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Due to the longstanding political and territorial anxieties that emanate from the border between Mexico and the US, both countries often choose to define themselves in terms of their relationship to the other. We mostly get to see the American side of this ever evolving story, but a new exhibition at the National Gallery in London gives a rare opportunity to examine a Mexican perspective on its own terrain, and by implication on that of its neighbour.
Before Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo developed and exported their 20th-century Mexican aesthetics, there was José María Velasco (1840-1912), who produced a body of landscape paintings that was widely regarded as integral to the creation of a Mexican identity and nationhood.
“Velasco is not as well known abroad as Rivera and Kahlo,” explains co-curator Daniel Sobrino Ralston, who along with the Mexico-based artist and curator Dexter Dalwood has put the show together. “But in Mexico his public status is analogous to, say, Constable or Turner’s in the UK. And he wasn’t just a painter. Velasco was a genuine polymath who engaged with contemporary thinking in geology and botany and zoology and these intense scientific studies of the local topography also come out in the paintings.”
Velasco was born into a febrile world in which Mexico had recently ceded the vast lands it had controlled in what is now the south-west of the US, and was facing incursions from the north. Orphaned in childhood, he was brought up in poverty in Mexico City but eventually made it to the country’s first school of art, where he came under the influence of an Italian painter and teacher. “While his early work fits into the European Romantic tradition,” explains Ralston, “what is really impressive is how this changes. The conventional prerequisites for landscape painting are soon abandoned to make work that is much more stark and abstract.”
Into these spacious ancient landscapes, specific and accurate in their geology, Velasco not only integrated signs of old and new human interventions – a goatherd by a factory, railways linking settlements – but also symbols of Mexican culture and history. Most notably in the foreground of his study of The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel there is a small depiction of a nopal (prickly pear) cactus and an eagle with prey in its mouth, the emblem at the centre of the Mexican national flag and a link to the ancient myth that the nation’s capital city should be founded where such a scene takes place.
It was during the autocratic military regime of Porfirio Díaz from 1876 that Velasco’s work was adopted by the state. Although there is little evidence of his own politics, his paintings were sent overseas – Velasco himself only left Mexico twice – and were acquired by the government as gifts for both an American president and a pope. “The timing was perfect,” says Ralston. “Landscape painting was taking over from history painting as a way to understand other nations. What did a country look like? What are its resources? His work became the great example of what Mexico was.”
After his death, his work fell out of fashion and it was with the unlikely help of Rivera, an admirer who had first encountered Velasco when a precocious 12-year-old art student, that he was restored to the centre of Mexican cultural history. The National Gallery exhibition is its first full show dedicated to a Latin American artist and features 30 paintings and drawings that illustrate Velasco’s artistic and scientific endeavours.
Ralston says examination of 19th-century American landscape painters is also instructive. “Velasco is compared to them but they often show us a sort of untouched wilderness there for the taking with no history on it, which of course was not true. Velasco, through his plants and symbols and so much else, gives us the sense of a long and expansive history reaching back to ancient civilisations, perhaps in contrast to the relatively newly created republic to its north.”
Hasta la vista: five images from the exhibition
Cardón, State of Oaxaca, 1887
This wondrous giant cactus is part of Velasco’s lifelong engagement with the plant life of Mexico, but it is also something grander. The tiny human figure not only allows the viewer to get a sense of scale, but also to contemplate the relationship between man and nature.
The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel, 1877 (main image)
Considered Velasco’s greatest artistic achievement, this huge painting subtly brings together different historical eras in an almost imperceptibly subtle way. It pays equal homage to both the location’s natural and human histories.
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The Goatherd of San Ángel, 1863
A scene from the south-west of the expanding Mexico City where the river has been dammed to supply a textile factory. The contrast between the new and old is amplified by the presence of agave plants, which have been used for making alcohol for thousands of years up to the tequila production of the present day.
The Textile Mill of La Carolina, Puebla, 1887
This painting, again employing botanical and industrial details to enrich deceivingly simple grand natural vistas, was commissioned by a bohemian pharmacist, František Kaska. He was a confidant of emperor Maximilian I, providing a direct link to Manet, and acted as an unofficial emissary between the Austro-Hungarian empire and Mexico after the emperor’s execution.
The Great Comet of 1882
Velasco’s last great work was painted in 1910, which saw the outbreak of revolution in Mexico as well as a sighting of Halley’s comet. He returned to his own sighting of the 1882 comet, to evoke moments freighted in symbolism in Mexico since Montezuma’s reported comet sighting in 1517 just before the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, tying together long histories and moments of great change.
José María Velasco: A View of Mexico is at the National Gallery, 29 March to 17 August.
