LONDON — The National Gallery hasn’t loudly trumpeted its decade-long strategy to introduce British audiences to art beyond Europe. Instead, it diligently rectifies this art-historical narrow-mindedness by covering major overlooked bases, such as with recent shows on American painter Winslow Homer or Australian Impressionists. Now, José María Velasco: A View of Mexico is the first monographic exhibition of this major 19th-century Mexican artist in the United Kingdom, and, staggeringly, the National’s first dedicated to a Latin-American artist. In this sense, curators Dexter Dalwood and Daniel Sobrino Ralston don’t need the additional justification of it being the 200th anniversary of the establishment of British-Mexican diplomatic relations.
Velasco is not an overtly nationalistic painter in an iconographic sense. Unlike European counterparts who would typically use landscape as a setting for dramatic narrative scenes (a concurrent National show on Millet, for example, which focuses on peasant characters framed by landscape), the topography, flora, and fauna are the subject; the high-altitude volcanic land surrounding Mexico City is the character. Velasco was a founding member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, and his inclination to meticulously record details of natural elements — as opposed to fictionally embellish them — makes his work documentary rather than narrative. As a result, we can track the gradual industrialization and modernization of Mexico in his work via the dotted appearances of factory buildings or expanding cities in the topographical distance.
The paintings are quietly grand in their monumental scale, rather than visually bombastic. Where narrative landscapes typically construct depth via artificial layers like scenery on a stage, Velasco’s vistas — clearly recorded in situ — employ staggering technical draftsmanship to induce a vertiginous sense of a precipitous drop: His epic “The Valley of Mexico (View of the Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel)” (1877) seems to sweep down away from our feet. Cloud shadows across distant mountains are a naturalistic detail few narrative painters would think to include. As in botanical work, oil glazes are rare, lending the colors an opacity and hardness that captures the dryness of the Mexican scrubland.
Later works, following an accident that limited Velasco’s mobility in 1901, are more lyrical; still, there remains that quietness and subtlety, as well as that persistent monumentality. Most striking is “The Great Comet of 1882” (1910), which records from memory a phenomenon he witnessed decades prior, a singular white whoosh bisecting a softly graded but otherwise totally plain sky. That it portends the Mexican Revolution of the same year, as the caption suggests, however, may be wishful interpretation, a single clanger amongst otherwise sensible exhibition text.
Critics of this show who label the painter as “proudly dull … unromantic [and] objective” or “boring” miss the point. Velasco should be viewed as a technical powerhouse celebrating the physical entity of Mexico itself, importantly recording its history academically, rather than appealing to ingrained nationalistic European sensibilities of history painting. More shows like this, please.
José María Velasco: A View of Mexico continues at the National Gallery (Trafalgar Square) through August 17. The exhibition was curated by Dexter Dalwood and Daniel Sobrino Ralston.
