Paradise The Art That Made Mexico: Paradise, Power and Prayers

In February 1943, Mexico's landscape was transformed.

After weeks of rumbling within the earth,

a fissure opened in the ground...

..and a column of black smoke billowed into the heavens.

The next day, a flaming pyramid had risen from the earth.

It was the size of an eight-storey building and counting.

For the first time in modern history, the complete

life cycle of a volcano was about to be witnessed.

Hundreds fled as rivers of lava consumed the local villages.

But one man edged closer and closer.

He was an ageing Mexican artist called Dr Atl and he began

obsessively and recklessly painting the convulsing fire.

"A river of lava ran towards me," he wrote. "The heat suffocated me.

"I felt myself burn."

Dr Atl lived to paint the volcano multiple times

in works of visionary power.

When the volcano erupted, the lava covered everything.

Atl must have been so overwhelmed and, somehow, so inspired by this.

For Dr Atl, the allure of the volcano

was as a symbol of radical, unstoppable transformation.

It embodied an ever-changing Mexico.

A nation propelled through history by three main forces.

Land and nature, which have been both the source of life,

and a cause of conflict and death since the earliest times.

The struggle for power,

which has defined this nation's history over millennia.

And faith, in Mesoamerican gods and Christian iconography,

which has been ever present throughout its existence.

They are the beats, rhythms and currents of Mexico,

and they run through my blood.

As an artist born here, and with roots stretching back

generations, I want to take you on a journey, through these three

great stories, that have shaped not just Mexican art, but Mexico itself.

In this programme, I want to find out how artists have

drawn on the landscape and forces of nature

to transmit their own visions of what it means to be Mexican.

Because from the earliest times, depictions of Mexico's land

have never just been about conveying their sublime beauty,

but about projecting topographies of ideology and identity.

The art of Mexico's landscape

has helped project the world views of ancient civilisations.

It forged new national identities in times of crisis.

And it established revolutionary imagery,

that, for the first time, was distinctly Mexican.

Art that's not simply ABOUT this land.

Art that could only be OF this land.

Mexico is a landscape of potent energy.

An ongoing collision of vast tectonic plates.

1,600 miles north to south,

the country's length is a distance from Sweden to Spain.

Snow-capped volcanoes loom over fertile plains.

Deserts give way to tropical forest.

At the heart of the country is the Valley of Mexico.

This fertile plateau sustained

some of the greatest civilisations of the pre-Hispanic era.

Ringed by active volcanoes, shaken by earthquakes, this has always

been somewhere Mother Nature is ever present in people's thoughts.

And from the earliest art of what we call Mexico,

depictions of landscape have never been just about the land itself,

but about the people that produced them.

Teotihuacan was a civilisation that flourished here

over 1,500 years ago...

..long before the more famous Aztecs.

It was the largest city in the entire western hemisphere,

and is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world.

Inside one of its compounds is something extraordinary.

One of the earliest depictions of landscape in Mexico.

A mural over 1,300 years old.

Tatiana Falcon is an art historian who has studied Mesoamerican

murals for over a decade.

Tatiana, what would this have been like when it was first painted?

I cannot, start, you know, imagining what it must have been like,

but, look at the height of these walls,

it must have been something very...

-Spectacular.

-..spectacular.

The mural depicts a landscape full of people.

The figures that you see in this mural are all

doing things that are related to water, for instance it is believed

that these people, the figures in blue, are people that drowned.

And then you see these figures down here that are swimming,

clearly swimming, like this little guy here.

This mural is about the thing that Teotihuacan revered above all else -

water.

You see the, the rivers, the water flowing,

with the plants growing, from the water,

and these round green beads, signify the water as being precious.

The mural has been dubbed, "The Paradise Of Tlaloc".

Tlaloc was the god of water.

He sits looking down over this landscape.

He had the power to bless the land with rain and fertility

or curse it, with storms and chaos.

He's one of the most important deities in Teotihuacan

and in many other Mesoamerican cultures.

The entire city of Teotihuacan was built in deference to water.

The most prominent landmark on the mural is a mountain.

Sacrificial victims appear to fall into it.

Their blood becomes the water that flows out.

This is an image of the sacred mountain Cerro Gordo,

the dormant volcano that overlooks Teotihuacan.

The mountain was abundant with springs.

The people here believed

it was the source of all the world's water, and only through

maintaining Tlaloc's favour would the water continue to flow.

So the temples of Teotihuacan are built to honour

the mountain by their likeness.

In their art and architecture, the people here venerated the natural

world around them, because the landscape embodied their world view.

The realm of gods

was not something they could master or control.

It controlled them.

Teotihuacan was destroyed in the seventh century.

600 years later, the last great civilisation to rule

the Valley of Mexico migrated here from the north.

We know them as the Aztecs, and the natural world

was the centre of their artistic universe, too.

The Aztecs recorded their history in illustrated manuscripts,

called codices.

Few of these priceless artefacts remain in Mexico

and those that do are held in maximum security vaults.

But here, in the Museum of Anthropology, are exact replicas,

even down to the deerskin parchment they're written on.

Baltazar Brito is the director of the library here,

and an authority on these invaluable windows into pre-Hispanic culture.

This is the Borturini codex, made over 500 years ago.

Its system of glyphs recounts the great migration the Aztecs

made, from the north, to found their civilisation in the central

Valley of Mexico, in the 14th century.

The final page of the codex recounts the legend behind the founding

of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.

The Aztecs built their city on an island in a lake, which has

since disappeared.

They believed a cactus emerged from the waters to signal where

Tenochtitlan should be founded.

For the pre-Hispanic civilisations,

the natural world was their reference point for everything.

Their foundation myths.

Their religions.

Their calendars.

For them, the landscape held the power that shaped their culture

and their art expressed that they

belonged amongst this sacred panorama.

But when a Spanish expedition arrived off the coast of Mexico,

at the beginning of the 16th century, all of this was overturned.

The Spanish conquest was a cultural holocaust

for the Mesoamerican civilisations.

Mexico City was built on top of the Aztec capital,

symbolic of the almost total cultural over-write

the Spanish were about to execute.

The conquered territories were christened New Spain.

The population were dispossessed of their land,

reduced to a disposable source of agricultural manpower.

Almost all forms of their art were denounced and forbidden.

By denying them their land, and the freedom to even depict it,

the Spanish were denying the indigenous population their very identity.

For the Spanish, this was to be Mesoamerica's year zero.

The colonial hub for the reboot of Mexican art was here,

the Academy of San Carlos.

It was the first academy of arts in all the Americas.

It's still a functioning art school today, where individual style

and expression are encouraged.

But in the 18th century, professors from Spain crossed

the Atlantic to instruct in the European academic style.

This room is hung with sketches made over the centuries

by previous students.

They were examined on their ability to accurately copy

mock classical sculptures.

So this painting in particular, which belongs to Louis, would have

been his exam.

It's an exact replica of this plaster cast.

He would have had to precisely copy it according to the methods

that they'd been taught, of how to create light and shadow with pencil.

And he would have to be

extremely precise in order to even pass his exams.

San Carlos was more than a school, it was a ministry of taste.

And students were encouraged to aspire to the art

of just one place - Europe.

So the early art of New Spain, was a lot like the art of old Spain.

The style, from baroque, to neoclassical,

reflected trends in Europe.

Very little about it seems authentically Mexican.

The same applied to the subjects of colonial painting,

predominantly portraiture and historical scenes.

What's absent in the art of the post conquest is a Mexican landscape,

leaving the oppressed indigenous masses

cut adrift from the very source of their identity.

But the story of the struggle to reunite the indigenous peoples

with their landscape is a story of the emergence of Mexican art itself.

This struggle began with an existential crisis

on a national scale.

Just decades after Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1810,

it was embroiled in a disastrous war with the United States.

The US annexed almost half of Mexico's territory.

Soon after, France invaded and briefly occupied Mexico.

These humiliating catastrophes left this young nation

on the brink of collapse.

It was out of this ferment

that an artist emerged who, through his landscape painting,

helped forge a new sense of Mexican national identity.

Jose Maria Velasco was born in 1840,

and studied at the Academy of San Carlos.

To understand his works

you have to understand the regime under which they were produced -

the rule of Porfirio Diaz.

He took power in 1876,

determined to strengthen Mexico after decades of chaos.

His repressive 35-year dictatorship

was known as the Porfiriato.

Velasco's symbiotic link to Diaz can be traced through his most famous

painting, which, rather fittingly,

is hanging in the presidential palace.

Arturo Alcazar is a Mexico City-based artist with a deep

fascination for Velasco and the Porfiriato era.

Well, the nature of the Porfiriato I think is this

importation of ideas to organise a new political class

and it starts the industrialisation of the country.

Velasco built his name with paintings that celebrated

industrialisation during the Porfiriato.

Realised in the sumptuous romantic style of Constable or Turner,

they were among the first landscapes of the post conquest era.

But Velasco's master works

were the series of views he painted of the Valley of Mexico.

This is the only one still hanging in Mexico City,

painted in 1878.

It helped turn Velasco into the de facto brand designer

of the Porfiriato's new Mexico

because it projected a seductive vision

of what it meant to be Mexican.

A sense of national pride, that emerges when you read

the painting as not simply a landscape,

but a history of the land.

Velasco starts his timeline with the Popocatepetl

and Iztaccihuatl volcanoes that dominate the skyline.

These embody deep geological history.

In the primary, elementary school, it's teached this way of being

proud of the landscape of the volcanoes.

Next, Velasco evokes pre-Hispanic civilisation,

with the remains of the lake that surrounded the Aztec capital

and the causeways that once connected it to the land.

To symbolise the 15th-century Spanish conquest, there is

the Basilica of Guadalupe,

an iconic church in Mexico's conversion to Catholicism.

I think it's of a big importance for Velasco as a Catholic to put

these, these place which is of a big importance in terms of,

of the religious control.

Everything suggests that, with God's blessing, history has led to

what Velasco paints dead centre -

Mexico City.

The capital of the Porfiriato is rendered every bit

as integral to the landscape as the ancient volcanoes.

There's very little animal life.

The absence of animals for me is saying the land is benign.

There's no danger. You can walk the land.

It's domesticated, kind of a postcard, you know, like,

tourist postcard, come and make your industry here.

It's like full...empty of savage.

Velasco's works rediscovered the power of landscape to create

a sense of identity.

I think they can be seen as propaganda,

as part of a fiction of...a new representation of Mexico.

Velasco's landscapes hung in state exhibitions,

where they won numerous awards.

He became the first Mexican artist to gain an international profile.

But was this really Mexican art?

For all its beauty and power,

its style was firmly in the European romantic tradition.

This was still European art, made in Mexico.

For this to change, and a truly Mexican art to emerge,

another part of Mexico's landscape would become the focus of art.

Something reduced to ornamental detail in the foreground

of Velasco's painting...

..the indigenous rural peasantry who worked

the land as near slaves of the colonial elite.

Their fight to reclaim ownership of the landscape,

the very source of their identity, would be

at the heart of a revolution in both society and art,

an artistic revolution that started with a story of two exhibitions.

In 1910,

the Mexican government proclaimed an art exhibition to celebrate

the 100th anniversary of independence.

This show was to feature exclusively Spanish art,

still considered the apogee of aesthetics.

This did not sit well with a Mexican writer and thinker

called Gerardo Murillo.

Murillo had travelled in Europe, returning to Mexico an anarchist.

Mexican art, he declared,

was a stagnant imitation of archaic European styles.

Murillo became a mentor to young artists

at the Academy of San Carlos.

He believed it was through the painting of the Mexican

landscape they could achieve a genuinely national art.

When Murillo learned of the exhibition featuring Spanish art,

he staged a competing show,

featuring works by his many proteges.

Among them was a landscape that marked the start of a new

direction for Mexican art.

At first glance, it doesn't appear a landscape painting.

But in fact it depicts one of the Mexican landscape's founding myths.

The story of how the famous volcanoes Popocatepetl

and Iztaccihuatl, that dominate the Valley of Mexico, were formed.

The original painting was in three parts.

This is one of them.

Popocatepetl was a warrior, an Aztec warrior,

and his leader's daughter, a princess, fell in love with him.

They were lovers and when he went to war

rumour came back that he'd died.

Completely taken with grief, she went up into the mountains,

covered herself in snow and ice, and waited to die.

The warrior returned and, absolutely devastated to find his lover,

lay beside her.

The two dead lovers became the volcanoes that now watch over

Mexico City.

The grieving princess became Iztaccihuatl,

the white lady now permanently snow-capped,

and Popocatepetl, the smoking mountain,

the iconic volcano, and they really have formed

a part of the collective consciousness of Mexico,

the masculine energy and the feminine energy.

The young artist who painted this was Saturnino Herran,

and by depicting the ancient myths behind these iconic landmarks

he was invoking a very different sense of Mexican identity.

There's a white woman and a brown-skinned man

and the paintings are extremely sensual.

And I can't help thinking that, in a subconscious way, Herran might

be alluding to his parents, his male and female examples.

His mother was European and his father was Mexican.

In a milieu totally dominated by Spanish and colonial imagery,

it can't be emphasised enough how important

and ground-breaking this synthesis of landscape,

pre-Hispanic allegory and fine art was at that time.

But this painting was only the beginning of the new artistic

trajectory Herran was helping plot.

He would come here for his masterpiece -

Xochimilco.

A network of canals south-east of Mexico City.

These waterways are home to ancient farms and rural traditions.

THEY GREET EACH OTHER IN SPANISH

Luis Vargas Santiago is an art historian who has written

extensively about the evolution of Mexican art.

So, we're in Xochimilco and I've been coming here, I think,

every year since I was born for birthdays or a family trip out,

but it's usually on a Sunday and it's usually extremely busy.

It is, I mean it's Mariachi, and music and quesadillas,

and it's a fun trip for a weekend.

Today, Xochimilco is a place to take a leisure cruise

on one of these trajineras, or canal boats.

At the turn of the 20th century,

it was an agricultural zone.

Herran came here, in 1913,

to paint what, for me, is one of the most beautiful

and evocative paintings in Mexican history...

..as well as a stepping stone to a genuinely Mexican art.

La Offrenda, The Offering.

It depicts a family of flower sellers transporting

cempachuitl, or marigolds.

These flowers are a key part of an ancient rural Mexican tradition.

It's the Fiesta de los Muertos, or the festivity of the dead,

so that's why they are carrying the flower of the cempazuchitl.

It is generally the flower that you take to graves of people you love.

So the marigold is La Offrenda,

but it's also a way for Herran to bring the landscape

into his imagery.

That's so true.

In a constrained landscape, the offering, the cempazuchitl,

makes it to represent the actual landscape of Xochimilco,

that all Mexicans are familiar with.

It's fundamental, to reflect the feeling

and sentiments of the people, that it's depicted.

La Offrenda draws its power from the time it was painted.

By 1913, the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz

had fallen and the Mexican Revolution had begun.

The quiet dignity of Herran's indigenous figures

belies the fact that the country was knee-deep in blood.

They represent every Mexican, in a year that is very conflictive.

They are expressing feelings like melancholia, sadness,

so it's about a drama of life and death.

La Offrenda reflects the suffering of the people

who lived off Mexico's landscape in the midst of civil war.

In the Legend Of The Volcanoes, Herran had used the landscape

to foreground indigenous legends.

Here, he was dramatising the ordinary lives

of the indigenous rural poor.

This was a total shift in subject matter for Mexican art.

But while the subject matter was new, stylistically

Herran was still working within a European framework,

drawing from symbolism and Art Nouveau.

He is bridging two faces of Mexican art.

Coming from a European tradition,

but with a depiction of a local matter.

The place of La Offrenda in Mexican art cannot be overestimated.

But Herran's star burnt brightly and briefly.

Before the revolution ended, he fell ill and died, aged 31.

But the revolution's upheaval provoked deep introspection

about what it meant to be Mexican.

The war lasted ten violent years.

A million people died, over 10% of the population.

It radically reshaped the identity of the nation, and its art,

and the visceral experience of battle led a landscape painter

to within touching distance of a genuinely Mexican artistic voice.

His name was Francisco Goitia, and this is a work

he produced in the aftermath of a battle in 1914.

It's a complete departure for Mexican landscape painting.

This is landscape, not as paradise, but as purgatory.

The story of this painting marks the start of one of the most

astonishing artistic journeys in Mexican history.

A journey that began on hostile terrain.

In 1914, two armies faced each other on this hill

overlooking the city of Zacatecas in northern Mexico.

Defending the city were federal troops, advancing with

the rebel forces under the command of General Francisco "Pancho" Villa.

Attached to Villa's army as an official artist

was Francisco Goitia.

His next subject was to be the bloodiest battle

of the revolutionary war.

SINGING CONTINUES

Pancho Villa's troops swept over this hill

and routed the federals into the city.

There was a slaughter and thousands were killed.

In fact, there were so many bodies

they had to be burned in the hundreds.

And Goitia was here to witness everything.

It was in the aftermath of this battle

that Goitia painted his landscape.

How he produced it is every bit as shocking as the image itself.

A general fighting for Villa had been captured

and executed by federal troops in the desert.

His headless corpse was hung from a misshapen tree.

Shortly after, the general's ambushers were themselves killed.

Goitia learned of the incident and found their graves,

and, with admirable commitment to authenticity, he exhumed their

corpses, hung them from trees, and sketched a study for his painting.

Both in style and content

there's nothing like this previously in Mexican art.

In his many war landscapes,

Goitia produced images that haunt you, like flashbacks to a nightmare.

But what fascinates me most is the style.

You can almost sense him feeling his way to express the full horror

of what he was witnessing.

And when the war ended, something incredible happened in Goitia's art.

His work shed its darkness,

and his landscapes filled with light and hope.

This is the Pyramid of the Sun, in Teotihuacan,

then still covered in vegetation.

Captured in the pristine midday sun, this isn't a desolate

image of abandoned ruins, but a monument to life.

It's completely entombed in vegetation.

But it's almost as if the area itself is

pregnant with this pre-Hispanic culture that's aching to be reborn.

The texture is incredible, it's so sensuous,

he's done layer upon layer upon layer.

It's almost 3D.

Among his post-war landscapes, what I find so incredible

is how Goitia appears to deliberately play with style.

Almost from work to work, his style transformed from one to another.

If you see a room full of his works,

they almost look like they could have been made by different artists.

For me, Goitia is perhaps Mexican art's first truly singular voice.

Like Herran, he focused his painting on what was uniquely Mexican,

this country's land and rural culture.

But he combined this

with freeing himself from any stylistic straitjacket.

Goitia died in poverty and a hermit.

His work was not widely appreciated in his day.

But among those he did influence were a group of other artists

set on using the landscape to recalibrate Mexican identity

in the wake of war.

By evoking ancient connections to the land, these artists would

create a truly Mexican art that would resonate the world over.

The revolution ended in 1920 with a socialist alliance in power.

The war had been fought over land. Who should work it?

Who should own it? And who should profit from it?

The new state aimed to restore the bonds between the indigenous

rural masses and the lands the Spanish had dispossessed.

Through this, a new Mexican identity would be forged.

It fell to art to broadcast these ideals, and in the revolution's

optimistic aftermath, public murals were commissioned.

One of these is at the Agricultural College of Chapingo,

outside Mexico City.

In the old chapel here is one of the most breathtaking

sights in Mexican art.

La Tierra Fecundada - "The Fertile Earth",

completed in 1929.

It's a work by Diego Rivera,

the most feted of all the Mexican muralists.

It's a celebration of the country's post-revolutionary landscape.

Many say this is his masterpiece...

..and stepping inside it is a dizzying experience.

Above, a technique of painting called trompe l'eoil -

French for "trick of the eye" -

creates a feeling of standing below statues suspended in the air.

So sculptural.

They're very sculptural.

We see what looks like relief in all of these panels

but they're flat.

Diego, very masterfully, uses this illusion

of three-dimensional space.

Katharine McDevitt has been artist in residence at Chapingo

for 23 years.

She has studied the murals, their artistry

and their meaning for decades.

They contain Rivera's narrative of the Mexican soil

and the people's relationship to it.

He begins by reaching back, to the deep past,

evoking a sense of ancient belonging.

The first panel that you see, on the right side of the door, is Xilonen.

She's one of the three corn goddesses in

the pre-Hispanic pantheon.

Then he portrays how before the revolution the land had been

monopolised by wealthy landowners and foreign interests.

We see a worker, who's being searched as he comes

out of the mine to see that he doesn't have any pieces of silver.

The overseers of the mine are not Mexican.

We notice a group of men and women that are bent in submission,

they are being humiliated, they are being mistreated.

Rivera then paints how the

sacrifices made in the revolution will help transform the land.

Two fallen heroes of the rural uprising

are shown buried under a cornfield.

The sacrifice of the leaders allows the corn to grow strong and healthy.

The earth is fertilised by the blood of the revolutionary.

Finally, the transformation to a post-revolutionary landscape

is complete.

We see this wonderful panel here at the end.

She represents Mexico and she is pregnant,

so she's the fertile earth.

La Tierra Fecundada was a symbol of how the ancient connections between

Mexico's indigenous population and the land had been restored.

Actually, it's a very optimistic view of landscape at this time,

of what the potential of the Mexican countryside could offer.

And, for me, it's really a distillation of Diego Rivera's

social concerns, political concerns, artistic concerns.

And I would even say spiritual concerns.

He joins the natural cycles of the land,

the fertility cycles of an agrarian calendar, to the human life cycles.

And this to me is what art can do.

It can make poetic leaps that remind us of profound truths.

Rivera's mural exemplifies how Mexico's rich diversity

of landscape and cultures had been matched by art

similarly bursting with potential and possibility.

This new art, free from imposed European aesthetics,

and rooted in the Mexican soil, was celebrated around the world.

The forces of nature that had shaped this country had helped

turn its art into an international powerhouse.

But this new artistic voice wasn't just limited to celebrating

post-revolutionary identity.

By the 1940s, for many, optimism was turning to discontent.

The country had become a near one-party state.

Many had not tasted the agrarian paradise promised by land reform.

And personal frustrations with lack of change

were about to find their perfect expression in the shape

of the Mexican landscape's most awe-inspiring sight.

The birth of a new volcano.

Paracutin, newest of major volcanoes.

Steaming and hissing, the lava moves on at the rate of 200 yards a day.

Communications are destroyed,

five whole towns engulfed.

The volcano of Paricutin burst through a quiet

cornfield in the state of Michoacan in 1943.

It was an international sensation.

The first time the complete life cycle of a volcano was witnessed.

But it wasn't just a geological attraction.

Just weeks after the eruption, a bearded white haired man,

called Dr Atl, arrived and built a hut by the site.

Day and night for several years he furiously painted

Paricutin in an incredible otherworldly style.

It was as if an obsessive mystic had been presented with a vision

that needed capturing in every detail.

The awe Paricutin must have instilled in him

can still be experienced.

As the colossal lava flow approached the local church, people

planted wooden crosses in its path, calling on God to stop its progress.

The lava covered everything and just as it was approaching

the altar, it seems to stop, to a dramatic halt.

So here on one side is the lava and literally a metre later

are the columns, so people come here, pilgrims, locals,

from all over Michoacan, to leave their ex votos,

which are their thank yous, their gratitude for miracles.

During the eruption, the volcano seemed to have the power to

wipe the old order from the earth.

It feels like Mother Earth is just crashing her way

into our buildings, it feels almost like a clash between nature

and civilisation.

And I kind of get the impression that Atl must have been

so overwhelmed and somehow so inspired by this incredible

natural phenomena.

The sheer hallucinatory power of Dr Atl's art matched

the volcano eruption for eruption.

To understand this obsession,

you need to understand something about the man.

Throughout his life, Dr Atl was many things.

He was a polymath - novelist, poet, polemicist, philosopher,

as well as someone whose path this story has crossed already.

He had been born in 1875, in Guadalajara,

with the name Gerardo Murillo.

The same Gerardo Murillo who had staged the counter exhibition

of Mexican art on the centenary of independence,

inspiring artists like Herran to paint the landscape

and indigenous culture.

Now he had changed his name to Atl, a pre-Hispanic word for water,

and was about to make his own indelible contribution to the

canon of Mexican landscape art.

Some of his key works hang at the Museum Of Modern Art in Mexico City.

He was playing many different interesting roles,

through history, so it is this kind of visionary Renaissance man.

He was always sort of

promoting a certain way of making this country something better.

Mario Garcia Torres is a contemporary artist who's had

a lifelong fascination with not just Dr Atl's art,

but the motivation for it.

Today, when you look at a painting, you really think

why was he doing this, what is this sort of bohemian guy going

out to the landscape and doing that?

Atl had been of an anarchist art movement,

who believed artists should rule the world.

He had originally supported the revolution,

but believed society needed more radical change.

He envisaged a country governed from a futuristic headquarters

called Olinka.

Well, Olinka was a really quite visionary, I think quite

a visionary project, he imagined a very big tower and he imagined sort

of gathering many intellectuals and artists from all around the world

and put them together to, to work together and really sort of change

the faith of the world and he wanted to have that here in Mexico

and I think immediately people thought this was totally insane.

Atl wanted to transform Mexican society,

just like the volcano had its landscape.

Like Olinka, the volcano here, with its vibrant green luminosity,

seems to possess the potential to create the world anew.

It's almost like he's alluding to this

life force of the volcano and green Mother Nature,

it's almost like from the destruction

also comes potential life.

Paricutin seemed to embody the change in the world

Atl himself was unable to effect.

The volcano, which in pre-Hispanic times had housed gods,

now embodied one man's desire for godlike powers.

The art of Mexico's landscape had shown it could accommodate

numerous visions, multiple identities.

It was no longer a canvas reserved for a single,

all-encompassing world view.

And increasingly, in the 1940s and '50s,

foreign artists were feeling the allure of Mexico,

as not just a natural paradise, but a utopia of artistic liberty.

Perhaps the greatest example of this

is the astonishing surrealist idyll of Las Pozas.

Hidden in a remote corner of the Mexican highlands is

a spellbinding collision of exotic flora and fantastical architecture.

Its creator was a wealthy English eccentric called Edward James.

But while he was born in Britain, his sculpture garden

could only have been made in Mexico.

Mexico is full of these places.

Strange and bizarre landscapes that you slowly discover.

It can only happen here. Here in this dramatic landscape.

Matthew Holmes is an architect who lives and works in Mexico,

and leads the conservation of Las Pozas.

This garden allows you to explore.

It allows you to get lost, it allows you discovery,

and that's maybe its biggest value.

Las Pozas was a coffee plantation

when Edward James came here in the 1940s.

He was a prolific collector of surrealist art,

and bought the plantation, intending to create an orchid garden,

until nature intervened.

They say he had over 15,000 orchids, when in 1962

a freak frost, snow storm, killed most of them.

And that's when he sort of rebelled against the forces of nature

and said now I will do this in concrete

and nature will never be able to take it away again.

James worked on Las Pozas for 20 years,

relying on local builders and artisans.

For much of his life, he'd been a drifter,

restlessly moving from country to country.

In Las Pozas he found a home,

a retreat where he could carve his surrealist dreams

into the very landscape.

He was definitely escaping, there's no question about that.

But then again so many people say

that he'd spent all his life escaping.

This was his paradise,

the place where he was finally able to get away from everything.

But there's something more to Las Pozas

than James's sculpted Shangri-La.

A bigger artistic statement, that for me speaks to the role

the landscape itself plays in the creation of art in Mexico.

Las Pozas was left unfinished when James died in 1984

and its final revelation was to happen after his death.

He said he imagined his structures fading into the forest,

reclaimed by the landscape, like some pre-Hispanic temple.

And he hoped a future archaeologist would stumble across them

and be utterly perplexed.

Nature itself was to apply the finishing touches to Las Pozas.

His sculptures weren't designed to dominate the landscape,

but to be dominated by it.

Today, the interplay between landscape, rural culture

and art in Mexico has come full circle.

In pre-Hispanic times,

the land and natural forces were the wellspring for all art and culture.

The Spanish severed these symbolic bonds, but they were restored

by the emergence of a Mexican art that followed the revolution.

And I think Mexico's contemporary artists instinctively

and actively reach for our landscape and indigenous culture

to inspire works exploring Mexican identity.

Not just in works that hang in galleries and museums,

but in the vibrancy and informality of Mexico's street art.

In this courtyard is a mural called The Dream Weavers.

It's a symbolic landscape representing all of Mexico

and celebrating what it means to be Mexican.

It's the work of two artists - Sego and Saner.

The mural's central motif is a pair of figures in pre-Hispanic masks.

The diorama is placed in a lake,

echoing the waters in which the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was founded.

And the mural is dripping in symbols of Mexico's landscape

and indigenous culture.

This mural, a romantic representation of Mexico's

origin myth, was commissioned by the Museum Of Popular Art,

to celebrate the 200th year of Mexican independence.

It stands in stark contrast with the official government exhibition,

100 years earlier, which featured exclusively Spanish art.

But since the revolution, it has become inconceivable

that art, designed to celebrate Mexico,

would not celebrate its lands, its nature and its rural traditions.

These themes continue to give Mexican art

its unmistakable identity.

In the next episode, I explore how artists responded to the struggles

for power that forged Mexico and how its history has been defined by art.