an "image problem" in the U.S.: people think of drugs and corruption. Moreover, norteamericanos in general are abysmally ignorant of Mexican culture, its immense age, its stylistic types, its myths and its rich confluences. It makes good diplomatic sense to use one to correct the other. With the Columbian quincentennial of 1992 just 14 months away and the economic prestige of America battered by Japan, Germany and a general revival of Europe under the sign of the Common Market, it is time to look for alliances closer to home.

So Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari made sure all the stops were pulled out for this exhibit. The country's biggest media mogul, Emilio Azcarraga, put up the money. An unprecedented tonnage of basalt, clay, obsidian, jade, gilt, inlaid wood and painted canvas has been moved out of Mexican churches, museums and private collections -- sometimes over protests by local communities that resent having their saints or gods borrowed by the government. On view are 365 objects, starting in l000 B.C. with a five-ton stone Olmec head and finishing in 1949 with Frida Kahlo's The Love-Embrace of the Universe, The Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me, and Mr. Xolotl. Along the way the show takes in the principal ancient cultures of Mesoamerica, from the Olmecs through the great epoch of the Mayans (A.D. 300-900) to the Toltecs and Aztecs; then the viceregal and Catholic mission art that rose out of the Spanish conquista in the 16th century; the impact of the Baroque and the growth of a Mexican (as distinct from imported Spanish) artistic consciousness in the 17th century; and so on to the major Mexican artists of the early 20th century, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo. (Artists born after 1910 are not included.) Wisely, the Met sells the catalog at the end of the show, not the beginning. Packed with illustrations, scholarly essays and an introduction by the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz, it weighs just under 7 1/2 lbs., and should have wheels.

In a sense, this exhibition is an impossible task: you cannot boil down so vast a visual culture and ship it to a museum, especially when so much of the essential evidence consists of immovable buildings and their ornament. One silver altar frontal or a gilded retablo, no matter how impressive in itself, cannot possibly duplicate the devotional frenzy of incrustation that gives Mexican Baroque its special character, any more than a few Chacmool figures and feathered serpents can convey the impact of the step pyramids, ramps and avenues of Chichen Itza or El Tajin.

Yet it is worth doing because some kind of reintroduction, no matter how emblematic, is needed. To most Northeastern Americans -- Protestants, Jews, Irish Catholics -- Mexico is, culturally speaking, an exceedingly remote place. The art of the Mayans and Aztecs was more influential in the U.S. 60 years ago than it is today. Then it was one of the monumental sources of art deco, as a host of works from Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture to the eagle- head gargoyles on Manhattan's Chrysler Building attest. (Even the pylons of the Harbor Bridge in faraway Sydney are based on that universal deco form, the Mayan step pyramid.) What American corporation in the past 20 years would have thought of bringing a Mexican artist to do its murals, as the Rockefellers in New York and the Fords in Detroit brought Rivera? But this relationship soon lapsed: it fell victim in the '50s and '60s to New York's own belief in itself as imperial culture center and its incuriosity about "provincial" cultures. Needless to say, this did not affect the market in pre-Columbian antiquities, still less the appalling rate at which Mexican archaeological sites were and are looted for the North American market. But it virtually guarantees that % one's first impression of Mexican art will be its strangeness, its vexing otherness, its complete originality.

Nevertheless, as Paz points out, this has always been so, right from the moment in the 16th century when the Spanish conquistadors looked down on Mexico City for the first time and saw, in the lakes and pyramids, a complete human world that had nothing to do with their own -- not simple "savages" like Columbus' Indians, but an immense hierarchical city of a quarter of a million people, twice the size of Philip II's Madrid. They were, as Hernan Cortes' chronicler Bernal Diaz del Castillo wrote, "wonderstruck . . . witnessing things never heard, nor seen, nor even dreamed." The Aztecs, like the Mayans and the Olmecs before them, lived in an isolation more complete than any of the world's other great civilizations': nothing had come into Mexico for 2,000 years, and nothing had gone out. Hence the feeling that any visitor to the sites of ancient Mexico gets -- which is preserved in a diminished form in this show -- that nothing in one's own inherited culture applies to this one.

The note is struck in the Met's foyer by a colossal head of a feathered serpent carved in Tenochtitlan around the year 1500. A stone eating-machine: Would it be possible to have a scarier sculpture than this, with its great recurved fangs that also seem to function as archaic legs, like those of a horseshoe crab, dragging the frightful effigy toward you? Not for nothing did the designers of the movie Alien base their outer-space monsters on Aztec sculpture.

For it is the implacable and bloodthirsty conservatism of Aztec art that forces itself on you first, even in the Met's galleries, so far from the real context of the sacrificial pyramids and the thousands of other effigies that make up its body. Here was an absolutely ordered society whose chief religious rite was human sacrifice -- penitential rituals, on an appalling scale, whose aim was nothing less than to keep reality in motion. The Mesoamericans believed that the world could stop at any moment, that the very cosmos was always on the brink of dissolution, its cycles maintained only by sacrifice. The sun would not rise in the morning over the lakes of Tenochtitlan if it were not refreshed by streams of blood.

We find it hard to imagine such a society, not because it was so cruel -- in that regard, pre-Columbian Mexico was no worse than 20th century Europe with its wars and concentration camps -- but because its cruelty, as Paz points out in his catalog essay, was indissolubly part of its "senseless and sublime" theological and moral system. "The Mesoamerican vision of the world and of man is shocking. It is a tragic vision that both stimulates and numbs me. It does not seduce me, but it is impossible not to admire it." So might some Russian of the 3rd millennium A.D. rhapsodize about the ancient sacrificial rites of Stalinism, immolating its millions to the God of the Future.

All old Mexican art is sacred art. There are rare moments of what one might call realism. One is the remarkable Olmec urn in the form of a hunchback, probably from La Venta; but its immense vitality suggests that in Olmec cosmology, cripples and dwarfs were invested with numinous power, along with jaguars and eagles. Another is the 7th century stucco head from the Temple of the Inscriptions in Palenque, which is clearly a portrait, perhaps of the ruler Pacal II. Yet even in this effigy of an individual, the great bladelike nose and the forward sweep of the headdress like the comb of a cockatoo suggest a hieratic type.

One sees premonitions of modernity, since 20th century sculptors drew on Mexican sources for inspiration -- Henry Moore's reclining women, for instance, derive partially from the powerful crankshaft rhythms of Yucatan Chacmool figures. But the best pieces here, such as the stone figure of a standard-bearer from Chichen Itza with its fierce gaze and crippled foot, are beyond such comparisons. From the delicately modeled stucco glyphs of Palenque, imbued with an almost rococo elegance, to the frightful severity of Aztec pieces such as the cuauhxicalli, or blood receptacle, in the form of a stone eagle, ancient Mexican sculpture is as powerful as any in human history.

Is there a common thread, a "Mexicanness," that links the Mesoamerican cultures to the Europeanized art of Mexico after the conquista? After seeing this show, who could doubt it? It lies in the metaphorical fierceness of its images: their intensity, their mania for the tangible, the dramatic, the lush, the syrupy -- their exuberance, in the original Latin sense of blossoming and fruiting out. When the Spaniards took over Mexico and began imposing Catholicism on its peoples, art played an immense role in conversion and the maintenance of faith. A European religion obsessed with blood sacrifice soon filled the void left by the expulsion of the Aztec gods. And since most of its images were made by Indians, curious eddies of meaning formed. A 16th century prelate in Mexico City orders Indian craftsmen to recut an Aztec relief of the earth god Tlaltecuhtli into a column base for a church. He wants the god's image to go facedown on the earth, so as not to offend pious eyes. The Indians gladly obey, since in their scheme of things Tlaltecuhtli has to lie on the earth anyway; they think the priest is respecting their old god, the priest thinks the Indians are obeying his new one, and everyone is happy.

Nowhere else in Christendom would there be such a fixation on the broken bodies of saints and the wounds of Christ: gory popular images of the tormented Jesus, of which a (relatively) restrained one from the 18th century is on view at the Met, would make an Episcopalian keel over and might have made even Torquemada feel queasy. If the peons suffer, Christ must suffer far worse to hold their allegiance. Spanish Baroque mutated wildly in the tropics, becoming even more ecstatic, hortatory and pain laden than it had been in Spain itself.

It may be that none of the "high" painters of Baroque Mexico represented here, like Cristobal de Villalpando or Juan Correa, mattered on a more than local level; affected and provincially fancified, none of them achieved within their art the distinction of Mexico's great Baroque poet, the nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. But though much of the sculpture in this show is gaudier than carrousel horses, some pieces are as extraordinary in their formal refinement as in their devotional sadism -- the star example being the processional image of Mexico's first saint, the Franciscan missionary Felipe de Jesus, martyred in Japan in 1597, represented palely swooning like a young dancer on the abstract X of two spears that spit him through.

The most interesting works from the 19th century are not so much the official portraits with which Mexican artists commemorated their criollo patrons, and still less the neoclassical renderings of Aztec kings and warriors that emanated from the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. Rather they are the sharper and more provincial images by Jose Maria Estrada and the self-styled amateur Hermenegildo Bustos, whose portraits have a steely conciseness, respectful of the sitter but untouched by flattery. Mexican art had its own "heroic" landscapist, the less showy counterpart of Bierstadt or Church, named Jose Maria Velasco. But it did not, properly speaking, have a major school of national painters until the 20th century.

. This happened with the confluence of modernism, Marxism and nostalgia for the fresco cycles of pre-Hispanic antiquity that turned in the 1920s, under the patronage of Mexico's Minister of Education Jose Vasconcelos, into the mural movement: Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The special value of this show is that instead of treating these Big Three as isolated characters, it presents a dozen or more other Mexican artists of the time in some depth -- starting with the spectacularly gifted Saturnino Herran, who would certainly be as celebrated today as Rivera himself if he had not died in 1918 at the age of 30, and ending with Rufino Tamayo, who is still alive at 91. Tamayo's paintings, like The Merry Drinker, 1946, are based as much on Mexican popular art with its bright organic colors as on the inspiration of Picasso; broad humor and even a fierce grotesqueness are never far away. And the main body of his work lies within the scale of easel painting, whereas Rivera's does not. Murals, by their nature, cannot be moved around, and so Rivera's coverage in the show hardly does justice to his enormous talent; it is a mere footnote to the big Rivera exhibition seen in the U.S. in 1986. As for Orozco and Siqueiros, their work has suffered the fate of much propaganda art. It tends to look coarse and melodramatic, even on the small scale of the easel painting. One much prefers the fierce, narcissistic and mysteriously sweet images of Frida Kahlo, which anchor the end of the exhibition.

In sum, this show bites off more than it -- or you -- can chew. But it makes you want to go to Mexico, to know this culture better, and on its own terms. As cultural diplomacy, it is a vivid success.