Hispanic Art

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Today I explored San Antonio’s Hispanic artistic legacy.

I started at Market Square, which my guidebook calls the closest journey to Mexico possible without a passport.

The route there passes San Fernando Cathedral, the oldest Catholic cathedral in the United States, built in 1738.

The architecture is based on Spanish Gothic, with two tall towers surrounding a central building.





The market itself consists of a series of long buildings containing dozens of vendors.

They sell items of all kinds: folk art, religious figurines, scarves and other clothing, and food.

All the signs are in both Spanish and English.

Flags and banners hang from above.

After my experience last night, I found a shop selling traditional Mexican pastries, which were delicious.

San Antonio Art Museum

I spent most of the day at the San Antonio Art Museum.

It’s yet another comprehensive regional museum.

This one is located in a historic building, the original brewery of Lone Star beer.

Found in practically every bar in Texas, it’s the unofficial state drink.





As noted elsewhere, I tend to dislike museums like this, because they show a little bit of many different types of art.

I prefer museums that collect particular subjects in depth.

The San Antonio Art Museum is worth a long visit due to two very special collections, contemporary art and the largest collection of Hispanic art in the United States.





Contemporary art fills several rooms, with a few billboard sized paintings in the lobby.

One of these is a large colorful painting of abstract geometry flowing around the canvas, like an explosion in an imaginary space.

It’s by Al Held; he changed to this style from his more famous minimalist work just before his death.

The museum has Double Scramble by Frank Stella, showing two sets of interleaved rectangles in different colors.

The color contrasts create optical effects for the viewer.

Irene Rice Pereira painted Pillar of Fire, a geometric work of overlapping wide lines in different colors.

More recently, Franco Mondini-Ruiz sculpted Legally Separated, a wedding cake cut down the middle.

Like most contemporary work, the styles cover everything possible.





Local artist Hills Snyder created a work which is San Antonio’s equivalent of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.

Like that famous readymade, it explores exactly what makes something a work of art, in particular the role of having it in a museum.

He found an old Lone Star beer can, from the era when the brewery was based in the museum building.

Snyder then declared the can to be a found object artwork, and donated it to the museum.

He made a big deal of his donation, including sending out a press release.

The can now sits under glass, with its official acquisition tag still attached.





An entire wing of the museum holds the largest collection of Hispanic art in the United States, which is worth a visit by itself.

It’s arranged roughly chronologically, and then by topic.

The art starts with Maya art, which is relatively hard to find.

When the Spanish conquered Mexico, they destroyed much of it.





Maya made ceramic figurines and bowls.

The figurines show highly stylized human figures.

They also made elaborate paper tapestries, which were folded into items called Mayan Books.

These are incredibly rare, because the Spanish considered them heathen and burned all they found.

The two tapestries on display are copies, because the originals are so fragile they would disintegrate in the light.

Both of them illustrate the Mayan ceremonial cycle with dense layered symbolism.

A write up next to the books explains the major figures.





The next room holds Mexican folk art from around the time of the Spanish conquest.

It holds many masks, which folk tradition states embody the soul of what they symbolize.

Many folk paintings of saints appear on the walls, along with rare examples of santos, small paintings created as religious icons (see New Mexico history is US history).

Carved religious figures appear too.





That segues to rooms of art by Spanish colonists.

Like their British and French counterparts, they commissioned art to showcase their wealth and position, along with the glory of the Catholic Church.

Accordingly, the section features lots of portraits along with sculpture and housewares made of gold and silver.

Patrons commissioned incredible carved altars and church backdrops of the type I saw in New Mexico (see Pueblo Life), and the museum has several.

It also has beautiful portraits of saints, painted to encourage religious devotion.





For the next two and a half century, art in Mexico followed European art trends, painting traditional still lives, landscapes and portraits, along with religious art.

In the 1920s, that radically changed.

Mexico became a center of the indigenous art movement, which encouraged artists to draw on native non-European traditions.

Most practitioners, though not all, had socialist political sympathies.

In Mexico, the movement was lead by muralists such as Diego Rivera (see Put Your Hands Up For Detroit), who painted large scale works extolling the dignity of farmers and other manual laborers.

The museum has several Rivera portraits, of course, along with work by artists only experts have ever heard of.





One room holds a set of wooden sculptures called ‘fair art’.

Mexico holds a system of juried art fairs around the country.

The museum bought these items from those fairs.

Most of it reminded me of better crafted versions of what appears in the early Spanish conquest section.





The final room showcases modern and contemporary art from Latin America.

Like most, the styles are incredibly diverse.

Some work updates folk art tradition with European modernism.

Others draw on the Mexican muralists.

Still others take European ideas in surprising directions.

Joaquin Torres Garcia, one of the most influential modernists, painted geometric minimalism based on a grid pattern.

David Zamora Casas painted In Loving Memory of Momma Kitty, a Surrealist update of the religious paintings from the Spanish Colonial period.

I really liked this section.





The rest of the museum feels unexciting compared to those two collections.

Traditional American painting fills exactly one room, mostly minor work from major names.

European painting gets two rooms, also minor works.

The museum also has a room each of Greek and Roman antiquities, mostly pots and three statues.

I breezed through these because the two main collections are the standouts.

Texas Barbeque

After the museum, I drove east.

The hill country faded away to reveal flat plains covered in fields and clumps of trees.

The entire area had a nasty petrochemical smell, so bad I wished I had a hardtop for the first time since the Central Valley of California.





I pulled off the highway to visit the town of Lockhart.

Like many states with southern influence, Texans love barbeque.

The state is so large that the cooking here varies by region.

Lockhart is the center for a variant based on eastern European meat traditions.

Some consider it the best in Texas.





I ate my dinner at Kretz Market, which started as an actual meat market a century ago.

The entrance corridor has two doors, marked ‘meat’ and ‘vegetarian’.

The latter goes directly into the dining room with no food!

The meat door leads to a large room filled with industrial sized iron pots.

Barbeque must be ordered by meat type and weight.

The cook pulls a hunk out of the appropriate pot and cuts off slices.

Sides must be purchased separately.





The pork was quite good.

They cook it long enough it fell off the bone while eating it.

Eating must be done by hand, because they don’t have forks!

Given my love of dry Carolina style, this place ranks as good as Memphis (see A Little Slice of Heaven) but can’t compare to Lexington (see Pigs and Tobacco).

Houston

Later tonight, my experience of Texas changed drastically.

Throughout history, humans have dreamed of planning the perfect city.

The theories of Le Corbusier were merely the most recent to be widely adopted (see Days of Future’s Past).

Examples exist worldwide, from ancient Egypt to the present.

The most dramatic recent attempt is probably Brasilia, the capitol of Brazil, a city of over two million people planned by exactly three people.

When evaluating their achievements, it’s worth examining the alternative.

What would a large modern city with absolutely no planning at all be like?

I’m about to find out, because I’m driving directly toward the largest city in the United States with no zoning rules, Houston Texas.

It’s an overwhelming mass (and mess) of sprawl.





The development starts many miles from the city center.

The interstate passes one of the largest outlet malls I have ever seen.

Even accounting for the Texas obsession with bigness, this place is huge.

Soon afterward, the highway starts adding lanes, going from two to four, then six, then eight.

Giant billboards sprout like weeds, until they line the roadway to the horizon.

Even this late at night, traffic quickly becomes nasty, the worst since Atlanta (see History, for a City that Doesn’t Like Any).





The landscape beyond the highway looks like Atlanta too, on an even bigger scale.

A sea of strip malls, fast food joints, and office parks stretches beyond the highway lights.

Small businesses with gaudy neon sights poke out where they can.

This city is almost the definition of visual overload, and it isn’t pretty overload either.

The sprawl spreads over a nearly unimaginable distance; so long I needed over an hour from my first encounter to reaching my hotel near the city center.





Houston distances are so large that I had to choose my hotel based on what I wanted to see.

I ultimately chose the museum district.

Several of Houston’s most important museums are located within blocks of each other.

Since the city has no zoning, it happened through the choices of individual institutions rather than any type of deliberate plan.





I got a sweet break on my hotel tonight.

Like northern New Jersey, Houston has a huge number of hotels that cater to business travelers.

During slow periods, they offer last minute room deals at almost absurd discounts.

Early November is one of these periods, so I was able to book a descent sized, although generic, SUITE at a Hilton for the less than I’ve paid for budget hotel rooms elsewhere on this trip.

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Photos

Market Square
Inside Market Square, a slice of Mexico in San Antonio

Market Square
Outside plaza in Market Square

San Fernando Cathedral
The oldest Catholic Cathedral in the US

San Antonio Art Museum
Former Lone Star Brewery turned into an art museum

Parking lot art
Assemblage in the San Antonio Art Museum parking lot

Hispanic folk art gate
Tile folk art gate that once sat outside a house in San Antonio

The Best BBQ in Texas?
Kretz Market, what some call the best BBQ joint in Texas

Famous sign
Often photographed sign at the Kretz entrance. Notice how some things HAVE changed in the last century :)

Kretz cooking room
A small portion of the barbeque cooking room at Kretz