Boston
One among many remarkable pieces in Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is a large desk with bookcase. Its front sports bold geometric inlays of wood and bone, the latter delicately etched with curving lines that, from a distance, recall calligraphy. To look at it is to be transported to the Mudjar period in Spain, when Christian rulers had expelled the Moors but retained elements of their artistic tradition. With the desk flap lowered and the bookcase doors open, however, the gold-on-red interior screams Chinauntil, that is, you take a closer look. The artist has depicted a hacienda with palm trees and deer, not a landscape with willows and oxen, and the figures wear sombreros, not conical hats.
This magnificent Mudjar-Asian desk was made in the mid-1700s in Mexico, about the time artisans throughout the North American colonies were fashioning wares inspired by European Chinoiserie. Here, grouped into a vignette, we see a tea-table and armchair from Boston, silver salver and sugar bowl from New York, blue-and-white china from South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Elsewhere, a tall chest from the same period speaks of a fondness for Japanning: Made in Boston, it depicts cranes, robed figures and other Asian motifs in vibrant ersatz lacquer (displayed next to a replica of a drawer showing how the colors would have originally appeared).
The craze for things Asian, the show makes clear, involved the whole of the Americas and began with the import of luxury goods, of which the show has a rich sampling: wall-size textiles, delicate porcelains, gilded folding screens, and a dazzling chest covered entirely in mother-of-pearl made in Japan in the late 16th or early 17th century. There is also a small dish commissioned from the potters of Jingdezhen, Chinas porcelain city, in the early 1590s. Its floral border is typical of Chinese export ware, but the coat of arms of the Viceroy of Peru fills the center. Perhaps working from a sketch or print, the painter possibly interpreted crenelated towers from the original as designs resembling stacked Chinese characters.
MFA curator Dennis Carrs salient contribution lies in using such exotic imports as a backdrop for an impressive array of works that artists and artisans in the Americas made in response to Asian imports. While the catalog also covers the Portuguese territory of Brazil, the show focuses on the English, French and, particularly, the vast Spanish colonies.
Using its New World colonies as a relay point for goods destined for Europe, Spain could bypass sea lanes and overland routes controlled by other powers. The first ships plied this Pacific route in 1565, but two unrelated developments in about 1570 changed the dynamics of world trade. Spanish colonists introduced a refining process that boosted the output of silver mines in Mexico and South America, and China implemented a silver-based tax system, which meant that obtaining the precious metal became the No. 1 priority for Chinese traders and, by extension, those who did business with them.
This sudden convergence of Asias unprecedented demand and the New Worlds ready supply meant that New Spain (todays Mexico, Central America, and the U.S. Southwest) and the Viceroyalty of Peru (which encompassed much of South America) became wealthy customers themselves. From 1573 until 1815, galleons sailed once, sometimes twice a year from Acapulco laden with silver and returned from the Philippine port of Manila filled with Asian luxuries. Only a small portion of these ever made it to Europe. A telling statistic is that in the early 1600s up to 90% of the goods traded between Mexico and Peru hailed from Asia.
Throughout the Americas, these prized luxuries and exotica sparked imitations, adaptations and inventive, often hybrid, improvisations like the Mexican desk and bookcase. But it is far from the only wonderful example. A brightly colored late 17th to early 18th century Peruvian tapestry, for instance, mingles depictions of indigenous furry rodents with interpretations of peonies, phoenixes and other Chinese motifs that appear in a 17th-century Chinese embroidery hanging beside it.
Elsewhere, a 17th-century portable writing desk and two small coffers (17th and 18th century) illustrate how artists in Colombia and Peru simulated the effects of Japanese lacquer with the indigenous mopa mopa resinnot to be confused with an oil-based technique used to equal effect in a number of works from Mexico. These include a large, round Mexican tray from about 1800 whose orange, gold and black decorations are reminiscent of Burmese lacquerware.
Probably the most dazzling grouping illustrates some of the ways in which Latin American artists incorporated the Asian predilection for mother-of-pearl inlayfrom an 18th-century furniture maker in Peru, who covered the entire exterior of another desk and http://www.homegain.com/sellertools bookcase with mother-of-pearl cut into swirling shapes, to Mexican painter Nicols Correa, who added touches of nacreous luster to his 1693 Miracle of the Wedding at Cana.
This scintillating shows one disappointment is that Mr. Carr was unable to include any Mexican-made biombos, the name the Spanish gave Japanese folding screens that were all the rage. But he does feature a folding fananother Asian formon which its 17th-century Mexican maker used iridescent and brightly colored feathers, a technique that predated the arrival of the Conquistadores, to depict European horsemen. Thanks to such treasures, Mr. Carr has managed with some 100 works and a must-read catalog to broaden and deepen our understanding of colonial art in the Americas and the explosion of intercontinental trade that fueled it.
Ms. Lawrence writes about Asian and Islamic art for the Journal.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/made-in-the-americas-the-new-world-discovers-asia-review-1441059293
