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
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.
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