This weekend LACMA added eight new works to its collection
through its annual Collectors Committee events. All week on
Unframed our curators will be highlighting the objects just
acquired. Casta (“caste”) painting is one of the most compelling
forms of artistic expression from colonial Mexico. These three
works belong to a set of castas by Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz
that originally had sixteen scenes (over time many sets have
been disassembled), and it is one of the finest of the genre.
Morlete Ruiz was an influential member of a painting academy
established in Mexico in the mid-eighteenth century, who was
deeply attuned to ideas of pictorial innovation. What makes the
paintings so exceptional is what they illustrate three centuries
before multiculturalism became fashionable: the intermingling of
races in colonial society. Each scene depicts a family group
with parents of different races and one of their children.
During the colonial period Indians, Spaniards born in Spain as
well as the New World (the latter