Modern Art from Mexico
Margarita Nelken and modern art from Mexico
Margarita Nelken Mansberger (1898-1968) was a Spanish intellectual who sought exile in Mexico in 1939. Prior to settling in the country, she was prominent in the literary sphere as well as in political and social activism in Spain. A prolific intellectual, she produced studies on the social situation of women, novels, popular science texts, movie scripts, parliamentary chronicles and different types of journalistic notes.
Before she fled into exile, Nelken had met a number of Mexican intellectuals and artists who lived in Spain and other European countries, such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Germán Cueto, Lola Cueto and Roberto Montenegro. It was thanks to these connections that she was able to settle in Mexico. There, she continued to work on her intellectual output. Her most frequent activity, and the one that defined her legacy, was art criticism. From 1940 onwards, she wrote articles, reviews and catalogue texts for countless artists. Although she identified with the international communist endeavour, she never developed a critical work that was aligned with Stalinist doctrine, let alone upheld a single artistic solution or type of representation. In Mexico, such a position was exceptional at the time. The author wrote texts that underlined the importance of the muralist movement and its representatives, but also about artists who could be considered their adversaries. Similarly, the attention she paid to the work of women artists is notable. Her viewpoint transcended generations: she concerned herself with the work of her contemporaries, yet didn’t shy away from promoting that of talented youngsters, while studying the artists of the past.
This diversity of interests is evident in her monographs on artists whose practices may be identified with realism (Raúl Anguiano) or with abstraction (Carlos Mérida), together with volumes focused on sculpture or on painting. In 1964, her most ambitious study, El expresionismo mexicano, was published, proposing an aesthetic in play in Mexican art characterised by an expressionist quality. However, it was in her regular critical reviews in the press that she left a record of her detailed and exhaustive scrutiny of the development of modern art in the country. For Nelken, these short articles were a practical means for her perspectives and reflections on art to reach “the greatest possible number of receptive sensibilities”.
Based on these materials produced by Nelken, this exhibitions presents a number of her perspectives on the modern art of Mexico and its history, and some of the characteristics that she considered to be distinctive and original, drawing on the updating of historical and local references and a position hostile to academia as modes of researching a range of modern artists, always in connection with her humanistic concerns. Meanwhile, the exhibition revisits her bibliography, revealing her ideas about painting and sculpture together with her aesthetic based around expressionist qualities strongly focused on the representation of the human figure.