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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.