The Fowler Museum at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) is well regarded for its exceptional exhibitions (and accompanying publications) extending over many decades. Under the tenure of distinguished administrators, like the current head Marla Berns and prior recent directors Doran Ross and Christopher Donnan, the content, presentation and interpretative value of the Fowler’s ambitious exhibitions have been superb educational and aesthetic models for illuminating the material culture and artistic forces that have pulsed throughout the world from the time humanity began making objects marking our presence on earth.

The exhibition Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda, continuing to March 15, 2009, is one more successful effort, a lovely and inspiring jewel in the Fowler crown. The Fowler Museum’s curatorial team, led by Betsy Quick, and consulting curator Gobi Stromberg, a specialist in the Taxco silver industry, have mounted a contextually rich and visually satisfying installation of Pineda’s jewelry drawn from the archive of Los Angeles collectors Cindy Tietze and Stuart Hodosh. But against the Fowler’s backdrop it is the beautifully designed and elegantly refined jewelry of Antonio Pineda that takes precedence.

Located in the Mexican state of Guerrero, the mountainous city of Taxco is today a still beautiful vestige of the Colonial Era’s silver mining industry, now with a concentration of many hundreds of jewelers working in silver, although mostly lacking the creativity and experimentation that marked the extraordinary decades dating from the 1930s. Antonio Pineda, born in 1919, arrived appropriately enough just as the Mexican Revolution was ending. In the following years the government and its associated elite encouraged the making of products, such as silver jewelry and other goods. With a keen awareness of its birth as a new nation in the Modern Age, an emerging, newly proud Mexico was eager to display its unique cultural identity. Architecture, fine art and decorative artforms took hold and bloomed in this fertile environment. It was a period that saw the development and rise of the great artists José Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros who reached past the Spanish conquest, exploring their ancient roots and transforming their muse into a contemporary idiom.

In the years ending the 1920s, when Pineda was yet a child, Taxco experienced its initial growth as a tourist attraction for Mexicans, Americans and other world travelers. It became a magnet for artists and writers; Frieda Kahlo, Miguel Covarrubias, Hart Crane, William Faulkner, John Reed, and Paul Bowles gathered in the charming small municipality. But the late 1940s and 1950s (the “Silver Age”) saw the real spike in tourism by which time Taxco silversmiths had established a sophisticated craft adding to the town’s visibility. Taxco’s native and intimate appeal was further popularized by Hollywood film stars Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Palance, and Barbara Stanwyck, and filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and John Huston. The political crowd could also discretely retreat to the remote area with Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Mexico’s presidents, and Leon Trotsky among those in attendance. The American heiress Barbara Hutton favored Taxco and accompanied by her personal entourage spent very large sums, by present-day rates, on silver jewelry and other items whenever she passed through. Before many decades passed, Taxco’s history and its silversmithed products made the city a must see on many travelers’ to-do lists for their Mexican vacation; and its allure has not abated.

A fortuitous confluence of relationships would assist Antonio Pineda in his rise as one of Taxco’s greatest silversmiths. In 1926, architecture professor William Spratling, an American who taught at Tulane University, arrived to study Taxco’s baroque architecture. He quickly grew to love the community and stayed on, becoming over time the renowned celebrity and mythic influence that would help Taxco emerge from its recessional slide. Then there was the United States ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, who began programs that would not only induce financial but cultural investments between the two countries. He often discerned, through his many contacts among the artistic and intellectual elite, just when and where to be be helpful; one such place was Taxco. Spratling, with his own network of many friends, like designer Frederick Davis, was aided by Morrow and others in stimulating the re-emergence of Taxco’s artisanal silver production. With the opening of, and later very successful, Las Delicias, his studio would provide a locus for silversmiths, training them in their heritage but with a modern aesthetic. Antonio Pineda was among the first, a still young boy of ten years, to apprentice in Spratling’s taller.

Over time, Pineda trained in a number of studios and by 1939, at the age of twenty having decided to become a designer and silversmith, opened his own taller. Curator Stromberg in the attending catalog, along with a fine, deliberative essay by Ana Elena Mallet, writes in-depth and incisively of this complex and historically dramatic post-revolutionary period in modern Mexico’s cultural transformation occurring within the larger turbulence of the twentieth century. Antonio Pineda’s professional journey and mature aesthetic are certainly partly results of Mexico’s developing special identity of its ancient past and indigenous people as well as an internationalism that embraced the modern world. But Pineda is also individual and distinctive in his creations.

Within the guileless simplicity of their clean and abstract designs, Pineda’s jewelry exudes an authentic personal energy and happy buoyancy, somehow imparting just how much he loved silver itself. The jewelry is also extremely sensual, so lovely and lyrical, as well as being precisely made and delightfully engineered to enhance a woman’s native beauty. It is marvelous and refreshing to behold the sheer intelligence of his aesthetic and both the universality and diversity of his vocabulary spoken in silver.