The Great City of Tenochtitlán

The critical fortunes of Latin American colonial art have been, in many ways, no more radical in their eclipse and rediscovery than, say, those of the Italian baroque. The complex artistic achievements of over three hundred years of creation in the Iberian colonial world (about a third of the earth’s surface) were for all intents and purposes shelved at the beginning of the nineteenth...

The idea that the so-called primitive art of Africa and Oceania has had considerable influence on a number of major twentieth-century artists is hardly novel. Such a relationship was demonstrated and solidified by, among other things, Robert Goldwater’s pathbreaking study Primitivism in Modern Art, a number of exhibitions in the past half-century in London and Paris, and a major show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York ten years ago. But the impact of the pre-Columbian art of Mexico …