This article is part of our coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15). Be on the lookout for featured artists and playlists on our art feed, as well as another article next week.

Drawing a culture’s art history is always a fraught exercise. Even when focusing on a single country—Italy, say, or Japan—questions of identity come up. Is an Italian artist working in America truly Italian? What about a Swiss painter who calls Italy home? When tackling the issue of Hispanic identity, this task becomes Herculean. The term Hispanic broadly refers to Spain and Spanish-speaking countries, especially in Latin America. Brazil, which is in Latin America but speaks Portuguese, is called Latino; Portugal, which is on the Iberian Peninsula with Spain, is neither Latino nor Hispanic. Some even consider Asian countries like the Philippines Hispanic, as it was colonized by Spain and retains its cultural traditions.

It should come as no surprise then that, historically, artists concerned with Hispanic identity have not converged around a single point. The Hispanic identity is diasporic—always expanding, mixing, generating new possibilities. (This isn’t to mention Hispanic identity as subjected by non-Hispanic artists. Long after colonization, Hispanic costumbrist themes appeared in many well known works, for example John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo.) Because encapsulating such an idea is impossible, let’s focus our quest for Hispanic identity on three distinct artists with three distinct ways of capturing what it means to be Hispanic.

An Impressionist with a heart for Spain

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida—or, as he is commonly known, Joaquín Sorolla—painted images of Spain that have contributed to the national identity possibly more than any other artist. His work can most readily be identified by bright sunlight and luminous ocean water. At the start of his career, he focused on themes that explored the Spanish identity, drawing political and historical issues with a forceful hand. But as he matured, he abandoned these themes, choosing instead to paint en plein air and capture Spanish landscapes. This provided him the fame necessary to reach a wider audience, and he soon began to receive commissions from the Hispanic Society of America, mostly for portraits. In 1911, he would receive his career’s defining commission from the HSA, 14 oil paintings originally agreed upon to be a Vision of Spain, focusing on its history—but he had other ideas. Instead, Sorolla chose to paint the terrains of the Iberian Peninsula. This shift from political art to aesthetic art should be seen as the major trend of his lifetime—one which runs counter to that of other eminent Hispanic artists.

Willingly naive

While some Hispanic artists saw European art as a touchstone, others defied European traditions and forged their own path. The Uruguayan Pedro Figari got a late start on art. A lawyer first, he did not fully devote himself to painting until he was 60. This would turn out to be crucial. His career in law exposed him to many social issues that would later blossom as themes in his paintings. Drawing from local issues was at the heart of his work, so much so that he took pains to ignore the wider world, especially European trends. This led to his “naive style,” one which “allowed him to caricature the social conventions of the bourgeoisie in his native Uruguay with a sort of wide-eyed innocence,” according to Oriana Baddeley and Valerie Fraser in Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America. One example of this is his candombe series, in which he depicted the style of dance native to his country, which was influenced by African tradition brought in by the slave trade. In this way, Figari was exemplar of the instinct to move the Hispanic identity forward, cutting it off from its European past and mixing it with disparate cultures.

Mexico’s anguished surrealist

Perhaps no Hispanic artist is more celebrated, especially in recent times, than Frida Kahlo. Born to a German father and a mestiza mother (someone with a mix of Spanish and indigenous blood), Kahlo embraced local traditions and aesthetics from an early age. (She even went so far as to change her birth date to coincide with the beginning of the Mexican revolution.) The through lines of her work were emotional suffering and the Mexican identity; in her Self Portrait (1932), we see both. The image shows her on the Mexican-American border (she spent some time in New York of Detroit, because of commissions received by her husband, Diego Rivera), longing to return home. That she is also regarded as a feminist icon shouldn’t be seen as an idea distinct from her national identity, but one inextricably bound to it; the desire for independence and the anguish that comes with it was always at the heart of her work.

These three artists are just three points we can use to graph the constellation of Hispanic art. With any luck, studying specific Hispanic artists won’t give us a feeling of finally being able to grasp Hispanic identity—just an urge to explore more ways it has been, and continues to be, expressed.