Mexican Art in the Twentieth Century

MEXICAN ART IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

By Carol Miller
Sculptress, Journalist, Author, Translator, Critic
(see: “The Winged Prophet, from Hermes to Quetzalcoatl”)



When the Spaniards arrived on the American continent, following the voyages of Columbus, they discovered an astonishing number and variety of indigenous societies spread over a wide area, whose cultural traditions included a richly symbolic language—often coded or emblematic, extending into the esoteric, especially with regard to the deities and their avatars-- in effect, elaborate and often mystifying narrative and data preserved through the use of incised stelae and wall panels, carved door frames, allegorical sculpture integrated with architecture, and brightly colored mural painting, intended to tell additional stories: of ceremonies and their deities, of battles and their victors, of monarchs and their courts. Of the latter very little has survived, but exquisite examples can still be seen at Bonampak in Chiapas, at Cacaxtla in the state of Tlaxcala, and in monumental Teotihuacan, the “Temple of the Gods” just outside Mexico City.

This decorative imperative was designed to educate and illustrate a diverse citizenry, across language barriers, and was revealed as well in their garments and personal adornments, their trade products, weapons and utensils, their legislative code, instruments of punishment, even the moral minutiae of everyday life.

Many details and subtleties, design motifs, artisan skills, were not only exchanged among each other but were inevitably influenced by foreign presence prior to the so-called Conquest. Techniques in metallurgy surely originated with the Wari of Peru and had a notable impact on the cultures of Western Mexico, especially in the case of the Purépecha in Michoacán. And it would be dangerously simplistic to ignore a legacy, though as yet unproven, received from an East Asian presence, patently graphic in customs and traditions which have endured to the present, for example in the Day of the Dead proceedings, including the elements and their arrangement on traditional altars, related to the harvest festival but definitely esoteric, frankly metaphysical, an exuberant and eloquent ancestor worship, in Mexico as in China, that appeals to the five senses. Mexican art therefore must be regarded as both an expression and a presence that excites sound, scent, color, a festival for the eyes, the ears, and the hands that create the artisan emblems prescribed for the occasion.

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With the arrival of the first Franciscan friars, followed closely by the Dominicans and Augustinians, mural painting was immediately perceived as a logical solution to cultural overlay, and Christian subject matter appeared, not entirely as a replacement but rather as an infiltration of existing values, leading to a syncretism, that is, a synthesis of beliefs, an immediately visible transposition of values, still apparent today. The crucified Christ became the Aztec lord of death, their Mictlantecuhtli, who reigned in the Underworld, where so many of his subjects toiled in the mines.

Quetzalcoatl of the Toltecs, Kukulkan to the Mayas, Taykanamo on the North Coast of Peru, the lord of goodness and light, became Christ the Enlightened, the teacher, and the friars were seen as his emissaries on earth, while his counterpart, Tezcatlipoca, his polarized opposite, was transformed by characteristically Mesoamerican (and Chinese or Hindu) balance of values into evil and darkness, demons of the malicious and the devil himself.

Tlazoltéotl became Mary Magdalene, and the transpositions or manifestations (the avatars) of the deities of the wind, wisdom, age, fire, carnal pleasure, drunkenness and its sanctions, good fortune, evil portent, the Sun, the Moon, Venus and the stars, through the parallel pantheon of the various cultures, became the saints, each with his or her day, and his or her festival, until the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe, mother of the Americas, a uniquely American Virgin Mary, related to the virgins brought by the Catholic priests from Spain but nonetheless a Mexican Mary, more precious and beloved and more highly prized than her imported counterparts.

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The Revolution of 1910 came with the onset of the Twentieth Century. Mexico had been questing for its own identity, culled from the so-called creoles –offspring of Spaniards born in New Spain as Mexico was then called, coupled with the aspirations of the native peoples or their indigenous-Spanish mixture, known as mestizos. A war of independence from Spain unleashed a clash of class concerns, which were in turn obliged to confront foreign meddling and physical intervention, from the United States (using the Monroe Doctrine as its leverage), or Britain and France, in order to recover their cash loans, and even the imposition of an Austrian emperor sent by Napoleon III, until he was overthrown by Benito Juárez’ reform movement, and thus a renewed and redefined Mexico emerged, only to clash again following the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the entrance of Mexico onto the stage of the Twentieth Century’s inevitable social ferment. A new world was coming into being and Mexico was to be a part of it, a world which could no longer ignore the aspirations of the working class, of the peasant class, of women, and the indigenous tribes, so long isolated within the confines of their own history and suffering.

The physical expression of this new world followed the battles. In the aftermath of armed conflict the strategy of mural painting, as a didactic ploy, was dusted off and applied again as an official government policy. Then-president Alvaro Obregón entrusted his Secretary of Education, José Vasconcelos, with the monumental task of indoctrinating a new generation, informing a population that barely, if at all, spoke Spanish, of its rights and values, and of crossing class, commercial and cultural barriers, while restoring the capital city to its former splendor.

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Vasconcelos proceeded to enlist a growing gathering of painters, led by precursor artist, teacher and intellectual, my dear friend Adolfo Best-Maugard. He was followed in turn by Roberto Nervo Montenegro, then impassioned ideologue José Clemente Orozco who eventually painted a number of murals in the United States, including several in New England (at Dartmouth, among others) and California, notably Pomona.

An émigré from Guatemala, Carlos Mérida, then appeared on the scene, and he was followed by Ramón Alva de la Canal, and French arrival Jean Charlot. By then Diego Rivera had returned from an internship in Europe among the Modern Movements, and immediately took up the cause, initially assisted by Xavier Guerrero and Fernando Leal.

Miguel Covarrubias, darling of New York’s social scene and resident caricaturist in the fashionable magazines of the time –Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue—found his true calling in anthropology and began working in the mural format, including his remarkable mural sized maps assembled from panels to facilitate dismounting and transport, assisted by Antonio Ruiz, “El Corcito”.

Perhaps the most dedicated, and certainly the most versatile, also one of the most politically polarized, with an almost unbearably powerful aesthetic impact, was David Alfaro Siqueiros, often assisted by José L. Gutiérrez who created many of his base materials from durable and malleable plastic compounds, and Pablo O’Higgins, a talented painter who arrived in Mexico from Salt Lake City.

Rufino Tamayo, from Oaxaca, became prominent with a new vision of color and subject matter, much influenced by this then-companion María Izquierdo, while he eventually influenced other painters, for example Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, architect-painter-draftsman Juan O’Gorman, Jorge González Camarena, Raúl Anguiano (famous for his deathless picture of the indigenous youth removing a thorn from his foot with the tip of a machete), Francisco Eppens Helguera, Jesús Guerrero Galván, Alfredo Zalce who brought with him the traditions of his native Michoacán, Roberto Cueva del Río, the fiercely textured José Chávez Morado (incidentally married to the fine painter, German-born Olga Costa, who immortalized the displays of fruit in the marketplace), José García Narezo, Juan José Segura, the master watercolorist Ignacio Beteta, the soulful Federico Cantú, Desiderio Escamilla, Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin, Carlos Orozco Romero (whose work evolved into a mastery of the soft line of the hazy pastel-colored mountains along the horizon), and master restorer of frescos Guillermo Sánchez Lemus. Even Isamu Noguchi came to Mexico in 1936 and left the two panels of his relief mural on the upper level of the Abelardo Rodríguez Market, in downtown Mexico City, currently in the process of restoration.

Vasconcelos offered them the walls of new or recently repaired buildings and gave them carte blanche in their choice of subject matter, which inevitably took on the social conscious criterion of the late twenties and early thirties. Beginning with Roberto Montenegro and his “Tree of Life”, painted in 1921 on the walls of a giant stairwell in the School of St. Peter and St. Paul, initially the Carmelite Convent, the building is now the Center for the Restoration of National Patrimony and is undergoing repair. It actually sits just above one of the original canals at the very core of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, and is as well a museum of architecture; it is hoped it will eventually be opened to the public.

One work followed another, filling the inner, outer and perimeter walls, the courtyard walls and the stairwells, of government offices, public markets, centers of education, anywhere a wall lent itself to the decoration by a variety of artists, singly or in teams, in a multiplicity of techniques, ranging from fresco, encaustic, tempera, to relief. After the legal separation of church and state under Benito Juárez, and the later Cristero war during the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles, churches and their property were nationalized, thus making small and large religious holdings also fitting backgrounds, either for post-revolution mural paintings or the recovery, in recent times, as conservation projects, of the original didactic depictions of the Colonial period.

Many painters worked alone, others enlisted disciples or journeymen to help with the ever-more ambitious projects, and so the ranks of restless artists multiplied. They adapted their designs from gigantic sketches drawn to scale and applied by stencil on the vast surfaces placed at their disposal, or they used the timeless mural technique of cuadriculating their design in order to expand the subject matter from preliminary sketch to mural proportions. They used pantographs or other projection devices to enlarge their material in order to introduce additional and often novel elements. Many of them ultimately resorted to photography as the basis for their composition. In the case of Diego Rivera, especially, they exalted their artistic imagination. They often used live models and converted them into the real or allegorical personalities who would populate their vast works.

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In the background, hidden from view by the blinding light of the muralists, were the landscape artists, the portraitists and the mannerists, much more subtle and no less marvelous, no less the interpreters of a previously Europeanized Mexico captured by the likes of Hermenegildo Bustos or Saturnino Herrán, or the British and American draftsmen of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, like Daniel Thomas Egerton, who saw Mexico as soft and voluptuous, misty, muted, magical and beckoning. These included José María Velasco, Francisco Icaza and Joaquín Clausell. The generation that followed them, however, includes a staggering array of uniquely individual(ist) artists, each with a singular vision of his own “Mexicanism”. Many of their works, spanning the years from 1900 to 1960, that is “Mexican modernism” prior to the “rupture” or break with tradition at mid-twentieth century, have been meticulously gathered into the incomparable collection of Andrés Blaisten and can be seen at one of the many venues of the National University, this one specifically Pedro Ramírez Vázquez’s 1960’s architectural masterpiece, formerly the Foreign Affairs Ministry, accompanied by an archaeological site and the shell of a sixteenth century church, at the Plaza of the Three Cultures.

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While the muralists in Mexico were discovering their voice and their cause, painters in the United States were also undergoing a transformation, which would echo back and forth among the creators of the entire Hemisphere, as the modern movements arrived from Europe. Beginning with the celebrated Armory Show of 1913 in Manhattan, and the explosion on the scene of Cubism, particularly, these were less a social interpretation than they were a visual revolution evolving out of the post-impressionist years in color, style and technique, a complete break with the past, yet they were quickly adapted in Mexico and an immediate diversification of styles emerged. Was this chaos or discovery? Was it rebellion or revision? Was it social awareness or a personal quest?

It was all of this and more, especially in Mexico, where the post-revolution years brought a wave of human flotsam, fleeing the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, fascism, Nazism, religious and political persecution of all sorts, finally defined by McCarthy in the 1950’s. Mexico opened its doors to what became an inestimable injection of vitality and originality in every field, ranging in art from what Spanish refugee art critic Margaret Nelken categorized as Expressionism, to a heavy dose of Surrealism, much of which arrived in Mexico from Europe vía New York. Exponents, some native, some imported or of foreign descent, included such diverse elements, ranging from realist to abstract, as architect-designer-sculptor Mathias Goeritz, Ignacio Asúnsolo, Guillermo Meza, Francisco Goitia, Charlotte Yazbek, Jesús “Chucho” Reyes, César Corzo, José Luis Cuevas, Marysole Warner Baz, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Alice Rahon and Wolfgang Paalen, Angelina Beloff, Enrique Clement, Luis Nishizawa, and the architecture in pre-stressed concrete of Félix Candela.

Then came a new generation, just as diverse but aesthetically isolated from any cult, movement, school or tendency, to such an extent that they gave themselves a name: “The Rupture”. A break with the past, a new view toward the future, more abstract, more geometric, more stringent, more personal: the savage and sublime brushstrokes of Francisco Corzas, the realistic faces under unreal headgear of Rafael Coronel, the blazing colors of his brother Pedro Coronel, the fetishes of Alberto Gironella, the cool anatomy of Joy Laville, the neo-architectural geometry and subdued esoteric erudition of Pedro Friedeberg, the harsh lines of Arnaldo Coen or Vicente Rojo, of Manuel Felguérez, Rubén Poblano, Arenas Chacón, Leopoldo Flores, Greta Kramsky, the sumptuous volumes and rich tones of Liliana Carrillo or Cordelia Urueta (and their aesthetic offspring, Susana Sierra), the childlike artistic reportage of Jaime Saldívar, the stilted architectural constructionism of Diego Matthai.


Some are gone, others continue to produce. Cuevas, more vital and prolific than ever, is always on the scene and has expanded his drawing with a new output of bronze sculpture. Tamayo spawned a new generation from Oaxaca, led by the astonishing Francisco Toledo and followed by Sergio Hernández and company, and by the singular Rodolfo Morales, an original with his own private vision. Sculpture, during the sixties and seventies dominated by women, returned to the male prerogative, especially defined during the late nineties by Javier Marín.

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Yet by then Latin American art, dominated by the Mexicans, with an important presence of Cubans in exile, as well as a selection of South Americans, had taken a new direction. In the early eighties Mary Anne Martin, today the owner of a successful gallery in Manhattan, back then an enterprising young employee of Sotheby’s Auction Gallery, started the Latin American Department, quickly followed by Christie’s, who turned management over to the ever-refined and discreet Lisa Palmer, a German who had spent several years living in Brazil. It might have seemed more natural to include the artists among their international peers, and this was attempted after 1985, when an oil of Diego Rivera sunflowers reached the highest then-price for a Latin American painting, at over half a million dollars. (Ironically, just days before, at the Impressionist sale in May of that year, Van Gogh’s sunflowers brought a hammer price of over fifty-nine million dollars, setting off a blockbuster domino effect on the international market, what one critic called “The Mona Lisa Syndrome”).

The experiment failed. Latin American art, it seems, must remain among the Latins, where Mexican artists made up approximately sixty percent of the alternatives, with an equal number of buyers. When periodic economic crises hit Mexico, parlayed into a devaluation to accompany the recession of the nineties, its impact was felt at the auction galleries, who gradually transformed the nature and character of their sale. What had begun as a modest afternoon event, in time had evolved into a twice-a-year (May and November) more prestigious evening sale, then expanded into a black tie evening gala (preceded earlier in the week by a private dinner in the Board Room and by a resounding cocktail party on the eve of the sale), followed the next morning with the works of lesser price and fanfare, but success is inevitably pursued by greed. Legal action was brought against the auction galleries for collusion and price fixing, for cash advances against pricey sales, and a major executive was not only dismissed: she went to jail. As a result, company policy, determined by market changes, brought about new parameters and in time Sotheby’s limited the value of the work offered to a minimum of fifteen thousand dollars, thus closing the auction floor to newcomers or artists on the back burner.

Additional restrictions since then have limited the available work, but during the heyday of the Latin American sales, during the late eighties and throughout the nineties, great collections were formed in Monterrey or Puebla, in Los Angeles, Houston, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Caracas, Quito, Bogotá or Miami; galleries and dealers speculated shamelessly and bought and sold their own products in order to inflate the prices, and museums throughout the hemisphere were stocked or recycled with representative selections chosen from among the primary works.

Little or nothing, however, was done to promote the sales through the media, no effort was made to educate or instruct the public, and it was the Impressionist, Modern or Contemporary sales that were harvesting the big bucks. Even when one notable Latin American auction brought in a record sixteen million dollars, mostly because of the sale to an Argentinean collector of a painting by feminist icon Frida Kahlo, Latin American remained the stepchild of the art market. With today’s inflated market, a sale can bring in sixteen, eighteen, maybe even twenty million. This no longer raises eyebrows when a Picasso can go for 120,000,000 and the actual sales room is visible by video on the auction gallery websites.

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Where does Latin American, and specifically Mexican, art go from here? The current tendency is so-called Contemporary Art, not referring to the euphoric years of New York Abstract Expressionism, but to the splash-and-crumple work of today, notably insubstantial and fleeting, with its emphasis on installations, the vaguely conceptual or the frankly minimalist, by people who have no clear understanding of the meaning of these terms, and young couples no longer find social élan in their art collections. The work they hang or display is sparse, generally more motivated by a desire for the decorative, while the art of the street, in reality pure vandalism, tends to be rich, colorful, angry and expressive, like the Chicano art it spearheads. And the established collections? They are being broken up and sold off, by the elderly or their heirs, who have no further interest in paintings, or for that matter, in fine porcelain, art glass, vanguard silver or masterpiece furniture, by the great designers of the Twentieth Century. They would rather go to Las Vegas, or take a cruise.

Yet since mankind’s days in the caves he has been compelled to adorn his walls, so there will always be a canvas or a scribbling, or a framed poster reproduction, to express his imperatives of the moment, and there will always be a message, that creativity, despite the mystery of its origins, and despite the probable dementia of the artist, will be kept in line by the observers, that is, the potential customers, who keep us sane and focused. We need it. And so do they. Art translates the miracle of the human brain, which we will never fully understand, and keeps it always close by. We want it near us to remind us that we are, in effect, human, for whatever that is worth.


oOo