Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
The Telegraph

The Art That Made Mexico: Paradise, Power, Prayers - a journey that puts everyone in the picture: review

Jasper Rees
Updated
Alinka Echeverria with Xochimilco canal boats in The Art That Made Mexico  - BBC
Alinka Echeverria with Xochimilco canal boats in The Art That Made Mexico - BBC

Usually at the BBC, the task of telling a nation’s story in art falls to Andrew Graham-Dixon. But he can’t be everywhere. To present The Art That Made Mexico: Paradise, Power, Prayers (BBC Four), the gig was shrewdly given to a rookie who is incontestably close to the subject. British-Mexican photographer Alinka Echeverría has repaid that faith.

Indeed, she’s so embedded in the culture that her native pronunciations were splendidly indecipherable. Take the artist Saturnino Herrán, who painted the first truly Mexican landscape depicting two volcanoes – darkly smouldering Popocatépetl and white-capped Iztaccíhuatl – in human form. Later, he painted an iconic image of indigenous peasants transporting marigolds along a canal in Xochimilco. The odd caption would not have gone amiss. 

Apart from the contractual promise to take the viewer “on a journey”, this introduction was bracingly stripped of cliché. Echeverría veered more towards a doctoral lexicon to describe art which is “about projecting topographies of ideology and identity”.

Advertisement
Advertisement

This first episode cantered through the story of the Mexican landscape. It began with Mesoamerican culture preserved in astonishingly alive frescoes at Teotihuacan. Along came the Aztecs, whose surviving scrolls are so precious that they’re locked in vaults. But the main event was Mexico’s declaration of artistic independence from a European aesthetic imposed by Spanish conquistadors.

The only internationally renowned artist on view was Diego Rivera, whose spectacular fresco cycle The Fertile Earth had its meaning carefully unpacked. Even seasoned gallerygoers won’t have had that story at their fingertips. 

Alinka Echeverria sitting on rocks at Paricutin - Credit: BBC
Alinka Echeverria sitting on rocks at Paricutin Credit: BBC

There are no women yet: Frida Kahlo is being kept up a sleeve. Other artists explored included the painter of epic landscapes José María Velasco, unflinching chronicler of war Francisco Goitia and, most dramatically of all, the self-styled Dr Atl, who in the Forties spent several years capturing the eruptions of Parícutin, a newly formed volcano.

In his blistering canvases it was as if the landscape was creating itself. A similar effect happened more slowly in Las Pozas, the surrealist sculpture park of English eccentric Edward James. He wanted the vegetation to grow over his creation, as if painting itself into the picture. 

Advertisement
Advertisement