The Color of Silver: William Spratling, His Life and Art, and: The Silver Gringo: William Spratling and Taxco (review)

The Color of Silver: William Spratling, His Life and Art. By TAYLOR D. LITTLETON. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Plates. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 322 pp. Cloth, $34.95.

The Silver Gringo: William Spratling and Taxco. By JOAN MARK. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. 154 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

Appearing in 2000, these two books commemorated the birth of William Spratling (1900-1967). He was an artist, writer, collector, perhaps best known as the Cellini of Taxco for his designs in silver and his successful efforts to revive silver craftsmanship there. Spratling completed an autobiography, File on Spratling (1967), shortly before his death in an automobile accident, but the volumes under review are the first book-length studies of his multifaceted career. Both books recount the principal events of his life, but each emphasizes different aspects of that life. Each has numerous strengths and a few weaknesses that reflect the background of its author. Littleton has published extensively on topics in literature and the humanities, and Mark has written several works in the history of anthropology; neither is a Mexican specialist.

Spratling was born in Sonyea, New York, where his father, a physician, was superintendent of a state institution for epileptics. Spratling's childhood was marked by loss, for his mother and one of his sisters died in 1910, his father in 1915, and his guardian (and uncle) in 1916. Mark passes over Spratling's formative years in two pages. Littleton gives a much fuller account, based on letters found in the family home in Alabama. Spratling studied architecture at Auburn University, but left without a degree to become an instructor in architecture at Tulane University. Littleton devotes two chapters to Spratling's years in New Orleans (1922-29), where he won recognition as an artist, especially for his architectural drawings. He was part of a Bohemian community that included Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, then virtually unknown, who was his roommate for two years and his collaborator on a book of caricatures, Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles (1926).

Spratling first went to Mexico in the summer of 1926, with a contract from Architectural Forum for drawings of colonial buildings. After visits in the summers of 1927 and 1928, he moved to Mexico permanently in 1929, settling in Taxco, then a picturesque but impoverished village that had once been an important mining center. From the outset, he immersed himself in Mexico's lively cultural scene, hobnobbing with Diego Rivera, Miguel Covarrubias, and other artists and intellectuals. He also formed friendships with American visitors and expatriates in Mexico, and two women he had known in New Orleans--journalist Natalie Scott and Elizabeth Anderson, Sherwood's ex-wife--moved to Taxco. In 1932 he published Little Mexico (reprinted as A Small Mexican World in 1964), in which he sketched with words and drawings a portrait of Taxco and its people and of nearby regions. Spratling, nearly always short of money, hoped that the book would bring a good financial return, but was disappointed.

It is in their discussion of Spratling's work as a silver designer and entrepreneur that the two accounts diverge the most. They even disagree on the year--1932 or 1933--in which Spratling opened a workshop where Mexican craftsmen produced jewelry, tableware, and other objects in accordance with his designs. According to Mark, Spratling developed a distinctive style, later emulated by other designers in Taxco: "The characteristics of the style are clean, modern lines; animal, plant, and pre-Columbian motifs; and combinations of silver with semiprecious stones, wood, and tortoise shell" (pp. 52-53).

Less than a third of Littleton's text is devoted to Spratling's silver enterprises, while the proportions are reversed in Mark's book. In addition, Littleton covers the last 30 years...