Piety and wealth at the Art Museum (1st review)

"Journey to New Worlds" boasts a profusion of riches— in both content and materials— drawn from the private collection of Roberta and Richard Huber, 40 years in the making. Yet this impressive show of works from the Spanish and Portuguese colonies begins quietly enough with a graceful ivory sculpture of a child, Christ Child as Salvador Mundi, set in a rather somber rotunda. We are hardly prepared for what awaits us beyond.

Here we find finely worked silver vessels and plaques, elegant ivory statuary and paintings so vibrant that they almost tip over into the gaudy. But just when you're prepared to write off all those impressively-plumed St. Michaels as second-rate Baroque, you will happen upon a piece like the Mexican Reliquary Bust, in which the head of an aged, bald and bearded saint is rendered so perfectly that it rivals anything that European craftsmen could produce. Certainly few could have afforded to "robe" their saint in vestments of gleaming silver as this anonymous Mexican artist has done.

I found these elegant ivory and polychrome sculptures— most of them less than a foot high— to be the revelation of the Art Museum's show. They lack the raw emotional appeal of the cruder depictions of sainthood, but the pure beauty and serenity of these pieces invite the eye to indulge in prolonged meditation.

Tilting to the Jesuits

There are several fine depictions of Saint Francis Xavier, the great missionary to the East, and one palm-sized but exquisite head of the "other Francis" (of Assisi). As befits the subject, the loveliest of these ivory sculptures is one of Mary as Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, a 17th-Century masterwork from the province of Goa in India— then a Portuguese possession— and all of about eight inches high.

An earlier Art Museum show on a similar theme— "Tesoros," in 2006— had a pronounced Franciscan tilt, but "Journey to New Worlds" is largely a Jesuit affair. Even the large oil painting, Christ Crucified with Adoring Saints, places the two great Jesuit saints Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier front and center while Sts. Dominic, Francis, Anthony of Padua and the rest are left in the background.

A large painting, St. Anthony of Padua Preaching Before Pope Gregory IX, tries to recover some ground for the Franciscans by showing Gregory listening attentively, with a Franciscan cord peeping out discreetly from beneath the papal robes.

Infant's gaudy crown

One theme of the show is the sheer wealth of the colonies whose art is represented. The numerous silver pieces, the pearl-inlaid cabinet, the 18th-Century mirror whose tarnished surface still reflects your image— all give testimony to the rivers of wealth flowing from these colonies to their mother countries.

Of course, wealth can get in the way of piety. An 18th-Century Christ Child in the Manger, from Portugal, shows an infant crowned with a golden crown and garbed in jewel-bedecked swaddling clothes. But another 18th-Century Child in the Manger— this one from the Portuguese colony of Brazil— shows a simple baby, roughly carved out of wood and decorated not with gems but with a simple coat of peeling paint.

To be sure, the Portuguese piece may have been executed for a noble or a great cathedral, while the Brazilian one might have adorned a simple country chapel— but really, which comes closer to embodying the Biblical message?

Classy neighbors

Similarly, a large oil painting, The Holy Family, depicts the family itself in the more or less "approved" fashion, but surrounds its members with some of the classiest neighbors in Bethlehem— all decked out like 18th Century Peruvian courtiers.

If all this piety becomes too much to bear, you can find a change of pace in the large painting, History of the Advent of Christ: Drunkenness and Wantonness. This spirited depiction of debauchery is very much in the style of an Italian Renaissance painting.

"Journeys to New Worlds" is a kinder, gentler version of some of the ground covered by the much larger "Tesoros" exhibit of 2006. There are no flagellated Christs with the skin of their backs hanging in bloody strips, no crucified infants or blood-chilling depictions of The Great Flood. Perhaps the Hubers' tastes didn't run toward that type of ultra-devotional art. In any case, the result is what might be called a family-friendly exhibit that includes the secular but leans heavily toward the spiritual.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.