"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.