LOS ANGELES, CA.- “El Siglo de Oro.” The Golden Age of Spain. The magnificent spring of culture that brought us “Don Quixote,” the Escorial palace, El Greco, and Velázquez.

When I used that phrase at a party for Mexican Independence last month, an Ecuadorean man smiled and offered: “Of course those brutes had the time to think about art and literature because they were exploiting my continent.”

They used gorgeous propaganda, those brutes, according to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The 93 artifacts in “Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500-1800” reveal the sumptuous visual logic of the Spanish Empire, one of the most powerful and wide-reaching the world has ever seen, from the point of view of its colonial artisans.

Take a resplendent painted folding screen from the late 17th century. It depicts an Indigenous wedding in Iztacalco, near Mexico City. As the newlyweds proceed through a valley of thatched roofs, a Moctezuma impersonator festoons himself in palm leaves while acrobats brave the upside-down “palo volador” swing and dancers gyrate in riotous native dress.

Look again and you’ll catch whiffs of the Old World. The painting’s been done in staggered oils reminiscent of Bruegel. At left, Spaniards loiter in their dour capes and ruffs, eyeing the party. At right, it’s a Catholic church the couple has just left — a vague stone edifice obscured by the framing, but a house of God.

Like the mitote dance on view here (the Nahua-Spanish hybrid dance that colonial authorities tolerated), the New World was not Spain, and yet Spain touched all.

Folding screens came from Asia, a territory at least partially Spanish since Miguel López de Legazpi conquered the Philippines in 1565. The format of this particular screen, LACMA’s curator of Latin American Art Ilona Katzew writes in the excellent catalog, “is connected to Asia, the medium of painting to Europe, and the subject matter to the New World.” In time, America became such an entrepôt among these continents that an 18th-century visitor, lending this show its title and theme, called Mexico City ‘the archive of the world.’”

Colonial Spain is not new to museums. But “Archive of the World” is rare in that it displays no loans. For 15 years, under Katzew’s eagle eye, LACMA has been rigorously acquiring. These greatest hits could position LACMA as a major destination for Spanish Colonial art, depending on the outcome of its expansion.

Along with screens, expensive gold-gilt threads from Asia filled North America. Two brilliant 18th-century Mexican clerical robes are made of them. Your eyes have to adjust to their gradations of embroidery as if to a sunny outdoors.

From these robes, we turn to Bolivian painter Melchor Pérez Holguín, whose followers called him the “El Greco of Upper Peru.” The mourners in his devastating “Pietà” (circa 1720s) have been dressed in Incan reds and greens. Holguín then drapes them with assorted patterns of brocateado, wavering webs of gold-leaf that he has dotted with the flat edge of a very sharp brush. Like the priests who wore the robes, Holguín’s bereaved have dressed for the occasion.

As you shuttle from 3D into 2D, from golden threads into brocateado canvases, from mother-of-pearl furniture into dazzling enconchado collages, from polychromed cedar statuary into textile-rich devotional canvases of the Virgin, you can feel the colonial impulse to transubstantiate the empire’s grandeur into paint.




European paintings, like spools of Chinese thread, also reached the New World. They arrived in the form of cheap and portable prints. Numerous paintings in the show copy European models. Holguín himself works Anthony van Dyck’s rather humbler “Pietà” (1620s). And three Mexican painters interpret the Flemish master of voluptuous naturalism who was also van Dyck’s teacher, Peter Paul Rubens.

Nicolás Enríquez’s “Marriage of the Virgin” (1745) transforms Rubens’s quiet “Betrothal of the Virgin Mary” (1620s) into an extravagantly modeled Catholic jamboree. Painting on copper (so the scene glows), Enríquez dresses his priest in mystical clothing and dwarfs the holy couple in a cathedral lined with echoes of the Trinity: tripartite pier columns and a blaring pop-art tapestry.

Rubens, who was based in Spanish Flanders spent formative months in Madrid copying Philip II’s famous Titians and cozying up to Velázquez, even planning a tour of Italy with the Sevillian master. Though thoroughly Flemish, he owed much to the groaning shiploads of New World silver and gold that fueled Spain’s Golden Age. By blinging out Flemish compositions like Rubens’s, Holguín and Enríquez were repurposing an artistic vanguard that their continents had financed in the first place.

In English, this show explains something of the European influence on colonial painters. But I question the requirement of a QR code to access wall captions in Spanish. Why banish the ablest interpreters of this glittering, informative exhibition to their phones?

Since conversion was thought to excuse conquest, these devotional artworks had to overawe their viewers. They had to compete with existing native splendor. (For context, one likely precolonial Incan tunic is on exquisite display.) And they still do.

“I couldn’t decide whether the artists and their patrons were celebrating diversity or promoting a deeply racial division of society,” Katzew writes in the catalog about the taxonomizing casta (or caste) portraits on view. “In the end it’s both.”

One casta by the Mexican painter Miguel Cabrera, “From Spaniard and Morisca, Albino Girl” (1763), depicts a fair-skinned Spanish man, his mixed-race wife, and their cooing alabaster-skinned baby. It’s an eerie mix of domestic charm and eugenics, in unclear proportions.

This canvas once belonged to Cabrera’s famous series of 16. When LACMA acquired it in 2015, all but one were accounted for at other institutions. Before long, as the critic Christopher Knight reported, Katzew received an anonymous letter enclosing credible photographs of the missing canvas, “From Spaniard and Castiza, Spanish Girl.” Whoever wrote the cryptic note (and Katzew tried frantically to learn), this person understood such portraits to be fraught talismans of the conquered New World, objects both Spanish and not.

“You should know that I am well and living less than two (2) miles from LACMA,” the letter told Katzew in the imagined voice of the daughter from the missing portrait. “I am not lost, I just do not wish to be found.” It was signed, “proud of my mixed blood despite being called Española.”

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‘Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500-1800’

Through Sunday, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-6000; lacma.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.