William Spratling and the birth of the Mexican silver renaissance

Taxco, Mexico, 1925. The Mexican Revolution, which had upended and deposed the old regime, is five years in the past, creating in its wake an air of Nationalistic pride. The new government under the leadership of President Alvaro Obregón and his successor Plutarco Elías Calles was still in its infancy, remaking Mexico in a new image with an emphasis on reform to lift up the working class. Artists who had moved abroad including Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, and José Clemente Orozco were returning home to answer the call of the Secretary of Public Education, José Vasconcelos, whose vision for post-revolutionary Mexico included a strong emphasis on the blend of Indigenous and European cultures through large-scale murals and public art. Cultural exchanges between the United States and Mexico resulted in a flow of ideas and artists moving between both sides of the border. Artists and intellectuals were turning their gaze to the Pre-Columbian past to reinvent a new, uniquely Mexican identity and visual language that blended with the fauvist, cubist, and populist painting styles dominating Europe and the Western world after World War I. It was in this environment, ripe with hope and expression, that an architecture professor from New Orleans first laid eyes on the town that would change his life and define his legacy.

Accessible by a winding dirt road largely impassable by car, William Spratling made the bumpy journey from Mexico City into the Taxco Mountains sometime in 1925 or 1926. Snug on the slopes of Atace Hill lies the Spanish Colonial-era town of Taxco. Anchored by the Santa Prisca church and dotted with 18th century buildings, the town must have seemed like a place out of another time and, in some ways, it was. In 1532, the Spanish discovered silver in the hills above Taxco, with two of Cortès’ own sons heading mining production. José de la Borda would modernize the operations in the 18th century leading the industry to a new era which would continue well into the 19th century. By the 1920s, however, the silver mining industry was in decline and silver production was done only by small independent operations in the surrounding towns. Despite its longevity in the area, the silver production did little to enrich the town and the spoils of their labor were exported, taking the profits with it. It’s not entirely clear why Spratling chose to settle permanently in Taxco but by the late 1920s he had purchased a small home with a large garden near the Plaza del Borda and began looking around for a more permanent income source. Up to this time, Spratling earned money writing articles or arranging commissions for his artist friends in Mexico City but a steady income eluded him. A friend of Spratling’s, Ambassador Dwight Morrow, suggested he look into what had historically been a major industry in Taxco—silver. This germ of an idea proved impossible for Spratling to shake and by the early 1930s he would found the first of the silver shops that would spur a Mexican silver renaissance.

His apprentices and craftsman, many of whom grew up during the years after the revolution, were likely students at the schools set up by the government to which Mexican muralists, like Spratling’s friend Diego Rivera, contributed. The Best Maugard method, based on the idea that seven shapes (the spiral, the half-circle, the circle, the “S,” curved lines, straight lines, and zig-zag lines) were the basis for visual expression and innate in the subconscious of humans, was being taught at the new schools set up all over Mexico. This establishment of a simplified visual language, culled from the method’s creator while documenting Pre-Columbian artifacts, created a profoundly simple road into artistic expression and design and can be seen in the forms and decorations created by the new generation of silversmiths coming out of the Spratling shop. A Zorrita, literally translated as “little fox,” referred to the young apprentices in the early Spratling workshops. Before machines where brought to the shops, the zorritas would hand hammer all the sheets of silver used in production and polish the creations with pumice using their own arm as a polishing wheel. Many familiar silversmiths started with William Spratling as zorritas including Antonio Castillo and Antonio Pineda. When they decided to form their own shops in 1939, Spratling gave them his blessing with the promise they would not copy his designs. The result is an aesthetic unique to each company, instantly recognizable in their own right. If William Spratling was the starting runner in the marathon of the Mexican silver Renaissance, it was his apprentices who would take it to the finish line.

If William Spratling were alive today, he would be gobsmacked to know his whim in the 1930s would take root and grow one of the most important and robust artistic movements of the 20th century. The collaborative spirit fostered in the Spratling workshops inevitably gave rise to hordes of talented silversmiths with their own unique talents and visions. Many of Spratling’s former apprentices formed tallers large and small, revolutionary and traditional, and created a way of life that brought prosperity and artistic satisfaction to the once depressed mountain town. The Mexican silver renaissance was in many ways a natural output of a unique time in Mexico’s history that nurtured artistic expression and emphasized ideas and a new identity. Spratling just happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right silversmith.

William Spratling, the designer and his taller

The post-revolutionary approach of the blend of Indigenous and European artistic language with the emphasis on idealizing folk life and art is imbued in the Spratling aesthetic. Friend Diego Rivera gave Spratling a Pre-Columbian carved standing figure that would lead Spratling in amassing an impressive collection of Pre-Columbian art and artifacts, many of which can be found today at the William Spratling Museum in Taxco. The discovery of Tomb 7, in Monte Alban unearthed one of the richest finds of Pre-Columbian gold jewelry and turquoise inlay work from the Mixtec culture with its complex and unique aesthetic. These two events would have a profound influence on Spratling’s own artistic sensibilities. Many of Spratling’s early work was lifted, sometimes directly, from Pre-Columbian pieces and designs in his collection. By the early 1930s Spratling had the vision for what he wanted to achieve but lacked the ability to execute it. In the town of Iguala he found a talented silversmith who would be the first of his crucial hires, Antonio Navarrete. The work was done largely by hand without the aid of machinery until the 1940s. At its height, Spratling’s silver shop employed hundreds of workers who created designs and contributed to the success of the taller.

World War II created a demand in America for other silver sources once European supplies dwindled, Spratling negotiated for contracts from several top retailers of the time and negotiated the lowering of import duties which lifted the profits of not just his shop but all the silver shops popping up in Taxco. But the success wouldn’t last. After a disastrous deal with an American investor laid waste to the company, Spratling resigned in 1945. When Spratling returned to silversmithing in the late 1940s, it would be in the role he loved most, design and craft of the work. A sojourn to Alaska and a collaboration with Conquistador silversmiths would fill his time for the remainder of the decade. By the 1950s, Spratling’s new workshop would once again set the trends in silver with its silver inlay work and simplified lines always, however, rooted in the Pre-Columbian aesthetic. When Spratling died in 1967 he left Taxco with a unique art form that reaches beyond the borders of the mountain town, his mantle taken up by a new generation of artists and craftsmen who would push the form to its limits.