Icons of Pain

By R.H.

Few places on earth could have been less auspicious to artists than New Mexico two centuries ago. The borderlands of what Cortes had fondly supposed to be the gold-stuffed kingdom of Cibola, New Mexico was a backward, poor, remote fief of Spain, all but forgotten in Madrid. The Franciscan friars, whose missions had supplied the chief form of local government in the colony, had been withdrawn. Most of the white community leadership came from a group of masochistically deranged Christian fakirs, the Penitent brotherhood, whose way of praising their redeemer was to imitate his Passion by flogging themselves with wire-tipped scourges. It was not, to put it mildly, a humanistic culture, but it was still capable of producing art, of a coarse and vivid sort.

Last month a large exhibition of it went on view at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego--"The Cross and the Sword," organized by Art Historian Jean Stern, a specialist in the art of the American Southwest. The 170 objects on display, mainly santos or devotional religious images, provide a most suggestive picture of the culture of the place and period. The show is the main event of San Diego's bicentennial-year celebration.

The religious art is mainly of two kinds: bultos or wooden sculptures, and retablos, paintings on adzed panels. They are invariably primitive. Folk carvers of devotional objects in Europe had a whole bag of tricks, derived from professional sculpture, to lend variety to their images. But the santos of New Mexico are almost always frontal; they stare at you with the stiff, doleful air of prisoners not fully released from their original block of wood, and even a representation of the three-headed, one-bodied Holy Trinity (see color page) looks like a detail from a chain gang. This kind of rustic simplicity was partly dictated by the poor tools the carvers had at their disposal -- sculpture was more a matter of whittling and hacking than of carving, since woodworking chisels were all but unknown.

Pieties and Terrors. Some artists -- the professionals known as santeros -- occasionally developed distinguish able styles. One such man, who flourished between 1805 and 1845, is called the "Chili Painter" for his habit of surrounding his figures with decorative borders of that fiery vegetable. But in general, whether Indian or Spanish, priests or laymen, the artists submerged their individuality in the demands of iconography. One does not look for subtlety of meaning in the santos. They are religious propaganda of the most basic sort: cult objects designed to hammer fundamental pieties and terrors into illiterate minds, heavily emphasizing suffering and violence.

Pain is much more readily conveyed by art than ecstasy, presumably because it is more tactile, and the santeros lost no opportunities to stress it. Saint Acacius, an early Christian warrior-martyr, is shown crucified in Mexican military costume, flanked by a V-shaped row of contemporary soldiers. The gaunt, hacked Christs drip blood by the pint, their rib cages and muscles have a flayed pathos that transcends the crudeness of carving and drawing; and in some pieces, like the articulated figure of the Standing Christ, with rawhide-hinged elbows, the imagery of pain acquires an immense expressive force. In some ways the weirdest santos of all were the penitential death figures, especially a fine 19th century death figure kneeling on a grave. The anatomy is haywire, the drawing childish; but this emptily grinning totem of wooden bones, flagellating itself above a mysterious round stone, is as strange as any surrealist sculpture by Giacometti, filled with a sense of isolation -- an image as suited to its desert as any cactus flower.

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