ART : Mexico’s Unsung Master : Hermenegildo Bustos’ brilliantly perceptual paintings--once solely the pride of his town--are beginning to gain due appreciation

Hermenegildo Bustos (1832-1907) is the most important Mexican painter of the 19th Century. If you’ve never heard of him--well, don’t be surprised. A year ago, few in the United States had.

Bustos’ reputation has been rather like the proverbial stone dropped into a pond. At its center, the splash was dramatic, while its ripples have been slowly expanding in larger and larger circles. Finally they’ve reached our shores.

The center of the pond is the provincial village of La Purisima del Rincon in central Mexico. There, Bustos was born, lived almost all his life and died at the age of 75.

For the past year, five of his paintings have toured the United States as part of the sprawling “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries,” now concluding its much-remarked journey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through Dec. 29). If you haven’t seen the Bustos pictures yet, proceed directly to the ground floor galleries of the Hammer Wing.

Bustos painted countless ex voto images, for neighbors desperate to express gratitude for divine intervention in their earthly tragedies, as well as occasional religious pictures. Most significantly, he made often mesmerizing portraits of local bourgeoisie and peasants. So important to the establishment of civic pride was this work that, eventually, the town would come to be called La Purisima del Bustos.

Soon after his death, however, Bustos was forgotten. The bloody, protracted Revolution of 1910 intervened. Not until the 1930s did interest revive, in the person of poet and diplomat Francisco Orozco Munoz, who began to collect the painter’s work. A retrospective was mounted in 1952, and the circle now encompassed the state of Guanajuato, whose eponymous capital has since become the principal repository of Bustos’ art.

Today, an extraordinary permanent display at the Alhondiga de Granaditas, an imposing regional museum in the lovely silver-mining hill town, includes six ex votos , a small religious picture, two highly unusual little paintings of celestial phenomena and some 49 portraits. They range in date from 1850 to 1903, and most belong either to the museum or to the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City, which has placed them on loan.

Ten more portraits--including an early, decoratively stylized and unusually hermetic painting of the artist’s wife, Joaquina Rios--are housed a few blocks away, at the intimate Museo del Pueblo.

Bustos’ paintings have since been regularly shown in exhibitions in Mexico City, and occasionally they’ve cropped up in displays in Paris and London. The selection at LACMA is somewhat uneven, given what could have been assembled, but it offers an intriguing introduction nonetheless.

Among them is Bustos’ sole self-portrait, an austere, highly refined and somehow vaguely eccentric image. The gaunt, mustachioed artist shows himself proudly dressed in a crisp, dark uniform with gold buttons and crosses--a pure invention, since he never served as a soldier.

Bustos painted this great, grave picture exactly a century ago. Sometimes, it takes a while for word of greatness to spread. But now that it’s here, it’s worth considering just what makes these pictures so compelling--compelling enough to catapult Bustos to so prominent a position.

The task is not an easy one, and guideposts are hard to come by. Almost nothing in English has been written about him, including many basic biographical facts. The most comprehensive study is a 1981 catalogue (in Spanish) by the eminent Mexican art historian, Raquel Tibol, for a show in Guanajuato, but it’s long since out of print.

A few articles have cropped up in far-flung periodicals--the earliest being a 1943 essay by Walter Pach in Art in America magazine announcing “A Newly Found American Painter,” the most recent a 1985 essay by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in the glossy journal FMR. And the catalogue to “Splendors” makes some noble stabs at interpretation, although even its enthusiasm sometimes derails.

Notably, the catalogue bemoans the “unsophisticated compositions” of Bustos’ two known still lifes, one of which is in the show. In reality, they are astonishing inventions, unlike anything this critic has seen before.

“Still Life with Pineapple” (1877) shows about two dozen fruits and vegetables laid out across the surface of the smallish canvas. Each is painstakingly depicted in a Realist manner, with soft and uniform lighting entering from high up on the left, as if you’re looking down on the pear, potatoes, pineapple and such resting on a table top.

There, the Realism ends. Bustos hasn’t arranged the fruits and vegetables in a bowl, a pile or any other naturalistic display. Instead, they’re all lined up, one after the other, in half a dozen fairly neat horizontal rows. Each is painted as a self-contained entity, and the big pineapple and a trio of skinny beans are turned on the diagonal, in order to fit their shapes into the seamless composition.

In other words, Bustos’ still life has been arranged according to the logic of the picture plane, rather than to any naturalistic conception of how these objects would be encountered in the world. Its gridded format, in which the surface of the canvas becomes the self-conscious surface on which the images rest, is thoroughly modern.

More than just a case of a naive painting by a folk artist that resembles the stripped-down abstractions characteristic of Modern art, the composition instead embodies a modern way of seeing.

Whether Bustos had any training as a painter isn’t known for sure. Some think he may have apprenticed in his youth at the studio of Juan Nepomuceno Herrera in the nearby city of Leon, but accounts suggest little about his life before adulthood. They do show that Bustos was a devout Catholic, who organized religious pageants and perhaps restored paintings in local churches, and that he was a jokester, certifiably eccentric and held himself in rather high esteem.

They also reveal him as a jack of many trades: laborer, carver, silversmith, quack doctor, pawnbroker, carpenter, band musician and even a seller of a kind of ice cream. Painting was plainly just one of many things Bustos did to get by. (Making ex votos seems to have been a particularly lucrative business for him; many are extant.) Even more than the other inventive trades in which he engaged, his painting speaks of an unusually inquisitive nature that reveled in the sensuous pleasure of the world.

The still life shows how. No allegory is intended, no narrative implied, no myth recounted in a picture such as this. Always you are conscious that the fruit has been laid out for just one purpose: simply for you to see .

Bustos goes even further in his determination to use paint principally as a vehicle of perception. Different types of potato and different stages of ripeness of the same fruit are painted side by side. Pieces have been cut out of several of the fruits, to show you what they look like inside. The cut side of a lemon faces forward, its pulp and seeds open for inspection; next to it rests an uncut lemon, its textured rind a dazzling yellow.

It may even be the same lemon, simply turned over by the artist and, on the canvas, turned over in your mind. Change, uniqueness and variety are magically conveyed.

This perceptual emphasis is also plain in two small, very eccentric images painted on tin and housed in the Alhondiga. One is a halation of yellow color on a pale blue ground, depicting an inexplicable celestial phenomenon (rather like an aurora borealis) that Bustos witnessed in the western sky, beginning Sept. 16, 1883, and ending April 10, 1886. The other records his sighting of four different comets--the first, a dazzling arc of light in 1858, the last a pale wisp of luminescence in 1884.

The commemoration of miraculous events in little paintings on tin is obviously related to the ex voto tradition, as is the description of the event carefully printed by hand below the images. What’s remarkable is that Bustos would return to a picture to make additions, diary-like, after as much as 26 years. It’s an example of his obsession with perceptual experience, and of his conception of art as both a commemoration of and a parallel to it.

It is in Bustos’ portraits of the people of his town--the earlier on canvas, most of the later on tin--that this obsession comes together most powerfully. In a prosperous (if not wealthy) region where silver mining had once driven the economy, a number were commissions from the bourgeois citizenry.

The most beautiful is of an unidentified woman with a shawl. Painted when Bustos was just 29, it shows a serene, middle-aged woman, her pearls, golden earrings, brooch and rings a sign of her station, the prayer book prominently clutched in her hands a sign of her piety.

However, something else about this picture makes it mesmerizing. In his best work Bustos paints with excruciating attention to detail--every eye lash is rendered, one by one--while the massing of forms is simplified and elegant. Here, those traits collide in a dazzlingly complex passage where the delicate fringe of the woman’s shawl cascades across her vibrant, boldly patterned, orange and black dress.

This bravura passage is a visual seduction that pulls you in close to scrutinize the painting. Deftly, Bustos puts you in a position parallel to the artist scrutinizing his sitter.

Bustos also took commissions for special occasions like a wedding, or to commemorate the death of a child. “Get me Bustos!” you imagine locals crying, whenever an event of note came to pass.

Among the most haunting of the latter is “Nina muerta: Francisca Quesada” (1884), a small picture of a dead infant, wrapped in a red blanket, clad in a white bonnet and of sallow skin. Among the most puzzling is a lovely, undated family grouping in which a sorrowful father and mother flank and embrace their black-garbed daughter, who stares almost blankly ahead: Do the parents share her grief in mourning--or is it they who are mourning for a deceased daughter, posthumously commemorated here?

Other portraits apparently were painted of the artist’s friends and neighbors. Most of these little pictures are oil on tin, which became Bustos’ preferred medium after about 1870. (Tin is common to areas where silver is mined, and was widely used for ex votos .) Unstintingly direct, the portraits are never idealized, record every blemish or irregularity, but are never cruel. As much as Courbet, his devotion is to the glory of what his eye can see.

Generally, Bustos’ portraits partake of the standard conventions of the genre, especially among academic artists of the era: three-quarter view, waist or chest high, oval framing, even light. Yet, these are anything but academic in feeling. Why?

There’s no way to know for sure, but looking at these pictures it’s unthinkable that Bustos hadn’t seen portrait photographs. The “miracle” of the still relatively new medium, which was as influential in Mexico in the second half of the 19th Century as anywhere else, surely would have galvanized his perceptual instincts in ways that academic training would only have blunted.

Indeed, that Bustos worked outside the academic influence of his time is likely his saving grace, and one important factor setting him apart from the usual litany of artists from the period on whom praise is incongruously heaped. Jose Maria Velasco, the lauded landscapist whose work recently fetched a record-setting $2.2 million at auction, is a perfectly respectable painter. But his skillful mastery of a narrowly academic manner is his principal, and rather meager, achievement.

Bustos is certainly erratic in his work. Sometimes, you can put two pictures side by side and it takes a while to recognize that both were painted by the same hand. This is especially true of the sharp, seemingly irreconcilable differences between his folkish ex votos and his best portraits.

It’s an exaggeration to say that the only consistent quality in his art is its inconsistency, but like most exaggerations it springs from a well of truth. It also explains why he’s so important.

Unlike Velasco, who meant to stand tall on the shoulders of academic tradition, the painter from La Purisima del Rincon had more profound aspirations. Hermenegildo Bustos meant to look his fellow human beings in the eye. In his paintings, we meet their startling gaze.