Mexico City, After All

Our original journey to Mexico City was cancelled because of the earthquake so we tried again. After a smooth flight from New York’s JFK we landed in the valley between the mountains which holds one of the largest cities in the world with a population of 9 million, Mexico City.  We met up with our son Hunter who had flown in from L.A.  We were there for the tour Penelope had worked on in conjunction with an exhibition of photographs of Frida Kahlo at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe.  It was just after the celebration of the Dead but there were still some vestiges remaining.

We arrived a day before the group and headed directly to the Cathedral, which was not on the established itinerary.  We went by subway which was quieter but even much more crowded during non rush hours than New York.  The Cathedral is incredible in size and decoration. Mexican gold was a large reason for the Spanish conquest and you could see that there was plenty to spare in that the gilding was so thick in the Cathedral that the altars have not needed re-gilding since the original in the 18th century.  Unfortunately the paintings were so black with years of soot, that without strong light, one could not see them.

Only in the sacristy were they viewable. The sacristy was what Penelope wanted most to see as its walls are covered with huge canvases painted in the late 17th century by Cristóbal Villapando (ca. 1649-1714) and Juan Correa 1646-1716). Here is a panorama of the Sacristy, a detail of the Correa and a detail of the Villapando (in that order).

Across the street from the Cathedral is the Templo Mayor.  The Spaniards had destroyed the great Aztec pyramid, using its stones to build the Cathedral.  Only in 1978 did electrical workers digging in a residential block near the Cathedral come across the remnants of the Temple.  When Archeologists took over, slowly but surely more of this important archeological site was revealed.  The Aztecs had kept building pyramid upon pyramid as they continuously enlarged their most important temple.  Within its precincts archeologists have found a ball court and the sacrificial remains of humans as well as every species of animal known in Mexico.  There is, of course, a museum attached and here is Penelope in front of a group of skulls.

Between the Cathedral and the Aztec excavation there is a small plaza where there are Aztec drummers and dancers in constant performance.  They are not necessarily descendants from the Aztecs, nor are the dances authentic, but they take their work very seriously. Here is a brief example.

The next day the official tour called “Frida in Context” commenced with James Oles as the scholar leading us.  Known as Jay, he grew up in Connecticut, got his degrees including a PhD from Yale and threw in a JD at the University of Virginia to boot.  Today, he is a professor at Wellesley for one semester a year and spends the rest of his time in Mexico.  He is curator at the Davis Museum at Wellesley, has written several books on Mexican art and Modernism and arranged important exhibitions on the subject.  We were lucky enough to have him give us the three intensive days in Mexico City devoted to Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) - he is a phenomenal teacher!

Suffice it to say that to write about everything we have seen and the information gathered would be impossible.  But here goes - we started with Diego’s last large fresco from 1947-48 called “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park”, which was originally done for a hotel on the park that  was destroyed in the 1985 earthquake. The mural was thought important enough to save and restore.  Moving a fresco is not like moving a painting on canvas as the paint is applied directly onto wet plaster and becomes part of the wall. In this case the entire wall was moved to an exhibition space constructed for it.  The work shows important personages of different periods around images of Diego as a child with grown-up Frida behind him.  It is impossible to show a good illustration of the 50 foot painting so here is a detail.

Jay, like every good teacher, believes that one first must put the subject in historic context so we went to the Franz Mayer Museum.  Immigrating to Mexico in 1905, Franz Mayer became a very successful banker and stockbroker and an avid collector. He amassed not only decorative arts of colonial Spanish America but European and Asian works too, everything that was popular with the elite when the Mexican Modernists came onto the scene.

In the near future I will get into more detail on Frida and Diego and what we saw in the last two days in Mexico City.