Chemistry:Mexican silver renaissance

Short description: 20th century revival of Mexican silver design

Taxco, Guerrero, the principal center of the Mexican silver renaissance

The Mexican silver renaissance, also called the Taxco Silver Age, was a twentieth-century revival of silver design and production in Mexico. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, its workshops reworked pre-Columbian and colonial motifs along the lines of Mexican modernism in handwrought jewelry and hollowware, sold largely to the United States and growing with the tourist trade that reached the town in the same years. The center was Taxco, Guerrero. Workshops and retailers in Mexico City and abroad belonged to the movement from the start, and its international standing was highest in the 1940s and 1950s.

Its best-known figure is the American-born architect and designer William Spratling, who opened the workshop Las Delicias in Taxco in 1931, trained apprentices who went on to found their own talleres, and built the export trade to the United States. Guerrero had worked metal long before he arrived.

Frederick W. Davis, whose Mexico City shop came before the Taxco workshops, was the other central figure; the silversmiths included Héctor Aguilar, Antonio Pineda, Margot van Voorhies Carr and Los Castillo. Museums have since collected and exhibited the work — Maestros de Plata at the San Antonio Museum of Art in 2002, Silver Seduction at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2008.

Earlier metalworking traditions

Specialized artisans in pre-Columbian societies worked gold, copper and shell into jewelry and ceremonial objects, and did so within settled occupational hierarchies. Colonial workshops turned out ecclesiastical silver, domestic wares and equestrian ornament. In Guerrero, and at Iguala in particular, gold- and silversmiths were still making filigree and other personal ornament when Spratling reached Taxco.

Taxco had mined silver since the colonial era. Working it into finished design was new in the twentieth century.

Postrevolutionary cultural reconstruction

The renaissance grew out of the cultural rebuilding that followed the Mexican Revolution, when artists, anthropologists and government officials set about defining a modern national culture from Mexico's Indigenous past and its popular arts.

The Exposición de Arte Popular, mounted in Mexico City in 1921 for the centenary of independence, presented pottery, textiles and furniture as expressions of national culture and as a possible basis for small-scale industry. The painter Gerardo Murillo, known as Dr. Atl, sat on the organizing committee and documented the same material in his two-volume Las artes populares en México (1922). A second version opened in Los Angeles the following year.

Mexican Arts opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 13, 1930 and closed on November 9. It brought together about 1,300 works, archaeological through modern, on Carnegie funding and under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts. René d'Harnoncourt organized it, and the Metropolitan was the first of fourteen American venues it reached over two years. The Museum of Modern Art followed in 1940 with Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, about 5,000 objects across the same range.

Frederick W. Davis and the Mexico City market

Frederick W. Davis built a market for Mexican decorative arts and jewelry in Mexico City before Taxco became the center of the trade. He had moved to Mexico in 1910, and he later managed the Sonora News Company in the Palacio de Iturbide Hotel. He travelled widely, learned the regional crafts and got to know the people making them.

He commissioned Mexican silversmiths to make jewelry out of regional forms, archaeological art and modern design, and he sold work by independent craftsmen under his own mark without designing it himself. Morrill and Berk credit him with holding the workmanship to a high standard, sharpening designs for foreign buyers, and separating serious decorative art from cheap tourist goods.

Davis hired d'Harnoncourt in 1927, and together they widened the company's range in both fine and popular art. Artists and intellectuals gathered at the shop, and the two men put on one of the first commercial exhibitions of contemporary Mexican painting. D'Harnoncourt went on to organize Mexican Arts in 1930, to run the United States Indian Arts and Crafts Board as general manager from 1939 to 1944, and to direct the Museum of Modern Art from 1949.

Davis went on to manage antiques and crafts at Sanborn's, and took part in institutions set up to preserve Mexican popular arts and bring them to market. For Morrill and Berk, Davis and Spratling are the two people who started Mexico's twentieth-century silver renaissance.

William Spratling and Las Delicias

William Spratling, who established the Taller de Las Delicias in Taxco in 1931

Establishment of the workshop

Spratling had taught architecture at Tulane University. He first visited Mexico in 1926 and settled in Taxco near the end of the decade, where his circle took in the muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the United States ambassador Dwight Morrow, and Davis and d'Harnoncourt. He collected archaeological and popular art, and wrote about Mexican architecture and rural life.

He opened the Taller de Las Delicias in 1931, bringing in Artemio Navarrete and Alfonso Mondragón from Iguala as his first master smiths. Apprentices entered as zorritas, or junior helpers, and worked their way up a ladder of skill and responsibility.

His first motifs came from archaeological clay stamps, from codices and from colonial ornament. The early pieces were heavy-gauge, in silver purer than conventional sterling, set with amethyst, obsidian and jade, and with wood and tortoiseshell.

Furniture, textiles and tinwork sold alongside the silver.

Workshop organization

Work in a large Taxco taller was divided. The owner or designer made the model, and specialized workers took each piece through the bench operations in turn: cutting and hammering, chasing, stone setting, final polishing. This was neither the mechanized factory nor the older arrangement in which one artisan carried an object from start to finish.

Apprentices learned by watching and assisting the experienced men before they were handed harder work. The most senior became master smiths or supervisors, and some left to set up on their own; internal design competitions at Las Delicias encouraged experiment and prepared artisans to do exactly that. Pieces carried the name or hallmark of the workshop proprietor, though it was often the master smith who worked out how to turn a drawing into something that could actually be made. In Pineda's taller, the masters who executed his designs sometimes stamped their own hallmarks alongside his.

Loss of the company

Wartime expansion was paid for with outside money. To meet rising production costs Spratling sold all but a small part of his holding in Spratling y Artesanos, and by 1944 he had lost control of the firm. In 1946 he sold what remained and resigned. He withdrew to a ranch he owned at Taxco el Viejo and spent the rest of his life rebuilding the business, designing, and collecting archaeological material; in 1951 he incorporated a second company, William Spratling, S.A., with no outside backing. He was killed in a car accident outside Taxco on August 7, 1967. By then nearly 3,000 people in the town worked in silver.

Formation of the Taxco school

Main article: Chemistry:Taxco school of silver design

Through the late 1930s and 1940s, artisans trained at Las Delicias or connected with it set up on their own. Designers watched one another's work and competed for buyers, for prizes and for the best smiths.

Silver pitcher by the Castillo family of Taxco, exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares in Mexico City, 2015

Héctor Aguilar, who had worked for Spratling, founded Taller Borda, known for weighty jewelry and hollowware, and for mixed-metal work combining silver with copper and brass. Several experienced silversmiths left Las Delicias with him and took its techniques and its way of organizing work to the new shop. Taller Borda expanded during the Second World War and developed commercial relationships in the United States, among them work associated with the costume-jewelry company Coro.

Los Castillo, founded by the brothers Antonio, Jorge, Justo and Miguel Castillo, went after technical problems. The workshop developed or refined metales casados ("married metals"), in which silver is joined to copper and brass, and it combined silver with stone mosaic, feather inlay and ceramic. Margot van Voorhies Carr, then married to Antonio Castillo, designed for the workshop in its early years before setting up on her own as Margot de Taxco, where she worked chiefly in enamel over silver. Matilde Poulat, who worked in Mexico City under the mark Matl, set silver with coral, turquoise and amethyst in densely ornamented pieces drawing on religious and colonial imagery.

Antonio Pineda trained briefly at Las Delicias, worked afterwards with Valentín Vidaurreta in Mexico City, and opened his own shop in 1939. His early work drew on Art Nouveau and on Spratling. By the 1950s his jewelry had become spare and sculptural, built from hollow forms, articulated links and concealed clasps. The scion of the San Francisco retailer Gump's bought his collection outright, and his jewelry appeared in a San Francisco exhibition in 1944; the relationship lasted.

Salvador Terán worked in oxidized surfaces and applied silver forms, for jewelry and objects with deep relief and strong shadow. Also working in Taxco were Ana Núñez de Brilanti, Sigi Pineda and Enrique Ledesma.

Design and techniques

A Mexican silver bracelet with mother-of-pearl inlay

A silversmith working a piece of silver in Taxco, 2019

Motifs came from Pre-Columbian sculpture, from codices and from the stepped fret, and from colonial silver, regional popular art, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and international modernism.

Sheet silver was pierced and cut (calar), chased and engraved with shaped tools (cincelar), or hammered from the reverse to raise relief (repoussé). Smiths set it with stones or mosaic inlay, oxidized it to darken the recesses, and hinged some pieces. Dies and presses were used for selected commercial lines. Hollow construction gave a piece the look of mass without the weight, and mixed-metal construction set silver against copper and brass.

Finished objects usually carried a design number and the workshop hallmark. In 1948 Mexico introduced a national eagle mark for registered production and minimum silver standards, assigning each registered maker a number within it. The eagle was abandoned in 1979–80 and replaced by a federal alphanumeric system.

Mexican modernism and national identity

Like the muralists and architects of those years, the designers transformed their Indigenous and colonial sources rather than preserving them. The earliest work adapted archaeological motifs more or less directly; later designers pared them down to geometry and volume, as in Pineda's mature jewelry, where the forms are spare and angular and the clasps and junctures disappear into the design.

Ana Elena Mallet has argued that Pineda and other Taxco designers moved past the category of the "Mexican curio" by turning national and regional sources into forms that belonged in cosmopolitan modern design. The Fowler Museum describes the Taxco School as a merger of Pre-Columbian and colonial reference with modernism.

The Spratling-centered account has been questioned. In a 2023 dissertation on modernism and mineral extraction, Grace Kuipers reads Las Delicias as an expression of a politics of developmentalism, "in which U.S. standards of capitalist modernity promised to more efficiently liberate Mexico's minerals," and places the workshop within early efforts at cultural diplomacy between the two countries. On her account Spratling's formalism treated pre-Hispanic design as a deposit to be worked, promising to "resurrect and refine the 'latent values' of Pre-Hispanic design into an abstract store of value that could be possessed or exchanged."

Tourism and international exchange

Taxco's growth as a silver center depended on tourism, and tourism depended on roads. The highway from Mexico City to Acapulco ran through Cuernavaca and Taxco, opening up a town that had been hard to reach. Government promotion sold Taxco as an authentic colonial town and as a modern resort with hotels and shops.

The first visitors were writers and artists, many of them friends of Spratling. By the 1940s and 1950s Taxco was a vacation town for Hollywood and a location for feature films. The money built hotels and drove up silver production and sales, and some 150 silver shops were trading there by the early 1950s. Local artisans met foreign modernists in the town, and the expatriate communities of Mexico City and Cuernavaca with them. Foreign visitors arrived carrying markets, materials and business connections.

Taxco Silver Fair

Main article: Engineering:Taxco National Silver Fair

The annual Silver Fair developed from design competitions held within Las Delicias during the 1930s. The contests let artisans experiment with their own designs, and rewarded technical and aesthetic work alike.

In 1937 the state of Guerrero recognized June 27 as Silver Day. The event grew into an annual fair, national in scope and later international. Awards brought prestige to designers and workshops, and sharpened the competition among them.

Antonio Pineda organized and expanded the fair. In 1953 he won the first national prize, and later widened it to take in exhibitions, music and dance.

Wartime expansion and commercial distribution

The Second World War accelerated the industry's growth, because American retailers had lost access to many European suppliers and turned to Mexican workshops. Taxco firms turned out jewelry, flatware and hollowware for the United States market, along with identification bracelets and other military accessories.

Spratling's work went out through retailers and catalogues including Montgomery Ward, and through upscale stores such as Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Pineda's relationship with Gump's of San Francisco lasted, and Taller Borda worked with Coro.

At their height, the largest workshops employed hundreds of workers. Presses and dies went into some wartime and commercial production, but most of the output was still handwrought.

Decline of the large workshops

The large-workshop system weakened during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1955 the Mexican government, seeking to promote the Pacific beach resorts, built a new highway from Mexico City to Acapulco that bypassed Taxco and ended its role as a required tourist stop. New labor and social-security obligations pushed up costs, while export taxes, cheaper competition, copying and the loss of some foreign accounts pressed on the major firms.

Gobi Stromberg attributes a decisive turn from the 1960s to the coyotes, independent dealers who bought silver by weight and took no interest in quality or design. Carrying none of the tax and labor obligations the workshops carried, and encouraging both copying and the sale of work below its worth, they drew the trade away from the large and medium talleres until those broke.

Large workshops cut employment, closed, or subcontracted to smaller home-based operations. Taller Borda eventually ceased operating. Los Castillo went through a strike and reorganization before continuing on a smaller scale, and Pineda reduced his workshop and came to rely on independent smiths.

The dispersal of artisans carried skills into hundreds of smaller workshops, but it broke up the concentrated division of labor on which the most ambitious work had depended.

Taxco went on making silver. Family workshops, wholesalers and commercial factories kept producing, and the town's shops came to serve tourists and day-trippers from Mexico City rather than the earlier luxury trade. The Fowler Museum notes that a small number of designers still work by hand, but judges most present-day Taxco silver to fall short of the design and technical standards of Pineda's generation.

Influence beyond Mexico

From the mid-1940s the United States Indian Arts and Crafts Board commissioned Spratling to devise designs, and a workshop system to make them, that could be adapted for Alaska Native communities. Seven Alaska Native trainees studied silversmithing as scholarship apprentices at his ranch at Taxco el Viejo over the winter of 1948–49, working under Mexican master smiths, and were promised employment through the Alaska Native Service on their return. The wider program failed, and Spratling's models passed into the Board's headquarters collection.

Legacy

The Mexican silver renaissance made Taxco a center of modern jewelry and metalwork known well beyond Mexico.

The work entered museum collections and became the subject of exhibitions. The San Antonio Museum of Art organized Maestros de Plata: William Spratling and the Mexican Silver Renaissance in 2002, and it travelled to San Diego, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, New Orleans and New York. The Fowler Museum at UCLA followed in 2008 with Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda, which presented Pineda as a major figure in the Taxco School and in Mexican modernist design.

The Fowler Museum's 2008 catalogue described its focus on Pineda as a departure from publications that had generally foregrounded Spratling, and set him among the contemporaries who built the Taxco School with him. Later scholarship has given more attention to the Mexican master smiths, and to the women and the younger designers of the Taxco School.

The collectors' market for vintage Taxco silver has grown better informed. Hallmark chronologies, and the names and initials that master silversmiths stamped on pieces they had executed, have made it possible to identify individual makers such as Fortino Mota. Demand has encouraged counterfeits and unauthorized production of established designs.

See also

• Mexican handcrafts and folk art
• Jewellery design
• Mexican muralism

Further reading

• Danly, Susan, ed (2002). Casa Mañana: The Morrow Collection of Mexican Popular Arts. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 9780826328052. 
• Mark, Joan T. (2000). The Silver Gringo: William Spratling and Taxco. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 9780826320797.