Art Museum's 'Mexican Printmaking'

The age of new thinking:
Revolutionary modern Mexico

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

The Art Museum’s current “Tesoros” show tells viewers the story of New Spain and ends chronologically around 1820, with Simon Bolivar leading an independence movement that would ultimately spawn a continent comprised of independent republics. “Mexico and Modern Printmaking,” a new exhibit, returns to the place where New Spain began— Mexico, now the northernmost of the modern Spanish republics— and leaps forward in time about a hundred years.

By 1920 Mexico had weathered a century of revolutions and counter-revolutions. Its larger-than-life heroes and villains— the Austrian-born Emperor Maximilian, Benito Juarez, Porfirio Diaz, Francesco Madero, Victoriano Huerta and Emiliano Zapata— had all come and gone. The wealthy landowners descended from the Spanish Viceroys, as well as the Roman Catholic Church—the two great pillars that supported the world of “Tesoros”—lay shattered. New thinking was in the air.

Warfare, bloodshed— and creativity

It should come as no surprise that much of the new thinking was political. The Communist Party grew and flourished during these years. Mexico played host to the exiled Communist theoretician Leon Trotsky and vigorously persecuted the Catholic Church. As Harry Lime once famously observed, all this warfare, terror and bloodshed seems to be a marvelous stimulant to creativity. Mexico had no shortage of artists, both homegrown and imported, to chronicle this period of its history, and they did their work well. “Mexico and Modern Printmaking” is a partial testimony to their collective genius.

Poverty; revolt; solidarity; education; victory; grief—these themes pervade this extensive exhibition, linking homegrown work to work created in exile, work looking backwards at the recent past to work embracing the newest Surrealist theories hot off the Paris presses. But the overwhelming theme, I think, is a simple need to communicate.

These artists wanted to speak person-to-person with every agricultural worker, every factory worker, and every other man and woman of good will. The great facilitator of this dream was an institution known as the Taller de Grafica Popular—the Graphic Workshop of the People. Here artists could create art that would be inexpensive and easily reproducible. Posters—an art designed to adorn walls and telephone poles—were a preferred means of expression, although the artists of the Taller were not averse to making limited numbers of prints on expensive paper for sale to such collectors as Carl Zigrosser (whose personal collection, now in the possession of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was heavily drawn upon in creating this exhibition).

Orozco outshines Rivera and Kahlo

“Mexico and Modern Printmaking” includes works by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. But another great name in Mexican art, Jose Clemente Orozco, emerges as the star of the show. His edgy designs— now starkly realistic, now flirting with the surreal—combine the monumentality of Rivera’s best work with the no-holds-barred savagery of Otto Dix. Orozco’s 1935 lithograph “The Masses” renders humanity on the move as a nightmare vision of shuffling feet and mouths with teeth bared.

Geraldo Murillo (who signed his work “Dr. Atl,” atl being the Aztec name for water) was a revelation to me. His 1921-1923 suite of eight color stencil prints, “The Katunes” (a cyclic measurement of timed in the Aztec calendar) is reproduced in full in the exhibit catalog and is in itself an excellent reason to purchase it. Murillo’s work is colorful, bold, nostalgic and modernistic, Eastern and Western all at once. The prints bear repeated viewings. This is a splendid accompaniment to “Tesoros,” and both shows need to be seen together. Think of it as “a double feature.”