Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Velasco: A View of Mexico. Minneapolis Institute of Art, September 27, 2025\u2013January 4, 2026.<\/p>\n
They say he gave one gold imperial coin to each soldier in the firing squad. \u201cMuchachos, aim well, aim right here,\u201d he said, pointing at his chest. He wanted his mother to recognize him. The detail about the coins may be apocryphal, but we know from his funerary photo that the corpse of Maximilian I\u2014Mexico\u2019s short-lived Austrian emperor\u2014went home with his head in one piece that summer of 1867. Well, except for the eyes.<\/p>\n
When Mexico\u2019s anti-imperialists defeated the emperor\u2019s occupying army, in a harebrained campaign backed by Napoleon III, they shipped his body back to Mexico City. It was strung up by the legs in a hospital that is now the National Museum of Art and embalmed in preparation for its long journey back to Europe. Looking at the photo of their handiwork, which circulated widely in Europe and may have inspired \u00c9douard Manet to paint his famous depiction of Maximilian\u2019s execution, it seems the morticians didn\u2019t do a very good job: in addition to his stretched and distorted features, his eyeballs were plucked out and replaced with unconvincing implants. They were probably glass or enamel, though some reputable sources say they came from a statue of the Virgin at a nearby cathedral.<\/p>\n
This was the culmination of a period of nonstop chaos unleashed in the wake of Mexico\u2019s independence from Spain almost fifty years prior. Geopolitical power was fractured across this vast, newly independent territory. Regional strongmen rebelled constantly against the central government\u2019s attempts to bring them under control. War with the United States ended catastrophically in 1848, with Mexico losing just over half of its territory to the northern victors. It couldn\u2019t pay back its war loans from the French, providing a convenient pretext for Maximilian\u2019s doomed invasion and ever-so-brief imperial foray.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mexico needed a hero, someone who could bring the country\u2019s conflicting interests together under one banner. And amazingly, that hero turned out to be a painter\u2014a painter of landscapes.<\/p>\n
The swell of patriotism that such idealized depictions produce has made them easy fodder for nationalist movements wishing to stake their claims.<\/p>\n
Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Velasco rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century for his exquisitely detailed panoramas depicting the Valley of Mexico, the geographic basin that cradles Mexico City amid a halo of volcanic peaks. His success allowed him to tour surrounding states like Oaxaca and Veracruz, producing a body of images that would become canonical to Mexico\u2019s national identity. Through official diplomatic presentations at world-historical fairs and exhibitions abroad, he eventually achieved the status of Mexico\u2019s first international celebrity artist, trumpeted as the supreme maestro of the Mexican school of painting.<\/p>\n
But Velasco\u2019s renown crested and then declined, as his work became outmoded by modernism\u2019s fast-changing fashions. He\u2019s no longer a household name in the vein of Diego Rivera (who was his pupil) or Frida Kahlo, especially outside of his home country. That may begin to change, thanks to the long-overdue traveling retrospective Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Velasco: A View of Mexico, which originated at the National Gallery in London and is now on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through early January.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Velasco, a polymath trained in botany and geology, reinvigorated landscape painting by pairing the plein air poetics of light, color, and perspective with the empiricism of explorer-scientists like Alexander von Humboldt. His soaring views captured the majesty of Mexican soil without the sentimental embellishment characteristic of Romantic predecessors and counterparts in the United States and Europe. And you can almost always spot the march of industrial progress in the form of mills, factories, and steam trains chugging along shiny iron bridges. This made his paintings more than just exaltations of the untrammeled wild.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still, his arrival at the status of national hero didn\u2019t just happen. He enjoyed a relationship of convenience with the dictator Porfirio D\u00edaz, who imposed an uneasy stability through a brutal thirty-year regime. While prosperous for the ruling class and foreign capital, this newfound modernity came at the cost of the violent suppression of striking workers and indigenous groups.<\/p>\n
D\u00edaz and his men saw in Velasco\u2019s work a picturesque vessel for the delivery of their \u201cdevelopmentalist\u201d agenda, in the words of Velasco expert Fausto Ram\u00edrez. Whether a willing participant or a patsy, Velasco\u2019s view of Mexico in transition happened to rhyme with their view of nature as \u201ca \u2018profitable\u2019 or \u2018saleable\u2019 commodity, available for exploration and exploitation.\u201d They rewarded him with appointments and exhibitions.\u00a0Furthermore, through his repeated portrayals of key features in the Valley of Mexico, like the snow-capped peaks of the Popocat\u00e9petl and Iztacc\u00edhuatl, Velasco helped normalize the consolidation of power and patriotism around the country\u2019s geographic center. These visions signaled a new Mexico proudly on the brink of bourgeois, industrial modernity\u2014\u201ca campaign orchestrated by \u2018the wizards of progress\u2019, active in the Development Ministry, who did not hesitate to put art to the service of national interests,\u201d Ram\u00edrez writes.<\/p>\n
You wouldn\u2019t really get any of this from the exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. That would be a lot of ground to cover in a small show, the first Velasco exhibition on U.S. soil in nearly fifty years, one meant to introduce the painter to a foreign audience. But even the catalog makes only passing reference to the artist\u2019s role as a booster for the bloody regime known as the Porfiriato, calling him \u201can essential figure in that generation of nation-builders\u201d\u2014and leaving it at that. We can and should honor the work\u2019s unparalleled beauty and rigor, along with the many lessons it has to teach us. But we\u2019re missing a crucial part of the story without a serious conversation about whose interests it served.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Jose-Maria-Velasco.-Rocks-on-the-Hill-of-Atzacoalco-1874.jpg\")
Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Velasco, Rocks on the Hill of Atzacoalco, 1874. Oil on canvas, 31.5 \u00d7 44 cm. Museo Nacional de Arte, INBAL, Mexico City. \u00a9 Reproducci\u00f3n autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. X12274.<\/p>\n
Velasco began his training as a teenager in Mexico City, after moving with his widowed mother and two brothers from their humble village of San Miguel Temascalcingo to the capital. While working in his uncle\u2019s textile shop, he enrolled in night classes at the prestigious Academia de San Carlos, the first art academy in the Americas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Founded in the previous century, the state-run academy\u2019s curriculum was based on those of the great Old World art schools. It was staffed by European directors and teachers who instilled in their students the aspirational values of European buen gusto, or good taste. Despite his family\u2019s precarity, he was able to continue as a full-time student thanks to a scholarship he\u2019d won for an early oil painting, The Courtyard of the Former Convent of San Agust\u00edn (1860). The contemplative scene of a crumbling edifice underscores the developing artist\u2019s exacting yet quietly expressive eye. Under the tutelage of Italian landscapist Eugenio Landesio, who encouraged the schematic study of things both built and natural, Velasco split his classes between the art school and the Escuela Nacional de Medicina. He graduated in 1868 and received his appointment as a lecturer that same year, a vocation he would practice for the next forty-two years.<\/p>\n
Before he discovered the Valley of Mexico from on high, Velasco painted from below. He\u2019d spend his days in Mexico City\u2019s Chapultepec Forest\u2014now a 1,700-acre park, where you can wander past swan boats and vendors selling novelty hats shaped like monkeys\u2014gazing up at Chapultepec Castle. Originally built for Spain\u2019s eighteenth-century viceroy, the hillside citadel would captivate Velasco for the better of thirty years. Its stucco-coated walls and parapets\u2014seen from afar or in partial view, flanked by figures toting parasols on their Sunday stroll\u2014provided a vehicle to experiment with shifting atmospheric light, though it invariably appears with its coterie of rustling cypress trees, whose delicate leaves he loved to paint. During Velasco\u2019s student years, it was occupied by the invading Emperor Maximilian I, who one likes to imagine may have glimpsed the still-unknown painter with his portable wooden paintbox.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Velasco and his wife would often visit his mother at her home in Villa de Guadalupe, a village outside the capital that, 150 years later, is now firmly within urban city limits. There, on the hill behind her house, he began the sketches and studies for what would become his first monumental panorama: The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Atzacoalco (1873). Even in this early work, you can already see his signature: an information density verging on the cartographic. This is especially clear in the painting\u2019s pencil study, which appeared at the National Gallery but was returned to Mexico before the Minneapolis show. It includes assiduous notes on noteworthy mountain peaks and buildings like the Basilica\u2014itself an homage to that most venerated icon, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who embodies the myth of Mexico\u2019s mestizo origins.\u00a0We see him coming into his own as a colorist here, too, with a tempered palette of reddish rocks and hazy purple mountains that resists the temptation toward bombast. (Hilariously, it is precisely this subtlety\u2014this creativity within a relatively limited spectrum\u2014that a reviewer for the Guardian misread as \u201cboring\u201d and \u201cproudly dull.\u201d)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then, two years later, he unveiled the first of his two undisputed masterpieces: The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (1875), created for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. This nearly eight-foot-wide knockout is the first thing you\u2019d see walking into the gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In the foreground is an indigenous campesino family going about their day\u2019s labor, another Velasco motif contrasting life on the margins with the smokestacks and trains in the background. He\u2019d been exploring this uneasy synchrony for nearly fifteen years, going back to early standouts like The Goatherd of San \u00c1ngel (1863). Hung directly opposite The Valley of Mexico, this scene of a boy and his goats feels undeniably quaint by comparison. At their left, the figures are seen climbing out of a forested ravine where a river flows through a hydroelectric dam, a rainbow playing in the spray of its cascading stream. On the other bank is a textile mill, where a man, presumably a mill worker, waves from atop the roof\u2014a message of harmonious relations. Far from being drowned out by the gravitas of its neighboring works, The Goatherd stands out for its storybook charm.<\/p>\n
The work can be cerebral, serene\u2014and implicated in a publicity campaign to romanticize the dispossession of people from their land.<\/p>\n
Velasco\u2019s second monumental masterpiece, completed in 1877, won him a medal from the newly inaugurated President Porfirio D\u00edaz, and was such a hit at the Paris Universal Exhibition that a copy of it was gifted to Pope Leo XIII. Painted from the same hillside vantage as its 1875 predecessor, the work employs a cunning perspectival shift that intensifies the awesome feeling of standing face-to-face with the sublime. A useful concept here might be that of the \u201cimperial sublime,\u201d coined by historian Harsha Ram in reference to the heroic narratives of poets like Pushkin, who portrayed the Caucuses as Edenic wilds awaiting their conqueror. During the early period of Russia\u2019s imperial expansion, Pushkin\u2019s verses forged a link between the sublimity of the natural world and the sublimity of patriotic sentiment. \u201cThis new creed . . . taught that a nation\u2019s essence lay in its land, its vernacular language, and its folk culture,\u201d Sophie Pinkham writes in her forthcoming literary history of Russia, The Oak and the Larch. \u201cRather than seeing identity as conferred by empire or religion, Romantic nationalism held that it grew out of the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
No mental gymnastics are required to see similar forces afoot here. But Velasco\u2019s works didn\u2019t promote empire so much as a kind of \u201cinternal colonization,\u201d according to Josu\u00e9 Mart\u00ednez Rodr\u00edguez, the chief curator at the National Museum of Art in Mexico City, which loaned many of the works on display here. The significance of, say, the steam train and its attendant infrastructure, is that it facilitated the penetration of a centralized state into the unincorporated periphery, with all the violence that implied. \u201cIn Mexico, in particular, the landscape genre does come from a profoundly colonialist tradition,\u201d Rodr\u00edguez told me, \u201cbecause you had Humboldt, and then Waldeck and then Nebel: the first landscape painters who visited independent Mexico in the nineteenth century came from Germany and France not exclusively to paint and portray the landscape, but in search of territory to exploit.\u201d<\/p>\n
This ideological baggage is well documented. As the art historian Jolene Rickard has argued: \u201cFrom an Indigenous perspective, the genre of landscape painting is one of the conceptual and visceral tools of colonization.\u201d After all, its stars have been co-opted to evil ends: Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic enshrined by a recent blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, became an official artist of the Nazi party a century after his death. His grand panoramas not only exalt German soil and spirit, they depict humans facing the unknown in a way that makes conquest seem noble.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Hudson River School painters, including Velasco\u2019s contemporaries like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, are broadly known for capturing North America\u2019s majesty while providing a visual argument for the project of Manifest Destiny. Bierstadt first traveled West with a government-sponsored survey exhibition to the Nebraska Territory, using this and subsequent trips to produce kitschy epics like The Rocky Mountains, Lander\u2019s Peak (1863). Depicting a Shoshone settlement in a clearing at the foot of the Rockies, it resorts to cheap theatrics you\u2019d never see in a Velasco\u2014over-saturated colors and god light landing on a perfectly reflective lake. The swell of patriotism that such idealized depictions produce has made them easy fodder for nationalist movements wishing to stake their claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Velasco was the official artist of his era par excellence. But in the brief instance where the exhibition catalog deigns to consider the implications of that, co-curator Daniel Sobrino Ralston waves any concerns away. \u201cVelasco has occasionally been considered, with some distaste, an adjunct to the Porfirian project,\u201d he writes. \u201cHis cerebral, serene art, however, eludes so simplistic an interpretation, even if, as the painter noted in his list, several of his paintings were purchased by D\u00edaz himself.\u201d\u00a0What\u2019s actually simplistic, however, is not being able to hold two thoughts simultaneously: that the work can be cerebral, serene\u2014and implicated in a publicity campaign to romanticize the dispossession of people from their land.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There is a similarly myopic tendency among Anglo critics to downplay the work\u2019s ideological content. \u201cVelasco is not an overtly nationalistic painter in an iconographic sense,\u201d one Hyperallergic reviewer writes, incorrectly. Maybe that\u2019s because they forget that, despite Mexico\u2019s subaltern status to its northern neighbor, it, too, is a colonial project. Following the recent rise of anti-immigrant fascism in the United States, it\u2019s become fashionable for liberals to declare that places like Texas and California were stolen from Mexico. That\u2019s true. And who do you think Mexico stole them from?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00eda Velasco: A View of Mexico. Minneapolis Institute of Art, September 27, 2025\u2013January 4, 2026. They say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-179240","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}