Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello, I'm Ruben Medina, a consultant with the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
and it is my pleasure to host a virtual tour of an exhibition celebrating the grand figures of Mexican Modernism.
During the 1920s and 1930s Mexico City was the center of the world,
becoming the scene of great social, political, and artistic revolution.
These revolutions look to break away from the 19th century, to modernize the country at all levels,
to incorporate an avant-garde aesthetic in art and technology,
and to create a new narrative for the nation and national identity.
Mexico receives dozens of artists, writers, and political figures from other countries.
The country developed an unorthodox avant-garde, attentive to European styles
but above all to its own cultural traditions, idiosyncrasies, and historic moments.
Even though she was a fundamental figure in Mexican Art, in actuality
her artwork was showcased sporadically and only friends and well-known artists bought her paintings.
In contrast to the monumental and public artworks of the muralists,
the paintings of Kahlo are miniature;
she obsessively used the self-portrait and the body to reflect upon her physical existence, dream-like state, and psychological being.
Her charismatic and exotic personality defined by her political involvement,
corrosive humor and use of "bad words, " and indigenous attire caught the attention of her contemporaries.
However, her personality and her artwork only became recognized during the last decades of the 20th Century.
In the 1990s, Kahlo became a canonical painter,
highly prized in the art market and gaining status as an international cult figure.
The cult emerged due to the fact that Kahlo breaks the rules of art,
normative heterosexuality, and the exclusive role of the man in Mexican culture;
and by depicting a complex and problematic vision of a post-revolutionary subject,
creating an allegory in many cases represented by her own body.
Her paintings are a dialog with the indigenous past and present, mestizaje, love, technology,
pain, capitalism, dreams and nightmares, and local flora.
In addition to self-portraits and retables (devotional paintings), Kahlo painted nature and death.
In these, the flowers represent diverse human emotions like desire, *** love, pain, and ambiguity.
The fruits indicate *** references,
especially the ones that open to reveal seeds inside (like papayas, watermelon, and pitahayas)
and allude to the interior/exterior of the human body.
The fruits sometimes signify a political motif through the colors or reference to the nation's flag.
The painting Still Life: Pitahayas, of 1938, has been seen as an allegory for the cycle of life and death, or death stalking life,
as here the skeleton is a ghostly presence over the fruits.
The pitahayas, in juxtaposition with the large inert rock,
at once express vulnerability, by being cut open, and vitality, by the emphasis of the color red.
These universal themes nevertheless contrast with the native element of the cactus fruit and the colors that allude to its habitat.
The painting demonstrates the tension between the universal and the local, between present and future,
between the personal and the collective.
He is the most important photographer from the Hispanic world.
He transformed documentary photography into art, in and of itself, that incorporates personal expression.
Photography found its way into Mexico in the 1840s and over three decades
developed into a distinctive and varied documentary style with an inclination towards health and ethnographic sensitivity—
these photographs captured individuals from the margins of society,
like prisoners, prostitutes, and people with mental illness. Photography also documented the upper class.
During his long regime (1875-1910) Porfirio Díaz hired photographers to capture the country's progress and modernization.
During the war period (1911-1920), thousands of photographs emerged
of leaders, farmers, women, battles, reunions, assemblies, performances, and scenes from everyday life.
The photographs emphasize documentation, the picturesque and the exotic, as well as the critical and the artistic.
The artistic vision appears intimately tied to the search for national identity.
In that context, Alvarez Bravo opposed the picturesque tendencies of the time that objectified and eroticized their subjects.
Alvarez Bravo's photographs included nudes, indigenous peoples,
children, the countryside, the interior and exterior of homes, patios
painters, writers, and scenes from everyday life.
He captures a complex national identity through
contrasts of light and shadow, composition and juxtaposition of objects,
figure poses, attire, and subtle cultural symbols
that function as metonymy and metaphors.
In Dia de todos los muertos (1933)
a woman holds a sugar skull that ironically personifies love,
or what used to be her love.
The composition of the photograph is important, since the image of death and its indigenous source contrasts with the Christian cross
that the woman is wearing on her neck, which alludes to the hybridity of Catholicism in Mexico.
Likewise, the look on the woman's face is enigmatic,
and she appears to be searching for complicity with the viewer.
Her thoughts might be associated at the same time with the death-skull
and the sweetness of love in the everyday cycle of life and death.
The key to the photograph is the irony that is established between
the woman and the skull,
which reveals a complex understanding of the world.
The photograph's composition masterfully connects the woman,
the culture (the cult of the dead),
and the universal (the perpetual cycle of life and death).
He had a belligerent life in the world of politics and art:
he was lieutenant during the Revolution, colonel in the Republican Army in Spain, and was incarcerated various times.
He frequently left an art project to pursue political activities.
He had less prestige than other muralists, due to his communist militancy, fierce anti-Trotskyism,
and virulent attacks against other painters.
However, as a muralist he was innovative in his use of materials and techniques, technology, public spaces, and the Marxist aesthetic.
He integrated painting, sculpture, and architecture
to reveal an art that is interdisciplinary and involves the public.
The main topic of his work was the connection between human history and the history of Mexico.
His paintings are characterized by their depictions of the rivalry and complex existence of society—
the bourgeoisie versus the working class— through symbolic representations of the world.
The figures of men and women are enormous and have large hands
to represent their ability to transform the natural world and dominate technology,
celebrating the role of the worker as contributor to the transformation of humankind.
His paintings depict a tension
between present reality and the utopia of the future.
He created the largest mural in Mexico, El Polyforum Cultural,
in which he integrates painting, sculpture, and architecture.
It is a multipurpose forum for cultural and political activities,
and its inner and outer walls contain murals that represent "the march of humanity on earth towards the cosmos."
The stage inside can also rotate and various sculptures are integrated with parts of the mural.
Siqueiros made approximately
twenty lithographs and engravings during his lifetime.
The lithograph here is a portrait of Moisés Sáenz,
a Mexican educator who studied in Mexico and Paris, and at Colombia University.
During the 1920s, he contributed to the development of an educational system
from kindergarten through high school and college levels,
as well as the advancement of indigenous studies.
The image reveals characteristics that are typical of Siqueiros's work:
a monumental head with imposing features,
contrasts between shadow and light,
and the grand feeling of human presence in time.
As an intellectual figure of the revolution, the image reveals various qualities of the person,
namely reason, strength, authority,
concentration, dedication, and personal harmony.
These values are indicated through the sharp details
that make up his finely carved hair.
His gaze is fixed beyond the audience to a distant point—
a sculptured face fixed in an enduring expression.
The intellectual appears super-human.