Art Review: In the New World, Trappings of a New Social Order

Posted in Articles, Arts, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, United States on 2013-09-28 17:53Z by Steven

Art Review: In the New World, Trappings of a New Social Order

The New York Times
2013-09-19

Karen Rosenberg

‘Behind Closed Doors’ Regards Spanish Colonial Art

Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492-1898,” at the Brooklyn Museum, leaves us in the strange position of marveling at the opulence of domestic life in the Spanish colonies while pondering some of the ugliest aspects of colonialism. This is awkward, to be sure, but also enlightening.

As its voyeuristic title suggests, the show follows the layout of a typical house belonging to an elite member of New World society. Drawn largely from the museum’s sizable collection of Spanish colonial art, it fashions a gorgeous set of temporary period rooms out of the fourth-floor special-exhibition galleries. They overflow with sumptuous textiles, family portraits bearing coats of arms, fine silver and porcelain and gilded everything — arranged in the more-is-more manner of the Spanish American upper crust, with cabinets stacked in pyramids and luxury goods laid out on carpeted platforms….

…Also on view are “casta” paintings that employ a rigid racial-classification system; one is called “From Spanish and Indian, Mestizo,” and shows a Spanish man and his indigenous wife with their mestizo, or mixed-race, baby. Here too are works that are not quite casta paintings but seem closely related, such as the group portrait “Free Women of Color With Their Children and Servants in a Landscape” by Agostino Brunias (an Italian working in the British colonies). The painting is not as progressive as it sounds; it reinforces colonial hierarchies of race and class by surrounding its fashionable young heroine — one of the “free women” of the title — with darker-skinned attendants who may well be her slaves…

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