Why Mexican art is ¡magnífico!
The world’s love affair with Mexican art burns hotter than ever.
During a patrons’ dinner Wednesday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, no one doubted the timeliness of its landmark show on Mexican art. “Walls,” said MFAH director Gary Tinterow, “are for hanging paintings.” The crowd applauded. Amid talk of a U.S.-Mexico border wall and deportation of undocumented Mexican immigrants, the world’s love affair with Mexican art is burning hotter than it has in years. By coincidence, two landmark museum exhibitions are on view in Texas. On Sunday, “Paint the Revolution” begins a three-month run at the MFAH. The show overlaps with the final weeks of Dallas Museum of Art’s “México 1900-1950,” which has been up since March.
since March. Both shows are drawing crowds. More than 120,000 people saw “Paint the Revolution” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and 174,000 saw it at Mexico City’s Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes. That’s more than double the crowd that MFAH drew for its recent, wildly successful Degas show.
In Dallas, nearly 83,000 people so far have viewed “México”; 230,000 saw it in Paris.
That’s a coup for Agustín Arteaga, who curated “México” for Paris’ Grand Palais, which was to have been the show’s only venue, then scrambled to bring the show to Dallas after becoming the Dallas Museum of Art’s new director.
Not just timely
It’s not just timeliness that makes the shows interesting. Both were assembled before the border talk exploded, for the art’s sake alone.
“The only school of art in the first half of the 20th century that vies in quality, prominence and in international influence with the school of Paris is the school of Mexican art,” Tinterow told the patrons Wednesday.
MFAH curator Mari Carmen Ramírez, who organized the Houston presentation of “Paint the Revolution,” thinks Mexican modern art is due for an international reassessment.
She recounted the flak she heard from a famous professor at the University of Chicago 35 years ago, when she proposed her dissertation on the Mexican muralists.
“He was like, ‘Why do you want to spend time on all these people who were not great artists?’ ” she said. “They were perceived as social realists. And social realism had a very bad reputation because of Stalinism. That was the thinking at the time.”
In the U.S., Mexican art has gone in and out of fashion.
In 1941, Museum of Modern Art founder Alfred H. Barr Jr. put Mexicans at the leading tip of the “torpedo” diagram he created to imagine an ideal permanent collection.
“He thought European art was exhausted, and Mexicans were the avant-garde,” Ramírez said. Barr gave MoMA’s first solo show to Diego Rivera.
“But then came Abstract Expressionism and the New York School and all of that … and the Mexicans were relegated because they were seen as anachronistic,” Ramírez said. For decades, the international narrative of Mexican modernism has focused mostly on the “Big Three” muralists — Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco — and clichés born in the 1970s, when North Americans found a pop-culture icon in Frida Kahlo.
In recent years, as interest in all Latin American art has surged, prices have, too. Argentine megacollector Eduardo Costantini bought Rivera’s 1929 “Dance in Tehuantepec” last year for $15 million; it’s among the stellar loans in “Paint the Revolution.”
The Philadelphia Museum of Art staged the first landmark traveling show of Mexican modernism in the U.S. in 1943. That’s partly why its director, Timothy Rub, and Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes director Miguel Fernández Félix conceived “Paint the Revolution.”
Tinterow has wanted a big Mexican show for Houston since he assumed the reins of the MFAH five years ago. When he saw “Paint the Revolution,” he had to have it.
Serendipity brought the schedules together.
Masterpieces on exhibit
Both shows are worth a trip and some serious looking time. They can’t be absorbed during a quick dash through the museum.
Each presents about 200 works, filled with masterpieces that have not traveled for years, if ever. The two shows unpack a layered history involving at least 60 important artists, multiple mediums and variations on themes amplified by the revolution that roiled Mexico from 1910-20.
There began the four-decade quest to convey “Mexicanidad,” a unique Mexican consciousness, through art. Front and center is the nearreligious trifecta Orozco conveys with such pathos in masterpieces such as “The Barricade,” (from 1931, on view in Houston) — this iconography of the Indian, the worker and the peasant. Martyrheroes of the revolution, indigenous traditions, Surrealism and urban transformation also figure in.
And of course, there’s muralism, the Mexican modern period’s glorious starting point.
In 1920, as the revolution finally abated, President Álvaro Obregón’s new government conceived the mural movement to spark nationalism on a grand, public scale.
The intellectual José Vasconcelos, the first minister of public education, dispatched artists to Mexico’s far corners to gather material for the magnificent paintings that would fill the walls of Mexico City’s colonial buildings — and later, buildings in the U.S.
“Portable” murals on view in both shows include beauties by Saturnino Herrán, who used indigenous people as heroic subjects in impressive, Art Nouveau-style paintings. Dallas also has Rivera’s gorgeous multipanel bathing scene, “Juchitán River,” made from 1953-55.
Impressive digital projections of murals fill the central gallery of the Houston show. Using a large kiosk, visitors can explore details of Rivera’s “Ballad of the Agrarian Revolution,” which resides in Mexico. With provided iPads, they also can roam Orozco’s “The Epic of American Civilization” for Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
Another jewel is not digital: A slightly reduced but colorsaturated, multipaneled recreation of Siqueiros’ swirling and ridiculously complex “Portrait of the Bourgeoisie.” The original consumes the walls and ceiling of a stairwell in Mexico City’s modest Electricians’ Union building.
“For me, it is a great masterpiece of modern art,” Ramírez said.
When Siqueiros painted this piece in 1939-40, he was afraid muralism was losing its relevance to film, which had become a more potent mobilizer of the masses. He incorporated cinematographic techniques, including multifocus perspective. Viewers of the original, Ramírez said, sense that the images are moving around them.
In both shows, Siqueiros emerges as the biggest thrill. He was the great experimenter, the avant-garde artist who also layered wood on canvases to bring out figures, slashed canvases and built up layers of car paint that inspired Jackson Pollock’s drip technique.
“The problem with him is that he
Visitors can explore Diego Rivera’s ‘Ballad of the Agrarian Revolution.’ With provided iPads, they also can roam José Clemente Orozco’s ‘The Epic of American Civilization.’
attempted to kill (Leon) Trotsky, and that kind of put him out of the loop,” Ramírez said. “His politics got in the way.”
Los mujeres
Twenty percent of the Dallas show features revelatory works by women, suggesting that women may have had more equal footing in Mexico than in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century.
When “México” debuted in Paris, critics anointed the provocative Nahui Olin “the new Frida.” Perhaps not for her own paintings; in spite of her psychedelic palette, her work pales next to Kahlo’s. Olin, however, was a sexpot, a thrilling muse for the influential Gerardo Murillo (known as Dr. Atl) and photographer Antonio Garduño.
Painters Olga Costa and María Izquierdo, sculptor Alice Rahon and photographers Lola Álvarez Bravo and Tina Modotti shine for better reasons. All of this group but Costa appear in the Houston show.
Kahlo, of course, is still queen, drawing crowds so reliably, curators jokingly call her “Santa Frida.”
The Dallas show boasts her greatest masterpiece, “The Two Friedas,” an exceptionally large canvas for Kahlo (at 68 inches square) that depicts her mestiza/ German duality. But other works in both exhibitions remind viewers why she deserves to be seen as more than a strong, tragic figure mangled by a bus accident that brought her a life of pain.
Kahlo was a more nuanced painter than her husband, Rivera. That’s evident even in the three small but complex Kahlo paintings of the Houston show.
In her “Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States,” she stands defiantly pretty in pink, a cigarette in one hand and a Mexican flag in the other, splitting a landscape that’s ominous on both sides, but coldly industrial north of the border and bursting with nature to the south.
Frida as a border wall! Why not? No wonder the museum features this painting in its ads and posters. Some visitors will be surprised, however, to see that it is only 12 by 13 inches, likely painted when Kahlo was traveling.
Oh, well: The “Mona Lisa” is tiny, too.
Kahlo’s fierce spirit also glows in two paintings from a Houston collection, her 1945 “Moses” and her 1939 “Suicide of Dorothy Hale.” Both originated as commissions that exceeded their commissioners’ requests.
Claire Booth Luce paid Kahlo to make a portrait of Hale, a friend who jumped to her death from a window. Kahlo depicted the act of suicide in a retablo-inspired painting whose cloudy sky spills all the way to the outer edge of its wood frame. Luce, furious because she was expecting a nice portrait, rejected it.
The Houston and Dallas shows share one fabulous and important element: Sergei Eisenstein’s cult classic black-and-white film, “¡Que viva México!,” an unfinished documentary from the early 1930s. It captures — with a Surrealistic, dreamlike quality — the real-life themes the artists so colorfully convey.
Throughout the galleries of both shows, other surprises abound and highlight numerous artists who deserve more solo attention in the future — among them Izquierdo, Dr. Atl, Roberto Montenegro and Rufino Tamayo.
Then there’s the whole other story of the European émigrés who fled World War II in the 1940s. They infused the scene with Surrealism — finding Mexico, with its magical realism traditions, a perfect climate for their dream-inspired exploration.
Mexican modern art flourished because the government invested heavily in it, making national themes mandatory. But that patronage also limited artists’ ability to explore more contemporary approaches to art, and made Tamayo a political outlier. This is why virtually none of the best-known Mexicans were abstract artists.
For the foreseeable future, the two shows’ hefty catalogs will be the new textbooks of Mexican modern art. They’re worthwhile investments for those anxious for an even deeper dive than the exhibitions can provide.
Go. Learn. Enjoy.
In addition to icon Frida Kahlo, female artists include painters Nahui Olin, Olga Costa and María Izquierdo, sculptor Alice Rahon and photographers Lola Álvarez Bravo and Tina Modotti.