Hermenegildo Bustos (1832-1907) is the most important Mexican painter of the 19th Century. If you've never heard of him--well, don't be surprised. A year ago, few in the United States had.
Bustos' reputation has been rather like the proverbial stone dropped into a pond. At its center, the splash was dramatic, while its ripples have been slowly expanding in larger and larger circles. Finally they've reached our shores.
The center of the pond is the provincial village of La Purisima del Rincon in central Mexico. There, Bustos was born, lived almost all his life and died at the age of 75.
For the past year, five of his paintings have toured the United States as part of the sprawling "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries," now concluding its much-remarked journey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through Dec. 29). If you haven't seen the Bustos pictures yet, proceed directly to the ground floor galleries of the Hammer Wing.
Bustos painted countless ex voto images, for neighbors desperate to express gratitude for divine intervention in their earthly tragedies, as well as occasional religious pictures. Most significantly, he made often mesmerizing portraits of local bourgeoisie and peasants. So important to the establishment of civic pride was this work that, eventually, the town would come to be called La Purisima del Bustos.
Soon after his death, however, Bustos was forgotten. The bloody, protracted Revolution of 1910 intervened. Not until the 1930s did interest revive, in the person of poet and diplomat Francisco Orozco Munoz, who began to collect the painter's work. A retrospective was mounted in 1952, and the circle now encompassed the state of Guanajuato, whose eponymous capital has since become the principal repository of Bustos' art.
Today, an extraordinary permanent display at the Alhondiga de Granaditas, an imposing regional museum in the lovely silver-mining hill town, includes six ex votos , a small religious picture, two highly unusual little paintings of celestial phenomena and some 49 portraits. They range in date from 1850 to 1903, and most belong either to the museum or to the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City, which has placed them on loan.
Ten more portraits--including an early, decoratively stylized and unusually hermetic painting of the artist's wife, Joaquina Rios--are housed a few blocks away, at the intimate Museo del Pueblo.
Bustos' paintings have since been regularly shown in exhibitions in Mexico City, and occasionally they've cropped up in displays in Paris and London. The selection at LACMA is somewhat uneven, given what could have been assembled, but it offers an intriguing introduction nonetheless.
Among them is Bustos' sole self-portrait, an austere, highly refined and somehow vaguely eccentric image. The gaunt, mustachioed artist shows himself proudly dressed in a crisp, dark uniform with gold buttons and crosses--a pure invention, since he never served as a soldier.
Bustos painted this great, grave picture exactly a century ago. Sometimes, it takes a while for word of greatness to spread. But now that it's here, it's worth considering just what makes these pictures so compelling--compelling enough to catapult Bustos to so prominent a position.
The task is not an easy one, and guideposts are hard to come by. Almost nothing in English has been written about him, including many basic biographical facts. The most comprehensive study is a 1981 catalogue (in Spanish) by the eminent Mexican art historian, Raquel Tibol, for a show in Guanajuato, but it's long since out of print.
A few articles have cropped up in far-flung periodicals--the earliest being a 1943 essay by Walter Pach in Art in America magazine announcing "A Newly Found American Painter," the most recent a 1985 essay by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in the glossy journal FMR. And the catalogue to "Splendors" makes some noble stabs at interpretation, although even its enthusiasm sometimes derails.
Notably, the catalogue bemoans the "unsophisticated compositions" of Bustos' two known still lifes, one of which is in the show. In reality, they are astonishing inventions, unlike anything this critic has seen before.
"Still Life with Pineapple" (1877) shows about two dozen fruits and vegetables laid out across the surface of the smallish canvas. Each is painstakingly depicted in a Realist manner, with soft and uniform lighting entering from high up on the left, as if you're looking down on the pear, potatoes, pineapple and such resting on a table top.
There, the Realism ends. Bustos hasn't arranged the fruits and vegetables in a bowl, a pile or any other naturalistic display. Instead, they're all lined up, one after the other, in half a dozen fairly neat horizontal rows. Each is painted as a self-contained entity, and the big pineapple and a trio of skinny beans are turned on the diagonal, in order to fit their shapes into the seamless composition.
