The Mexican silver renaissance, also called the Taxco Silver Age, was a twentieth-century revival of silver design and production in Mexico. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, its workshops reworked pre-Columbian and colonial motifs along the lines of Mexican modernism in handwrought jewelry and hollowware, sold largely to the United States and growing with the tourist trade that reached the town in the same years. The center was Taxco, Guerrero. Workshops and retailers in Mexico City and abroad belonged to the movement from the start, and its international standing was highest in the 1940s and 1950s.
Its best-known figure is the American-born architect and designer William Spratling, who opened the workshop Las Delicias in Taxco in 1931, trained apprentices who went on to found their own talleres, and built the export trade to the United States. Guerrero had worked metal long before he arrived.
Frederick W. Davis, whose Mexico City shop came before the Taxco workshops, was the other central figure; the silversmiths included Héctor Aguilar, Antonio Pineda, Margot van Voorhies Carr and Los Castillo. Museums have since collected and exhibited the work — Maestros de Plata at the San Antonio Museum of Art in 2002, Silver Seduction at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2008.
Earlier metalworking traditions
Specialized artisans in pre-Columbian societies worked gold, copper and shell into jewelry and ceremonial objects, and did so within settled occupational hierarchies. Colonial workshops turned out ecclesiastical silver, domestic wares and equestrian ornament. In Guerrero, and at Iguala in particular, gold- and silversmiths were still making filigree and other personal ornament when Spratling reached Taxco.
Taxco had mined silver since the colonial era. Working it into finished design was new in the twentieth century.
Postrevolutionary cultural reconstruction
The renaissance grew out of the cultural rebuilding that followed the Mexican Revolution, when artists, anthropologists and government officials set about defining a modern national culture from Mexico's Indigenous past and its popular arts.
The Exposición de Arte Popular, mounted in Mexico City in 1921 for the centenary of independence, presented pottery, textiles and furniture as expressions of national culture and as a possible basis for small-scale industry. The painter Gerardo Murillo, known as Dr. Atl, sat on the organizing committee and documented the same material in his two-volume Las artes populares en México (1922). A second version opened in Los Angeles the following year.
Mexican Arts opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 13, 1930 and closed on November 9. It brought together about 1,300 works, archaeological through modern, on Carnegie funding and under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts. René d'Harnoncourt organized it, and the Metropolitan was the first of fourteen American venues it reached over two years. The Museum of Modern Art followed in 1940 with Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, about 5,000 objects across the same range.
Frederick W. Davis and the Mexico City market
Frederick W. Davis built a market for Mexican decorative arts and jewelry in Mexico City before Taxco became the center of the trade. He had moved to Mexico in 1910, and he later managed the Sonora News Company in the Palacio de Iturbide Hotel. He travelled widely, learned the regional crafts and got to know the people making them.
He commissioned Mexican silversmiths to make jewelry out of regional forms, archaeological art and modern design, and he sold work by independent craftsmen under his own mark without designing it himself. Morrill and Berk credit him with holding the workmanship to a high standard, sharpening designs for foreign buyers, and separating serious decorative art from cheap tourist goods.
Davis hired d'Harnoncourt in 1927, and together they widened the company's range in both fine and popular art. Artists and intellectuals gathered at the shop, and the two men put on one of the first commercial exhibitions of contemporary Mexican painting. D'Harnoncourt went on to organize Mexican Arts in 1930, to run the United States Indian Arts and Crafts Board as general manager from 1939 to 1944, and to direct the Museum of Modern Art from 1949.
Davis went on to manage antiques and crafts at Sanborn's, and took part in institutions set up to preserve Mexican popular arts and bring them to market. For Morrill and Berk, Davis and Spratling are the two people who started Mexico's twentieth-century silver renaissance.
William Spratling and Las Delicias
Establishment of the workshop
Spratling had taught architecture at Tulane University. He first visited Mexico in 1926 and settled in Taxco near the end of the decade, where his circle took in the muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the United States ambassador Dwight Morrow, and Davis and d'Harnoncourt. He collected archaeological and popular art, and wrote about Mexican architecture and rural life.
He opened the Taller de Las Delicias in 1931, bringing in Artemio Navarrete and Alfonso Mondragón from Iguala as his first master smiths. Apprentices entered as zorritas, or junior helpers, and worked their way up a ladder of skill and responsibility.
His first motifs came from archaeological clay stamps, from codices and from colonial ornament. The early pieces were heavy-gauge, in silver purer than conventional sterling, set with amethyst, obsidian and jade, and with wood and tortoiseshell.
Furniture, textiles and tinwork sold alongside the silver.
Workshop organization
Work in a large Taxco taller was divided. The owner or designer made the model, and specialized workers took each piece through the bench operations in turn: cutting and hammering, chasing, stone setting, final polishing. This was neither the mechanized factory nor the older arrangement in which one artisan carried an object from start to finish.
Apprentices learned by watching and assisting the experienced men before they were handed harder work. The most senior became master smiths or supervisors, and some left to set up on their own; internal design competitions at Las Delicias encouraged experiment and prepared artisans to do exactly that. Pieces carried the name or hallmark of the workshop proprietor, though it was often the master smith who worked out how to turn a drawing into something that could actually be made. In Pineda's taller, the masters who executed his designs sometimes stamped their own hallmarks alongside his.
Loss of the company
Wartime expansion was paid for with outside money. To meet rising production costs Spratling sold all but a small part of his holding in Spratling y Artesanos, and by 1944 he had lost control of the firm. In 1946 he sold what remained and resigned. He withdrew to a ranch he owned at Taxco el Viejo and spent the rest of his life rebuilding the business, designing, and collecting archaeological material; in 1951 he incorporated a second company, William Spratling, S.A., with no outside backing. He was killed in a car accident outside Taxco on August 7, 1967. By then nearly 3,000 people in the town worked in silver.
Formation of the Taxco school
Through the late 1930s and 1940s, artisans trained at Las Delicias or connected with it set up on their own. Designers watched one another's work and competed for buyers, for prizes and for the best smiths.
Héctor Aguilar, who had worked for Spratling, founded Taller Borda, known for weighty jewelry and hollowware, and for mixed-metal work combining silver with copper and brass. Several experienced silversmiths left Las Delicias with him and took its techniques and its way of organizing work to the new shop. Taller Borda expanded during the Second World War and developed commercial relationships in the United States, among them work associated with the costume-jewelry company Coro.
Los Castillo, founded by the brothers Antonio, Jorge, Justo and Miguel Castillo, went after technical problems. The workshop developed or refined metales casados ("married metals"), in which silver is joined to copper and brass, and it combined silver with stone mosaic, feather inlay and ceramic. Margot van Voorhies Carr, then married to Antonio Castillo, designed for the workshop in its early years before setting up on her own as Margot de Taxco, where she worked chiefly in enamel over silver. Matilde Poulat, who worked in Mexico City under the mark Matl, set silver with coral, turquoise and amethyst in densely ornamented pieces drawing on religious and colonial imagery.
Antonio Pineda trained briefly at Las Delicias, worked afterwards with Valentín Vidaurreta in Mexico City, and opened his own shop in 1939. His early work drew on Art Nouveau and on Spratling. By the 1950s his jewelry had become spare and sculptural, built from hollow forms, articulated links and concealed clasps. The scion of the San Francisco retailer Gump's bought his collection outright, and his jewelry appeared in a San Francisco exhibition in 1944; the relationship lasted.
Salvador Terán worked in oxidized surfaces and applied silver forms, for jewelry and objects with deep relief and strong shadow. Also working in Taxco were Ana Núñez de Brilanti, Sigi Pineda and Enrique Ledesma.
Design and techniques
Motifs came from Pre-Columbian sculpture, from codices and from the stepped fret, and from colonial silver, regional popular art, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and international modernism.
Sheet silver was pierced and cut (calar), chased and engraved with shaped tools (cincelar), or hammered from the reverse to raise relief (repoussé). Smiths set it with stones or mosaic inlay, oxidized it to darken the recesses, and hinged some pieces. Dies and presses were used for selected commercial lines. Hollow construction gave a piece the look of mass without the weight, and mixed-metal construction set silver against copper and brass.
Finished objects usually carried a design number and the workshop hallmark. In 1948 Mexico introduced a national eagle mark for registered production and minimum silver standards, assigning each registered maker a number within it. The eagle was abandoned in 1979–80 and replaced by a federal alphanumeric system.
Mexican modernism and national identity
Like the muralists and architects of those years, the designers transformed their Indigenous and colonial sources rather than preserving them. The earliest work adapted archaeological motifs more or less directly; later designers pared them down to geometry and volume, as in Pineda's mature jewelry, where the forms are spare and angular and the clasps and junctures disappear into the design.
Ana Elena Mallet has argued that Pineda and other Taxco designers moved past the category of the "Mexican curio" by turning national and regional sources into forms that belonged in cosmopolitan modern design. The Fowler Museum describes the Taxco School as a merger of Pre-Columbian and colonial reference with modernism.
The Spratling-centered account has been questioned. In a 2023 dissertation on modernism and mineral extraction, Grace Kuipers reads Las Delicias as an expression of a politics of developmentalism, "in which U.S. standards of capitalist modernity promised to more efficiently liberate Mexico's minerals," and places the workshop within early efforts at cultural diplomacy between the two countries. On her account Spratling's formalism treated pre-Hispanic design as a deposit to be worked, promising to "resurrect and refine the 'latent values' of Pre-Hispanic design into an abstract store of value that could be possessed or exchanged."
Tourism and international exchange