A new art for a new nation: Félix Parra’s Bartolomé de las Casas

(soft piano music) - [Lauren] We're in the National Museum of Art in Mexico city, looking at a large painting from the 19th-century of a 16th-century friar. This is a heroic image. - [Beth] This painting by Felix Parra painted in 1875 is showing us the famous Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas, who wrote in the 16th-century, a famous book called the Destruction of the Indies that defended the indigenous peoples from the abuses acted out against them. - [Lauren] Those abuses included the death of millions of indigenous people that happened in the decades after the Spanish conquest of 1521. - [Beth] This painting is an academic painting of the late 19th-century. And what we're seeing here is, Bartolome de Las Casas standing in the center of the composition, this solid figure, his arms crossed against his chest, his eyes looking up towards heaven, clutching a crucifix in his right hand. And what we're seeing is the aftermath of the attack on an indigenous couple who have come to an indigenous temple to honor one of their dead loved ones. - [Lauren] And in doing that, the husband is brutally murdered, the wife clings to the fryer for protection. This heroizes a Spanish friar, but is also, it's empathetic to the indigenous population. They were treated so brutally by the Spanish. And seeing elements that identify this as the traumatic aftermath of this moment on the left bottom of the composition, we see incense that's still burning, but that's been toppled over. We see a garland of flowers with paper banners, that's falling down and tattered. We see columns that have been toppled. And of course the husband whose body is splayed and due to foreshortening looks like he's coming out towards us. And there's blood running down from his head. - [Beth] And all of this taking place within this architectural setting, borrowed from the architecture of indigenous people. - [Lauren] He is just combining different peoples from across Mesoamerica and throughout time together to evoke this sense of the pre Hispanic past. - [Beth] We refer to this as an academic painting, the Academy advocates, a style that's readable, that's based on the art of classical antiquity of a high amount of finish and polish, dramatic lighting. This is a kind of art that appealed to the masses in the 19th-century. But here in Mexico, it answers a call for a new kind of art that tried to reconcile with its violent past. - [Lauren] And the 19th-century in Mexican history is complicated. In 1821 we have independence. Eventually much of Mexican territory is taken over by the United States in the middle of the 19th-century. And then you have French occupation of Mexico for a period of seven years in the 1860s. And then in 1867, it's like the second independence occurs, this freedom from the French who have taken control with Emperor Maximilian. And it's two years later that there's this call for a national art, this art that looks to the Mexican past rather than the Greco-Roman past. And so we begin to see artists like Felix Parra who are looking to these conquest narratives. - [Beth] Parra could have looked at indigenous people who are contemporary with him in the end of the 19th century, who were living impoverished lives, but here chooses a subject from the past. It's safe at a distance to look at it. It doesn't force people in the late 19th-century to deal with political reality. So it's a coming to terms, but in a way, not as honest as maybe in the 21st-century, we wish it had been. - [Lauren] And of course, while condemning the violence associated with the conquest, it's certainly not condemning that the conquest should have occurred. - [Beth] Right. The idea is that it was still the right thing to do to Christianize the people who lived here. - [Lauren] Even if the violence was wrong. This painting was paired with another one of his paintings that was done two years later that shows the massacre of Cholula, which was a moment in the conquest narrative where the conquistador, Hernan Cortes enters the city of Cholula and he demands luxury items, gold and silver, and wants the people to side with him. But they refuse and in return, he massacres thousands of people. - [Beth] So this idea of condemning some of the acts of conquest, but not necessarily the idea of conquest. (soft upbeat paino music)