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Juan Soriano at Art Museum (1st review)
Modern Mexicans:
Where Kahlo and Soriano parted company
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
Juan Soriano (1920-2006) began his career on a note of defiance, rejecting the public preaching and bold statements of the “Big Three” of Mexican art—Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. By 1945 he was being likened to Frida Kahlo. This is a fair assessment only in that both reacted to the grand rhetoric of revolutionary art, and both were painting “personal realities.” Beyond that, the comparison begins to break down.
In these early pieces, which represent the artist between the ages of 19 and 30, Soriano’s work is visually tamer than Kahlo’s and lacks her reach into Mexico’s mythic past. Soriano’s art is more personal. I suppose he could echo Kahlo’s riposte to Breton— namely, that he too paints not dreams but his own reality. So let’s say Soriano’s reality is more grounded in the neighborhood than the nation.
When Kahlo paints a dead child— and there’s a striking portrait of one Dimas Rosas, all dressed in his funereal best, propped up like a little king on his throne— it’s more about breathing new life into a type of portrait quite common in colonial times. When Soriano paints a dead child, his admiration for modern German art kicks in, and he creates an Expressionist masterpiece in which the child’s contorted image seems to float in space, and the hands of the adults clasped in prayer become a decorative frame-within-a-frame. The result is that Kahlo’s dead boy is majestic, whereas Soriano’s dead girl is theatrical.
Several still life paintings adorn this rather compact show, and they really display Soriano at his poetic best. Still Life with Vase and Skull (1941), is probably the most mysterious of these works, while Still Life with Self-Portrait (1949) is the most visually engaging. Soriano demonstrates a useful artistic reaction against the excesses of revolutionary zeal and civic virtue. Had Stalin been a little less Stalin we might well have seen similar painters emerge in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Instead, we got paintings of tractors.
To read anoher review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read Andrew Mangravite’s review of the Art Museum’s Frida Kahlo show, click here.
Where Kahlo and Soriano parted company
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
Juan Soriano (1920-2006) began his career on a note of defiance, rejecting the public preaching and bold statements of the “Big Three” of Mexican art—Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. By 1945 he was being likened to Frida Kahlo. This is a fair assessment only in that both reacted to the grand rhetoric of revolutionary art, and both were painting “personal realities.” Beyond that, the comparison begins to break down.
In these early pieces, which represent the artist between the ages of 19 and 30, Soriano’s work is visually tamer than Kahlo’s and lacks her reach into Mexico’s mythic past. Soriano’s art is more personal. I suppose he could echo Kahlo’s riposte to Breton— namely, that he too paints not dreams but his own reality. So let’s say Soriano’s reality is more grounded in the neighborhood than the nation.
When Kahlo paints a dead child— and there’s a striking portrait of one Dimas Rosas, all dressed in his funereal best, propped up like a little king on his throne— it’s more about breathing new life into a type of portrait quite common in colonial times. When Soriano paints a dead child, his admiration for modern German art kicks in, and he creates an Expressionist masterpiece in which the child’s contorted image seems to float in space, and the hands of the adults clasped in prayer become a decorative frame-within-a-frame. The result is that Kahlo’s dead boy is majestic, whereas Soriano’s dead girl is theatrical.
Several still life paintings adorn this rather compact show, and they really display Soriano at his poetic best. Still Life with Vase and Skull (1941), is probably the most mysterious of these works, while Still Life with Self-Portrait (1949) is the most visually engaging. Soriano demonstrates a useful artistic reaction against the excesses of revolutionary zeal and civic virtue. Had Stalin been a little less Stalin we might well have seen similar painters emerge in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Instead, we got paintings of tractors.
To read anoher review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read Andrew Mangravite’s review of the Art Museum’s Frida Kahlo show, click here.
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