Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Yale University Press
2004-04-10
252 pages
8 1/2 x 11
100 b/w +100 color illus.
Paper ISBN: 9780300109719
Cloth ISBN: 9780300102413

Ilona Katzew, Associate Curator of Latin American Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Selected for Honorable Mention for a 2003-2004 Book Award given by the Association for Latin American Art.

The pictorial genre known as casta painting is one of the most compelling forms of artistic expression from colonial Mexico. Created as sets of consecutive images, the works portray racial mixing among the main groups that inhabited the colony: Indians, Spaniards, and Africans. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ilona Katzew places casta paintings in their social and historical context, showing for the first time the ways in which the meanings of the paintings changed along with shifting colonial politics.

The book examines how casta painting developed art historically, why race became the subject of a pictorial genre that spanned an entire century, who commissioned and collected the works, and what meanings the works held for contemporary audiences. Drawing on a range of previously unpublished archival and visual material, Katzew sheds new light on racial dynamics of eighteenth-century Mexico and on the construction of identity and self-image in the colonial world.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction
  • 1. Painters and Paintings: A Visual Tradition and Its Historiography
  • 2. “A Marvelous Variety of Colors?”: Racial Ideology and the Sistema de Castas
  • 3. The Rise of Casta Painting: Exoticism and Creole Pride, 1711-1760
  • 4. Changing Perspectives: Casta Painting in the Era of the Bourbon Reforms, 1760-1790
  • 5. The Theater of Marvels: Casta Paintings in the Textual Microcosmos
  • Concluding Remarks: A Genre with Many Meanings
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Photograph Credits
  • Index
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