Washington museum showcases Latin American portraiture

Washington, Oct 21 (EFE).- Covering 2,000 years from pre-Columbian to modern times, the most exhaustive exhibition of Latin American portraits ever assembled opened here Friday at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery.

"Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits" includes 115 paintings and sculptures drawn from 76 museum and private collections in Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean and the United States.

"The exhibit is a mix of art, history and biography," Carolyn Kinder Carr, the gallery's deputy director and chief curator, told EFE.

Viewers are given the chance to gaze into the eyes of some of the prelates, kings and nobles who made history in Americas over the last two millennia, as well as the faces of anonymous, ordinary people of all backgrounds and stations.

"The portraits speak to us and tell us the story," Carr said.

The traveling exhibit debuted in New York and made stops in San Diego and Miami Beach before coming to Washington, where it will remain on view until Jan. 8, when it is to proceed to San Antonio.

Organized chronologically in five sections: pre-Columbian; colonial; 19th century; modern and contemporary, the exposition features artists such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Fernando Botero, among others.

In their comments to EFE, all four of the exhibit's co-curators singled out for praise a 1599 work by Indian artist Adrian Sanchez Galque, "Los Mulatos de Esmeraldas," which depicts three mixed-race men clad in European clothing but wearing Indian gold jewelry and holding spears.

"The symbolic power of the work is very strong," said Marion Oettinger Jr. of the San Antonio Museum of Art, who is overseeing the exhibit in cooperation with Carr, the National Portrait Gallery's Miguel Bretos and Fatima Bercht of El Museo del Barrio in New York.

The property of a museum in Spain, "Los Mulatos" was featured in the New York run of "Retratos" and is on display now in Washington, but did not accompany the exhibit to California or Florida and will likewise not make the trip to Texas, much to Oettinger's regret.

The three men portrayed, each identified in the legend with the Spanish honorific "don," sport expensive European silks and lace along with their elaborate indigenous jewelry. Though the work's title refers to them as mulattos, the subjects appear to be what were known in colonial Ecuador as "zambos," or Afro-Indians.

In its juxtaposition of elements, the painting reflects the complexity of the society then beginning to form in Spain's American colonies.

"It is powerful in the way it dramatizes the (Indians's) conversion to Christianity and subjugation to the Spanish crown," Oettinger said of "Los Mulatos de Esmeraldas," a work commissioned by King Philip III of Spain.

For Bercht, one of the most fascinating aspects of the "Retratos" exhibit is what it shows about the artistic skills and evocative flair of painters who had no formal training.

"One of my favorites," she says, "is a modest and anonymous portrait of a creole woman (a Spaniard born in the Americas) who holds flowers and a book to make it clear that she loves, is loved and can read."

Another notable painting is "Dama de Bahia," which features an Afro-Brazilian woman of the mid-19th century who is luxuriously and elegantly garbed in blue satin and European gloves, yet with an African necklace to convey pride in her recently purchased freedom from servitude.

"If you like telenovelas you will like this exhibition, because one is hidden within every painting," said Bretos, referring to the soap operas - often period dramas - that are the bread and butter of Spanish-language television.

"We tend to concentrate on what differentiates cultures, and not on what unites them and makes them similar," observed Raquel Egusqyuiza of the Ford Motor Company Fund, sponsor of the "Retratos" exhibit. EFE

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