Visitors don’t seem to know about this place yet, but it is one of the finest artistic venues in Spain.  Taken from the royal collections and opened only a few years ago, it has one of the best displays of 16th century Brussels tapestries you will find, perhaps the best, beautifully hung with plenty of space.  The paintings are from Goya, Velazquez, Melendez, Patinir, Mengs, Juan de Valdés, and others patronized by the Spanish rulers.  Few bad pieces in the lot.  There are also Goya tapestries, sometimes right next to associated Goya paintings.  A splendid royal carriage.

This is perhaps my sixth (?) visit to Madrid, and the place never has felt better.  Great for walking, and full of young people and small shops.  It has absolutely displaced Barcelona as the leading city in Spain.  A+ for both dining and art, and now it is the European capital of Latin America as well.  It is no longer crazy to put it in the same league as Paris or Berlin, and these days feels more like a work in progress — in the good sense of that term — than either of those other places.

In an earlier post I detailed my history of how I got started collecting Haitian art.  There is more to that story, but for now the point is that buying Haitian art led me into buying Mexican art as well.

I was visiting the New Jersey home of famed author and art dealer Selden Rodman, who had lived part-time in Jacmel, Haiti for decades and by then was approaching his 90s.  This was in the late 1990s.  On his wall I saw some Mexican paintings, from a small Mexican village called San Agustin Oapan (good short video), in the state of Guerrero.

The style of the art was naive, broadly similar to the major trends in Haitian art at the time.  Perspective was vertically stacked, as you might find in medieval art.  Sun and stars were prominent in the pictures, often portrayed together.  You might see angels, a tableau of the village, a procession, or village animals or a local fiesta.  Colors would be bright, or black and white.

I tried to buy the paintings, but Selden refused to sell them.  I kept on trying, but to no avail.  Finally he cackled and spit out “Well, I guess you’ll just have to go there and get some!”  As if to get rid of me, which he did.

Not one to decline such a challenge, I began to investigate the matter.  I could not find the name of the small village on any maps, including the detailed Mexico maps held in the GMU library.  Finally, I called up Selden and he gave me some vague sense where it was.  I flew to Mexico City and hired a taxi.  We drove several hours to the general area, and then started asking people on the side of the road where the village was.  We kept on being redirected, and for a while it seemed fruitless.  But eventually someone told us to take an unmarked turn from the road, not too far from Iguala.  And so we climbed the hill on an unpaved road, with the 25 km distance taking almost four hours.

The eventual taxi fare was $600, a fair amount in the Mexico of the late 1990s.

Along the way were fantastic cactuses and canyons, another small village, and the occasional person with a burro.  It was hot.  I was on my way.

When I reached the village, I was surprised by the number of pigs, by the number of drunken men lying in the street, and by the living standards, even though I had been going to Haiti.  I later learned that a family of seven might earn about $1500-2000 a year, and if seven children were born perhaps only four or five would survive to adulthood.  I thought the place at least would have a shop or a restaurant, but no.

Due to its remoteness, Oapan was still Nahuatl-speaking (the older people did not speak Spanish at all) and had preserved an especially large number of pre-Columbian customs and religious practices.  Oapan, by the way, is a Nahuatl word for “where the green maize stalk abounds.”  To this day, I consider Nahuatl to be the most beautiful and expressive language I have heard.

I started asking around for Juan Camilo Ayala, the name of the painter whose work I so admired.  It turns out there were two people with that name in the village, but eventually I found his home and knocked on the door.  I was not expecting to find a corn farmer and a bunch of domestic animals behind the door, but indeed I did.  He later related he was shocked that I came to visit, but he responded calmly in a non-plussed manner.  “Not many people come here,” he noted in his own broken Spanish.

I showed him a photo of the painting I liked in Rodman’s house, but he did not remember it.  Nonetheless he pledged to paint, if not a copy, something in the same general style and inspiration.  I asked for a large painting, and was surprised when he cited a price of only $100.

Like an idiot, I handed over an AmEx traveler’s check, and Juan Camilo thought it was dollars.  (Later on we straightened that mess out, and I started using Western Union.)

I gave them my address, which they wrote in the rafters of the home, above the screeching roosters, and I headed back down to Mexico City with the cab. Several months later a beautiful picture arrived at the house, in perfectly good condition.  It hangs on the stairwell to this very day.

I was hooked, and soon this story was to continue…