Amate

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The following is a list of Tyler Cowen’s favorite artists.

My Favorite Artists

Velazquez is probably the greatest painter ever, followed by the usual choices, such as Leonardo, da vinci, Raphael, Rubens, Caravaggio, the nineteenth century French, van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse. Poussin is much underrated, I think, as are many of the eighteenth century French. Mondrian is especially dear to my heart. Morandi and Franz Marc are sentimental favorites. Rene Magritte is a recent interest.

Later in the twentieth century, I very much like:

Jasper Johns

de Kooning

Andy Warhol

Lichtenstein

Frank Stella

Philip Guston

Gerhard Richter

Georg Baselitz

Balthus

Frida Kahlo

Howard Hodgkin

Robert Gober

Bruce Nauman

Susan Rothenberg

Damien Hirst

Matthew Barney

John Currin

Contemporary South Korean art

I am a big fan and collector of Hatian art. Going to Haiti changed my life. Haitian voodoo art is my favorite. The web sites typically don’t sell the best stuff, though. Please see my short page related to Haitian art.

Many of the other arts hold great appeal for me, including Islamic calligraphy, Indian miniatures, Indonesian textiles, south Pacific tapa cloths and clubs, Latin American colonial art, Naive and Outsider Art, Russian Icon painting, African arts of all kinds (Nkisi most of all perhaps), Chinese and Japanese painting, 19th century Japanese prints, and Korean celadon, among many others.

The Camilo Ayala Brothers: Lost Treasures of the Art World

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The paintings of the three brothers — Marcial Camilo, Juan Camilo, and Felix Camilo Ayala — stand among the high points of modern Mexican folk art, and represent the most ambitious creations to have come from the province of Guerrero . The joyous traditions of Guerrero rival the better-known outputs of Oaxaca or Michoacan in quality but they have not received comparable attention from collectors or museums.

The state of Guerrero lies between Mexico City and Acapulco and includes the cities of Taxco , Iguala, and Acapulco . Of particular importance is the indigenous Nahua community in the state of Guerrero. The local Nahuas live in a series of villages along the Rio Balsas, dating prior to the Spanish conquest. San Agustin Oapan, with approximately 1500 citizens, is the largest of these villages, and the entire local Nahua community numbers no more than 40,000 individuals. Yet they have evolved a unique culture, as reflected in their distinctive artistic traditions.

Nahuas can be found in several parts of Mexico but the Rio Balsas community has been isolated for a long time. It is protected by the mountains and by the absence of any very large city in the immediate area. (There are two paths to San Agustin. One is to take the road up from Xalitla, which is about fifteen minutes from the city of Iguala . The other is an unmarked turn-off from the Mexico City-Cuernavaca highway, just before the Puente Mezcala.)

I first discovered the brothers when I was visiting the late Haitian art dealer and author, Selden Rodman. Rodman owned a number of fine pictures by the brothers, but he was not keen to sell them to me. Since that visit, I have been tracking down the works.

After buying some works from dealers, I decided to take a trip to San Agustin, using a Mexico City taxi driver. I asked in the village for the brothers, and found that only Juan Camilo was at home. I drove to Juan’s house, spoke to him, left him some money for paintings, and told him I would be back within a year.

The following year I tracked down Marcial Camilo in Taxco , as Juan had told me Marcial now spends most of his time outside the village. I went to the central square of Taxco and asked the local artisans if they knew where I could find Marcial.

Fortunately I stumbled upon Marcial’s daughter, Oliva, selling pots in the central square, and she directed me straight to him. As I asked her if she knew a Marcial Camilo Ayala, I recognized her similarity to a portrait that Marcial had painted of her many years ago, which now hangs in my living room. She was embarrassed to hear that I look at her portrait every evening at home.

To this day, only about half of the road to San Agustin is paved. A journey of no more than twelve kilometers takes several hours, and potentially more in the rainy season. Most Nahuas in the area do not read and write much and they have Spanish as a second language, if they speak it at all. Juan Camilo claims that no one in the town speaks English or has migrated to the United States . San Agustin has no stores to speak of and most residents do not have television or radio. The local religion is Catholic, though heavily infused with animistic elements, which are manifest in the numerous local festivals.

The landscape around San Agustin is beautiful, similar to many parts of the American Southwest, though wilder in feel. The river, Rio Balsas, is central to life and plays a prominent role in many of the artworks. Residents bathe in the river, fish in the river, wash their clothes in the river, and conduct their social lives in the river.

The local painting started with pottery. For as long as records exist, Rio Balsas artisans painted a variety of designs on pots, which were then shipped out and sold. In the early 1960s, however, Rio Balsas artisans switched to painting on amate. Amate is made on a bark paper, originally coming from a small village near Puebla . Amate paintings were cheaper to transport and suffered no breakage. The idea of painting on amate came from Max Kerlow, a folk art dealer in Mexico City who introduced the idea to some Nahua artisans. Amate painting rapidly took off and a new genre was born.

Amate painting developed in two directions. First, some amate creations are highly original works of art and are sold to relatively exclusive buyers. Many of these amate works are detailed black and white sketches, rather than colored works. Far more common, however, is the second branch of amate painting, which is largely for tourists. This kind of amate is sold on the streets and in the artisan markets of many Mexican cities and in Olivera Street in Los Angeles . Themes tend to be highly generic and the artistic quality is usually no better than satisfactory.

Low and high quality amate nonetheless share a common iconography. The most frequent topics are village scenes, local religious festivals, and weddings. These pictures draw upon the San Agustin landscape of river, cactus, wild animals, and vivid stars. Some of the more sharply drawn high quality works resemble older Arabic miniatures in style. One branch of amate portrays animals, usually birds, with twisting, sinuous lines and sharp, vivid colors. The village scenes use a vertical form of perspective, as is found in nineteenth century Japanese prints. Black and white amate drawings frequently portray nativity scenes in great detail. In more recent times, amate has been used as a form of political protest (more on this below).

Virtually everyone in San Agustin and neighboring villages learns how to draw and paint at a very young age. A typical lifestyle involves tilling the fields during the rainy season (late summer through fall) and otherwise turning to artisan work to make a living. In earlier times San Augustin had been a center for the salt trade, but when that source of income dried up, earlier in this century, artisanship became more important.

The Ayala brothers started as amate painters in San Augustin but were encouraged by outside patrons to try larger scale works. In the 1972 an American, Edmond Rabkin, was in Cuernavaca with his wife, the artist Carolyn Mae Lassiter. Rabkin accidentally encountered Marcial in the streets and found his presence and his personality compelling. He bought all of the amate that Marcial was carrying and the two quickly established a friendship. Rabkin encouraged Marcial to paint on a larger scale, and the idea spread to Marcial’s brothers, Juan Camilo and Felix Camilo, and to several of their cousins, Felix Jimenez Chino, Inocencio Chino, and Roberto Mauricio. While these individuals were starting to paint, and also in later years, Rabkin offered generous support.

The group soon proved to have a remarkable talent for painting. Marcial has always been the leader, the most conceptual, and the most original. His paintings draw upon sources as diverse as surrealism and Diego Rivera, but are always rooted in native Nahua traditions. Marcial once noted that: “Painting is my way of looking into my past, my people’s past…”

His pictures have a deep, mysterious quality and often concern dreams or multiple perspectives on a single event. As much as any mainstream artist, Marcial’s work shows imagination to be a vital method of philosophical presentation, a way of recapturing deep ideas about a collective past. Marcial’s pictures have been exhibited in the United States several times, including in the permanent collection of the Museum for International Folk Art in Santa Fe , and he is usually considered the most talented of the group. Marcial also has two paintings in the new Museum of the American Indian, the newly opened Smithsonian museum. The accompanying video display features him talking about amate painting. He is charismatic, articulate, and worldly.

Juan Camilo is more conservative, sticking closer to the amate tradition, but he has painted some of the loveliest of the Ayala pictures. A vertical landscape, with Nahua festivals in the foreground and stars in the sky, is his signature style. Some of his most accomplished paintings rely primarily on shades of black and grey, with only occasional splashes of color. Juan is quieter than Marcial and spends more of his time in San Agustin.

Many of Juan’s paintings reflect the animistic religion of the local Nahuas. The sun, moon, stars, and animals are all portrayed with a god-like presence. In some pictures, birds and foxes sit high in the trees. Men are more base. They have mastered the earth, in the form of pottery, but they can only aspire to godliness by killing these animals with bows and arrows, or by honoring them with festivals. In Juan’s artistic world, gods still stalk the earth. In Marcial’s artistic world, the ancient gods are no longer present, but we must nonetheless dream them and give them an existence of another kind.

Felix is the younger brother and his style is more derivative, though he has a number of fine works. Felix Jimenez, a cousin, is the second most conceptual and experimental painter of the group, after Marcial; he lives in San Miguel Allende rather than in San Augustin. Some of Felix’s best works portray very large female figures juxtaposed with very small male figures. Inocencio Chino and Roberto Mauricio, two other cousins, have painted quality works as well. Inocencio lives near Felix Jimenez and Roberto Mauricio splits his time between painting amate and playing in a mariachi band.

About thirty years ago, the painters made their first impact on the art world. Rabkin introduced the works to Selden Rodman, the well-known writer on folk and Naïve art, and their reputation quickly spread. Mr. and Mrs. Maurice C. Thompson, who have perhaps the best private collection of Haitian art in the United States, bought numerous paintings. Selden Rodman proclaimed that the tradition would turn out to be no less important than the Naïve Art of Haiti , and he featured the painters prominently in his book Artists in Tune With Their World . Rabkin opened a Santa Fe gallery, called Galeria Lara, devoted largely to works from the region.

All of the brothers maintain homes in San Agustin, although they spend much of their time in other locales for commercial reasons. The population of San Agustin has become increasingly itinerant, as individuals leave during the winter months to look for work elsewhere, returning to till the fields in the summer and fall.

The Rio Balsas Nahua community will not last forever. Over ten years ago the Mexican government had plans to build a dam that would have inundated most of the villages and required forcible removal of the inhabitants. The plans were called off, in part because of well-organized local protests, and Marcial was one of the leaders of this movement. Anthropologist Jonathan Amith subsequent reproduced some of the resulting “protest amates” in his book The Amate Tradition , which remains the best introduction to the art of the region).

Local residents fear that the dam will eventually be built. Whether or not this is true, the Rio Balsas community will in any case be transformed by time. As outside opportunities become more lucrative, the community will fray. A generation ago, hardly anyone left San Agustin, but now many people leave, if only for part of the year. The culture may lose the sense of innocence and charm portrayed in many Nahua artworks, and perhaps lose its unique visual sense and perspective as well. The Rio Balsas painters are aware of this danger, and they are seeking to preserve their history and their traditions through their painting.

Tyler Cowen is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, author of In Praise of Commercial Culture (Harvard University Press 1998), and can be reached at tcowen@gmu.edu. He can also help you reach the Ayalas, or other neighboring artisans, if you wish.

Wall Street Journal: Mexican Folk Artist, Brilliant and Cursed, Triumphs as a Painter

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Tyler Cowen recommends this profile of an artist whose paintings he collects, published in The Wall Street Journal on July 13, 2005.

Since his schizophrenia was diagnosed in 1991, Alfonso Lorenzo Santos has divided his time between a psychiatric clinic in Cuernavaca and his tiny lime-green house in this remote mountain village. At home, he often gets so violent his neighbors chain him to a wall.

Yet despite his anger and terrifying delusions, Mr. Lorenzo has become one of Mexico’s most innovative folk painters, piling points upon points of paint on paper, like tiny tiles in a mosaic. To his psychiatrist, Mr. Lorenzo paints as if he were blinded by the sun and sees floating black dots in front of him. To Francesco Clemente, a celebrated Italian artist who encourages Mr. Lorenzo’s work, the Mexican appears “to see images through a telescope — he breaks things down to their elemental level.”

Mr. Lorenzo, now around 54 years old—he was orphaned and doesn’t know his age exactly—is part of a generation of Mexican-Indian artists from the Balsas river region, about 75 miles from Acapulco. These artists started painting in the 1960s for tourist dollars on bark paper, called amate in the Nahuatl language. Colorful amate paintings of birds and villages still sell for a few dollars at Mexican tourist sites.

Some young artists showed extravagant talent, and attracted backers who hoped the art would one day fetch the thousands of dollars that some Haitian folk painters get. That hasn’t happened. Even the best amate paintings generally sell for less than $1,000. But Teresa Tate, a Smithsonian Institution researcher, compares amate artists to Frida Kahlo, who was largely untrained but became a Mexican icon. “So too are the amate paintings becoming a face of the Nahua people in Mexico,” she says.

One group of amate painters moved to Cuernavaca in the 1970s to live with Edmond Rabkin, a New York expatriate who introduced them to Western literature and music. Those artists, especially Marcial Camilo Ayala, whose work is now displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, often paint romantic visions of village life.

Some Ameyaltepec artists developed a harder edge, especially Mr. Lorenzo, whose figures rarely smile and whose birds have menacing claws. In the 1970s, Mr. Lorenzo moved to Mexico City, where an art dealer promoted him as the descendant of Aztec princes, and where he had his first psychotic episode, says Gobi Stromberg, a Cuernavaca art patron. Complaining to friends that his heart was exploding, he returned to Ameyaltepec around 1980, wandered the arid mountains, cursed at neighbors and flung stones at them. Barely 5 feet tall, but stocky, Mr. Lorenzo became a threatening figure. After villagers decided he had to be restrained, several volunteers wrestled him to the ground and chained him to a wall in his house, where he remained for several years.

“It was medieval,” says Jonathan Amith, a U.S. anthropologist who visited Mr. Lorenzo. “There was a hook attached to the wall. He had on underwear and shorts, and he was incoherent.” His wife eventually left him. Says Mr. Lorenzo: “They grabbed me and put me in chains.” He says he doesn’t know what made them do that, though he acknowledges he gets violent and can’t stop himself.

Cristino Flores Medino, an Ameyaltepec artist, says that the village, which doesn’t have a psychiatrist or police force, had little choice. In 1991, after Mr. Lorenzo was arrested for assault in a nearby village, a group of artists arranged for his release and sold paintings to pay for a round of therapy with Cuernavaca psychiatrist Alberto Guerrero Ochoa, who runs a residential clinic. Dr. Guerrero, 50, has continued to treat Mr. Lorenzo in exchange for a few dozen of his paintings. A Oaxaca psychiatrist, who treats another artist who cuts himself and uses his blood as paint, consults on Mr. Lorenzo’s treatment.

Mr. Lorenzo fell into a distressing cycle, says Dr. Guerrero. The artist would visit the clinic every month or two and take a course of antipsychotic medication, which would calm him enough so he could return to Ameyaltepec to paint. There, he would eventually skip his medicine, get violent and wind up chained to a wall, with only a sketchpad to occupy himself. The drawings illustrate his decline: The fierce birds of the early pages trail off into simple outlines of houses a child might do.

In the Nahua culture, mental illness is seen as a force beyond individual control — something like a curse. Traditional psychotherapy isn’t useful, says Dr. Guerrero, who treated Mr. Lorenzo instead with various medications and also encouraged Mr. Lorenzo to focus on his painting. “The therapy is to give him what it takes for him to feel well,” the psychiatrist says.

As Mr. Lorenzo’s delusions intensified, he has lived for longer periods at the clinic, where he often paints village scenes including one in which a young man is courting a woman. In a shaded courtyard, he has lucid moments in which he talks of improving his Spanish and of his desire “to paint and sell, paint and sell, paint and sell.” Then he’s off on a riff about how he’s the president of Acapulco or conversing with an invisible band of musicians who, he says, follow him.

His painting has taken on an increasingly religious tone. One painting, done in the style of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting, shows a fierce face of God, with eyes made up of other tiny tiled eyes. A second shows a nude woman by a tree that resembles a crucifix. “He likes the goriness of Catholicism because it depicts a kind of scary world he lives in,” says George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen, who has written a book on amate paintings.

But when his delusions are most intense, he is at a loss for themes and direction. One still life of fruit on a table, painted from an overhead perspective, is smeared on one side because Mr. Lorenzo collapsed over the work. Sometimes he takes his inspiration from small religious prints sold outside Mexican churches, says Dr. Guerrero.

Mostly, he longs to go home again, and Ms. Stromberg, his patron, agreed to take him there by taxi late last month. Initially pleased, the painter insisted that his imaginary musicians come, too. Ms. Stromberg didn’t blanch. She figured that if they were in his head in Cuernavaca, they would travel that way to Ameyaltepec.

But the next day, Mr. Lorenzo hardly got the welcome he was hoping for. Ms. Stromberg offered to pay 1,000 pesos a month, nearly $100 — big money to villagers — to someone who would feed him and check to see that he takes his medicine. But his brother turned him down, as did an elderly uncle and aunt, who live in a house made of mud and straw. Even when Mr. Lorenzo stuffed the money into his uncle’s hand, essentially begging for his help, the uncle told him no, switching to Nahuatl for emphasis.

But as Mr. Lorenzo stared imploringly, the uncle wordlessly relented. Once Mr. Lorenzo had left the hut, another family member explained the family’s hesitation: “Alfonso can be so violent, he even hit his son’s wife.”

At a village meeting a week later, Mr. Amith, the anthropologist, says Mr. Lorenzo told him that he’s working on a painting he started at the clinic. It’s his interpretation of a Titian portrait, “Ecce Homo,” showing Christ with his hands bound.