For the urban vacationers streaming south from Mexico’s capital each weekend, the city of Cuernavaca fills all the requirements of a locus amœnus—a place of safety and serenity. The Fort Dodge, Iowa–born collector, artist, and trucking heir Robert Brady (Fig. 4) first visited the city in 1961, attracted by his desire to acquire objects from different parts of the world. Smitten with the riotous colors and playfulness of Mexican popular art in general, and the advantages of Cuernavaca in particular, Brady decided that he’d found his spiritual home. The following year he purchased Casa de la Torre, “Tower House,” a converted sixteenth-century monastery adjoining the Cathedral of Cuernavaca in the historic downtown, and began filling it with mementos of his travels (Fig. 1–3). Established as a house museum in 1986, today the Robert Brady Museum brims with folk and fine art from nearly every continent—some twelve hundred objects in total—conserved and on display in exactly the way Brady arranged and enjoyed them.
The fortress-like cathedral and monastery were begun in 1525 by a group of Franciscans, some of the first twelve of their order to set foot in New Spain, and charged by Hernán Cortés with converting the colony’s indigenous inhabitants to Catholicism. At the turn of the twentieth century renovations to the monastery were undertaken by the second bishop of Cuernavaca, Francisco Plancarte y Navarrete, who adapted it to serve as his personal abode, adding the element that would give the house its name: a three-story tower to house an astronomical observatory (Fig. 2).
Following the Mexican Revolution, ecclesiastical assets were expropriated by the state to be sold on the open market. Casa de la Torre passed through a series of private owners before being acquired by Brady, who reorganized its living spaces to suit his needs. On the ground floor, what had been the monastery’s great hall is now divided into Vestibule and Cantina, a luxurious tiled bathroom, and a gallery for Brady’s collection of prints. To the south he installed a pool in the expanse of lawn that unfurls outside the Loggia (Fig. 3), which served as Casa de la Torre’s principal dining room; to the north an imperial staircase rises from the garden to the second floor, giving onto bedrooms used by Brady and his close friend and frequent houseguest Josephine Baker, as well as the main living room. The garden itself contains the graves of Brady and his two dachshunds Yetl and Pilli (Nahuatl for “bean” and “little girl”) in the shade of palm trees, purple-blossomed bougainvilleas, and a spreading arbol de amor—a perfect oasis in the midst of a city whose population has more than tripled in the last forty years.
Pushing open the complex’s carved and paneled front doors, and climbing the stairs to the Vestibule, visitors to Casa de la Torre are beckoned into the house’s Cantina by a Day of the Dead skeleton that lounges on a colorfully upholstered wraparound bench (Fig. 6). The figure is fashioned in the style of the Linares family of Mexico City, who’ve made cartonería, or papier-mâché sculpture, their business since the eighteenth century. As he would have done during drinking bouts with his friends, Brady presides here still, if only in effigy. A ceramic figure with his features occupies a niche in the center wall that might formerly have contained a saint or virgin (Fig. 7). Called reinitas de Oapan, or “little queens of Oapan,” hand-modeled figures like this are prepared with cream-colored slip and painted with floral and animal motifs by family-run businesses primarily associated with the village of San Agustín Oapan in Guerrero. Joining the Brady effigy, “queen-ified” members of Brady’s fashionable entourage stand in an arched opening: American actress Paula Laurence, Mexican comedian and actor Cantinflas in his battered felt hat, Brady’s cook María Hernández, and, tallest of all, Peggy Guggenheim, whose oil portrait by Brady hangs upstairs.
Following stints at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Temple University’s Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Brady in 1951 became one of the lucky few admitted to the Barnes Foundation to study in its highly competitive art appreciation course. Albert C. Barnes preached an open-minded, formalist approach to fine and popular arts from around the world, and he and Brady quickly struck up a friendly working relationship. The student would personally deliver Barnes’s donation of artworks to Fort Dodge’s Blanden Memorial Art Museum, and was honored by the attention that his teacher showed to a Jules Pascin watercolor in his possession. Writing to thank Barnes for framing this work—it now hangs in the Master Sitting Room upstairs—Brady, echoing Oscar Wilde, expressed his hope that he could “live up to” the drawing.
Although far more playful than the installations formerly in Merion, Pennsylvania (for example, the escutcheons, hinges, weathervanes, and other metal implements that serve as a rather severe motif at the Barnes Foundation are replaced here by the warmth of countless painted and weathered wooden crosses), Brady’s ensembles at Casa de la Torre nonetheless exude Barnes’s influence. But if it was in the West that artists and intellectuals first began to re-evaluate the relationship between the fine and folk or functional arts, the idea took wing in Mexico. There, following the revolution, European-taught Mexican artists like Roberto Montenegro, Dr. Atl, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, and the Big Three muralists—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—returned to exalt the nation’s rich popular art traditions, and incorporate them into their own creations. Many of these artists are represented in Brady’s collection of graphic art, on display down the hall from the Cantina. A jowly Rivera self-portrait from 1930 is paired with his naïvely proportioned nude study of Frida Kahlo from the same year (Fig. 9). Orozco’s lithograph of Zapatistas—partisans for Emiliano Zapata, agrarian hero of the Mexican Revolution—hangs on the wall opposite, sandwiched between a pair of woodcuts by Rufino Tamayo; while Siqueiros’s tenebrous portrait of the American-born “father of Mexican Silver,” William Spratling, glowers from a corner next to Two Sailors by Otto Dix. All these masterworks of modern art hang equitably with their folk-art ancestors and coevals: votive paintings, simple wooden crucifixes, a windowsill crowded with colorful Italian glass (Fig. 11), a Navajo rug, and a tapestry depicting a flowering cactus, designed by Brady and woven by a family of craftsmen from Chiconcuac in the Valley of Mexico.
Christened “the city of eternal spring” by Alexander von Humboldt during the German explorer’s sojourn through New Spain at the turn of the nineteenth century, Cuernavaca is also known as “the city behind the walls” for the privacy that its colonial architecture affords homeowners, a quality that has attracted many famous people through the years. At the feasts served in the Loggia, the likes of Maria Callas, Rita Hayworth, Octavio Paz, Rudolf Nureyev, Erich Fromm, David Hockney, and others from the long list of artists, performers, intellectuals, and jetsetters entertained by Brady would have been serenaded by the unpredictable calls of grackles, while their eyes traveled across the hundreds of mostly African and pre-Hispanic objects juxtaposed so that the seemingly unrelated unite in harmony (Figs. 13–15). Yoruba fertility dolls and other ceremonial carvings, Dan masks and the striking kple kple masks of the Baule people—noteworthy for their “modernly” simplified flat, circular faces with projecting round eyes, rectangular mouths, and often with long streamers of hair-like raffia—mingle with Mexican masks from the dances of the diablos and tecuanis. In the best and most subtle juxtaposition, three beaded doves made by the Huichol people of the coastal Mexican state of Nayarit perch atop a beaded stool from Cameroon (Fig. 12)—a tranquil artistic collaboration made possible thanks to the global trade in Murano beads, and by Brady’s impulse to bring together what had been widely dispersed.
More than just a collector, Brady decorated every room in the house, relying on a palette of yellow, blue, green, and red-orange—what the house’s caretakers call “Brady Colors”—to imbue each space with personality and a specific atmosphere. The luxurious Yellow Bathroom on the ground floor, in hand-painted Talavera tiles, houses a collection of Haitian folk art (Fig. 5); the Green Bathroom upstairs, with its blue-and-white tiles, accommodates figure studies—many of them nude—by Miguel Covarrubias, the nineteenth-century Mexican academicists Juan Cordero and Pelegrín Clavé, Honoré Daumier, Giorgio de Chirico, and a print by Brady of Josephine Baker.
Baker began staying with Brady two months out of the year after losing her castle in France, the Château des Milandes, to debtors in 1969. For her, Brady designed Casa de la Torre’s most striking room, the Oriental Bedroom, filling it with fine and decorative arts from Asia (Figs. 16, 16a, 16b). Dyed textiles and watercolors from China and Japan, depictions of rajas, priests, and twirling princesses from India and Southeast Asia, mudéjar arches that repeat across the bed’s headboard, the alcove casing above, and the fluted chiminea—everything sets the mood for the dancer. But even in this room, of all of them in the house the one in which Brady’s decorative scheme is most disciplined, all is not as it seems. For one, stucco walls aren’t exactly de riguer in Asia. And that inlaid lacquerware chest? Just a brass-studded Mexican one doing a passing impression. A pair of red candlesticks that look like Japanese Negoro ware but were actually made in Venice complete the syncretic fantasy.
The Oriental Bedroom is accessed from the vibrant Yellow Room, Brady’s preferred space for entertaining (Figs. 17–19). It’s decorated with paintings either made by women or depicting them—Frida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Monkey, The Zeppelin by María Izquierdo, Brady’s portrait of Guggenheim, Old Queen Cotton by American folk artist Horace Pippin, an altar to Baker (with grinning, banana-skirt-clad articulated doll)—all surrounded by African and South American tribal pieces. In front of brass and wood staffs from Burkina Faso and Mali, textiles, and a trio of what look something like totem poles (ceremonial figures from the Maprik yam cult in New Guinea) there is a squatting figure in wood and brass repoussé (Fig. 18). Decades before it appeared in this room Guillaume Apollinaire published a similar figure in his epochal Sculptures negrès of 1917, in which he declared the value of thinking about and looking at such African sculptures as art rather than merely as ethnographic material. Arrayed here with obvious care taken to their formal properties—their verticality, their weathered look like old driftwood—it is clear that Brady felt the same way about the African and other pieces in his collection, but he found a way to incorporate their makers’ intentions as well: in this room of women many of the figures and objects relate to fertility rituals.
But the heart of the home, as is typical in Mexico, might be the kitchen, where the color and decorative ideas that Brady tried out in different rooms add up to an aesthetic thesis. One enters by way of a modest dining room adjoined to the Loggia, in which are gathered retablos depicting the saint of the kitchen, Pascual Baylón. Pushing open a plank door painted the color of burnt sienna you find yourself in an open, colonial-style space where architectural elements, tiles, and wall-mounted crockery in all the Brady colors come together in a way that’s just right, in both artistic and historical terms (Fig. 20). The crockery is from across the country; the Talavera tiles, an art form that has Arabic roots and was transmitted to the New World via the Spanish, is a craft traditionally linked to certain places in Mexican architecture, primarily church facades and monastery kitchens. For visitors who know, the color and playfulness of these walls beam with the spirit of generations of craftsmen—hands repeating patterns that ancestors’ hands have been making since time immemorial—from across nearly half the world. Undoubtedly, traditional dishes like mole, pozole, atole, and others cooked by María (Fig. 21) in this kitchen received the visual seasoning of the surrounding folk arts, for here one begins to realize that contemplating such works in their natural settings means delving into the customs and traditions, the rituals and celebrations that they are part of, and becoming one with the art.
CHANDRAVALI MARTÍNEZ is a graduate of the art history program at the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana in Mexico City.
