Mexican Painting
FINE ARTS
By MACKINLEY HELM
SINCE I made my first comprehensive report on the Mexican painters six years ago, when I took my readers on a tour of about fifty studios, the membership of the School of Mexico City has become somewhat more clearly defined. A few artists have disappeared from the group, like the mysterious young genius Tebo, whom no one has seen in the City for four or five years. Others, like Francisco Goitia and Agustín Lazo, have dropped out of sight in the galleries through neglecting to paint. Francisco Gutiérrez died of a tragic ailment not long after he had begun to exercise the true lyrical power which was hardly in sight in 1941. Some of the young men who were print makers first — Raúl Anguiano, José Chavez Morado, and Alfredo Zalce —have grown up as painters. And three or four new young people — not very many — have appeared on the scene.
Dr. Atl, the prophet of the Mexican renaissance, has been officially honored by a retrospective exhibition of his globular landscapes in bright Atl-color, a waxy pigment of his eccentric invention. The old gentleman sat every day in the frigid galleries at the top of the Palace of Fine Arts, wrapped up in mufflers and receiving the homage of thousands: for in Mexico, a successful artist remains a great public figure.
Mention of Diego Rivera, who once ruled the School, now arouses so much rancorous argument that it is hard to estimate, with any objectivity, such values as may be seen in his more recent murals. Most people think his new paintings are tripe. But in the frescoes which he is now making in the National Palace, on the subject of pre-Conquest history, there are glimpses of the once-honored master, the man of talent and energy, of knowledge of mural design and passion for color.
Partly, I think, because of Rivera’s personal unpopularity, and only partly because the older man’s greater authority is now being recognized, José Clemente Orozco has acquired, during these years, the greater prestige at home. Nothing he has done publicly since the completion of his ironical historical frescoes in Guadalajara has materially added to his reputation. There are few figures in the new Supreme Court murals, which the judges hated, or in the gaudy roof of the secularized Temple of Jesus in Mexico City, that can compare, in the power to arrest and excite, with the tortured nudes so peculiarly placed in a children’s library in Guadalajara. But whereas there was almost no sale for his work in private and museum collections six years ago, when Rivera was at the peak of his market, Orozco’s drawings and portable paintings now command high prices and find ready buyers.
Maestro Orozco was angry with me, one time, because I told him that, like the English poet A. E. Housman, he had never ascended to the high plateau where he worked, but had always lived there. He must have forgiven me, for a few years later he asked his official biographer to make the same declaration.
When David Siqueiros, the stormy petrel of the Mexican movement, came home after painting murals in Chile, a tempest was brewed in a Rightist teapot. The painter came to my house waving a cartoon in which he appeared in the uniform of the Spanish Republican Army, He read out the caption, “El Coronelazo,” which meant, roughly, in English, “The Stuck-up Colonel.”
“Look!” said Siqueiros. “In the history of art, we have had El Greco and Lo Spagnoletto. Now there is El Coronelazo!” Whereupon, for the first time, he added that name to one of his works on my wall: a colored sketch of a part of the Chilean murals.
For the reason that this tempestuous and original painter needs large walls for the turbulent themes which he paints with spray gun and duco — and gets them from frightened officials — his portable paintings are sufficiently rare to command rising prices. The strength and fantasy of the new easel paintings of landscape and animals, executed with more sincerity and less shock than the murals, clearly enhance his position at the table of the senior Mexican masters.
A good deal of the responsibility and a not unmerited share of the prestige attached to the School, which is now in its twenty-sixth year, have lately fallen upon a second generation of hard-working painters. Three of them, Carlos Mérida, Rufino Tamayo, and Jesús Guerrero Galván, are of purely Indian ancestry, a circumstance which I like to point out because I am so often asked to say what part the indigenous races play in the cultural life of the Latin Americas.
It is in the work of descendants of the aboriginal people, I like to insist, that Mexico’s pictorial quality is most, honestly stated. The Mexico of Diego Rivera, for all the masterly painting, was a private invention after a long absence from home. The Mexico of Tamayo, Galván, and Mérida (a transplanted Maya) has the look of authority. It is abstracted and possibly patterned, but it is native and real.
Tamayo, whose exhibitions command deep respect in New York, is never a realist. He never simply paints what he sees. Like his ancestors, who were not strict realists either, he uses form and color for feeling. The painters and sculptors of ancient Mexico worked from the heart, and Tamayo, who was one of the first of his school to hark back to the ancients, has a good deal of the same spontaneity.
I think of Carlos Mérida as the musician of the Mexican movement and of Guerrero Galván as its poet. Mérida, who was one of the founders of the easel wing of the School, is a somewhat difficult painter. It is not always easy to see what he drives at. Except in the lithographs which were designed to document regional dances, costumes, and customs, he never tells stories. His paintings are intended to delight the eye by purely pictorial means: that is, by color and line and the arrangement of forms. Mérida’s personal use of these traditional means, together with his perfectly visible rhythms, somehow suggests the hearing of music, an art to which he has been devoted from childhood. When he visited Boston on the occasion of his first New England exhibit, he listened impartially to symphony concerts and hot colored bands.
I continue to take undiminishing pleasure in the paintings of Guerrero Galván. He has made a small group of new paintings based on recollections of childhood in the westerly state of Jalisco on such storied themes as guardian angels, miraculous healers, and visitations from tombs. The poetic episodes are set against remote landscapes, as in much early painting in Italy, and the colors, though still transparent, have grown somber and mystical.
“Does it seem to you like a poem, no?” Galván often has asked me, in front of one of his paintings.
I answer, “It does.”
Federico Cantú, hard at work now in a well-lighted new studio, paints while the sun lasts, and draws with his burin late into the night. His work has puzzled some people because it is not so obviously “Mexican” as that of other members of the middle group to which he belongs. It is true that Cantú, in some respects, does stand alone in the School. He did not take part in the revolutionary proceedings of the first years of the revival of painting; nor has he ever consciously tried to isolate himself from Europe.
On the contrary, he has persisted in drawing his subjects from the classical and religious traditions in which he was reared abroad and for which he has a scholar’s feeling — as in panels recently painted for a church in Monterrey and a new series of line engravings of sacred and profane subjects. Yet after considerable acquaintance with Cantú’s work, I do not see how it could have been produced in any other setting than the highlands of Mexico: for while I find pleasure in its freedom from narrow parochialism and its preoccupation with universal ideas and means, I also see in it, so clearly revealed, a new light on the Mexican land and its people.
Antonio Ruiz — if, as I suppose, he is still painting — manages to keep his satirical miniatures well hidden from the public eye. Several people have lately come to me to ask for help in buying one of his expensive little pictures, but the diplomatic negotiations which once amused me now leave me fatigued. Still, I continue to admire the gay independence and modesty of Ruiz’s thoughtful and careful production.
Julio Castellanos has been so immersed in the theater that he only occasionally paints the sad, fleshly people that collectors look for. Manuel Rodríguez Lozano’s new paintings, following a course I once indicated, have become so ascetic that they hardly exist: the forms reduced to negations and the color to white. Carlos Orozco Romero’s nearly flawless techniques are applied to a widening range of subjects; but his rather hard-bitten style, which has sometimes repelled his admirers, seems to have given way to a looser romanticism in the new landscapes.
I am happy to say that my early precipitate judgment of Guillermo Meza has never embarrassed me. He has produced nearly five hundred pictures, in oil and gouache, besides a great number of pen-and-ink drawings in a miraculous technique of oval crosshatching, and all but a handful of these have been sold. The prices now paid for his work, dollar for peso, reflect the general view that this self-taught painter has grown in authority. As modest in mind and person as ever, as I learned while he painted my portrait, Meza thinks of himself as the devotee of a muse who can never be satisfied.
Juan Soriano, of whom I formerly spoke with some condescension, has completely won my respect for a purposeful seriousness which I had not suspected. Few of the painters of the younger generation have been willing to submit, as he has done, to the discipline of drawing from nature. In a nude by his colleague Meza, however torn apart and distorted it comes out on the canvas or paper, you can imagine and feel the sound structure of the breathing reality. Soriano’s people, never so altered for the sake of emotion, begin to show the force of the same basic, indispensable knowledge.
A new young painter whose name is linked with Soriano’s and Meza’s is Ricardo Martínez, who had not painted before 1940. His entirely non-political paintings are poetic and dreamlike. And whether he represents landscape or figures, the air and the misty spaces which the painter contrives give off mystical feeling.
Another promising new painter is Alfonso Michel, the only young artist of rank who does not work in the capital. Michel draws bodily nourishmeat from an old hacienda in the State of Colima, and has therefore been able to resist the attraction of permanent residence close to a market. Developed in the tierra ealiente, his work has introduced a new note into group exhibitions.
Some of the metropolitan artists have dipped now and again into the hot country — Alfredo Zalce, for example, in some wash drawings recently shown in New York, and Diego Rivera in his fine Tehuantepec water colors— but it is only the high plateau that has persistently provoked the loving and critical observation that produces autochthonous art. It is to be hoped that Michel, who has only lately returned from long residence in France, will slay at home to exercise his joyous sense of color in the western lowlands.
Feliciano Peña, after years of hard and painstaking work, has developed a new lyrical style in portraying the largely neglected Mexican landscape. Foreigners have always gone for the countryside in a big way, and almost always falsely, but the Mexican revival, which began with humanistic ideas, has quite naturally never taken a very objective view of inanimate nature. The nineteenth-century Mexican landscapist José María Velasco has had but few followers: Dr. Atl exceptionally; Carlos Orozco Romero more lately; and now Peña, who fills in the gap. Perhaps with the decline of political passion, the landscape will come back to its own.
I do not mean to imply that political passion is already spent. It is present in the work of painters who have come out of the shops where the graphic arts served the Revolution: Alfredo Zalce, Raúl Anguiano, Isidore Ocampo, and José Chavez Morado — whose wife, Olga Costa, has lately added a delightfully comical note to the serious comments of Chavez Morado and his talented colleagues. But even these younger “social-consciousness’' painters, unlike their elders, paint what they see with tenderness rather than hate. It is only the old guard that still fumes.
