Los Castillo was a Mexican silver, jewelry, and decorative-arts workshop founded in Taxco, Guerrero, in 1939. It was established by the silversmith Antonio Castillo with his three brothers, his wife Margot van Voorhies Carr, and his first cousin Salvador Terán. The Castillo brothers had trained at William Spratling's Taller de Las Delicias and became part of the first generation of independent workshop proprietors associated with the Taxco school of silver design. All four brothers received a full commercial and technical training at Las Delicias, where Miguel Castillo later served as a general administrator responsible for the more than 400 artisans employed there during the Second World War. Los Castillo produced jewelry, flatware, hollowware, furniture, architectural decoration, and decorative objects. The workshop became particularly known for experimentation with mixed metals, stone and shell mosaic, silver applied to wood, enamel, and pluma azteca, a technique incorporating colored feathers behind pierced metal. Its work combined pre-Columbian imagery, Mexican flora and fauna, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and later modernist abstraction. During the Second World War, Los Castillo expanded to employ more than 300 workers and produced identification bracelets and chains for American military personnel. The large workshop contracted following labor disputes and changing economic conditions in the late 1950s, but Los Castillo continued on a reduced basis until 1995.
Founding and early history
Antonio Castillo and his brothers were among the young Taxco craftsmen trained at William Spratling's Taller de Las Delicias. The early workshop was supervised by master silversmiths from nearby Iguala, including Artemio Navarrete and Alfonso Mondragón, and developed a structured apprenticeship system through which young workers learned cutting, soldering, repoussé, chasing, engraving, and other specialized skills. The brothers’ association with Las Delicias was not continuous. The family had come originally from Veracruz and moved from Taxco to Toluca when their father was transferred, and none of the brothers appears in a photograph of the workshop taken in 1934. During the period near Mexico City, Antonio and Jorge worked for about six months at the Taller Matl with Matilde Poulat and Ricardo Salas; Morrill and Berk suggest that the baroque repoussé forms Jorge helped produce there informed his early work at Los Castillo. The brothers subsequently returned to Las Delicias, where Antonio became a maestro. Antonio Castillo became a master silversmith at Las Delicias. In 1939, he left Spratling's workshop and established Los Castillo with members of his family and close collaborators. The founding group included his brothers Jorge "Chato" Castillo, Miguel Castillo, and Justo "Coco" Castillo, Margot van Voorhies Carr, and Salvador Terán. Margot, who had married Antonio Castillo after meeting him in Taxco in 1937, became the principal designer during the workshop's early period. She prepared drawings that Antonio and the workshop's silversmiths translated into three-dimensional silver objects. Her early designs frequently drew upon Japanese art and natural forms, including fish, waves, shells, flowers, and foliage. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art attributes several early Los Castillo necklaces and bracelets to Margot's design direction. Early Los Castillo jewelry included sculptural silver forms, floral and animal motifs, pieces set with amethyst and other stones, and designs influenced by Mexican colonial ornament and pre-Columbian art. The workshop also developed an extensive cataloguing system in which models were assigned inventory numbers. The original shop and workshop were established on the Plazuela Bernal in Taxco, which remained the firm’s principal showroom for more than fifty years. During the 1950s Antonio Castillo acquired the Hotel Los Arcos and Los Castillo opened a further shop there, and by 1969 the company also occupied premises in Mexico City on Amberes and Juárez.
Designers and silversmiths Los Castillo operated as a collaborative taller. Although the workshop's objects ordinarily carried a Los Castillo hallmark, their designs and fabrication could involve several family members, designers, master silversmiths, apprentices, and specialists.
Antonio Castillo Antonio Castillo directed the business and workshop and remained closely involved in design, production, and relations with clients. His training at Las Delicias gave him the technical ability to interpret drawings and guide their execution in metal. He also recruited and trained craftsmen who later established independent careers.
Margot van Voorhies Carr Margot served as the leading designer during the workshop's first years. Her designs contributed an emphasis on organic line, Japanese-derived imagery, flowers, fish, shells, and curving forms. After the end of her marriage to Antonio Castillo, she left Los Castillo and established the independent workshop Margot de Taxco. Several silversmiths associated with Los Castillo followed her, including Miguel Meléndez and Sigi Pineda. LACMA describes Margot as the lead designer at Los Castillo before she opened her own workshop following the couple's divorce.
Jorge "Chato" Castillo Jorge "Chato" Castillo was regarded by fellow Taxco silversmiths as one of the workshop's most technically inventive designers. His work ranged from representational pre-Columbian figures to mixed-metal abstraction. The Fowler Museum catalogue describes him as one of Taxco's outstanding designers because of the aesthetic range of his work. Chato was closely associated with the development of metales casados, or married metals, in which different metals were cut and joined into a single flush surface. William Spratling later credited Jorge Castillo with generating the principal ideas behind Los Castillo's experimentation with married metals, stone mosaic, and related mixed-material processes. Morrill and Berk credit him with coining the term metales casados and with developing a range of related processes, among them divorced metals, feathers set behind silver, stone and abalone inlay, silver-encrusted onyx, blued steel and metal painting. He also devised an alloy he called rex, composed of five percent silver, forty-five percent brass and fifty percent copper, which the workshop used alongside nickel, gold, silver, copper, brass, alpaca and monel to widen its range of metal colors.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
