Modern Art from Mexico
Notes on the history of modern art in Mexico – PART 2
Nelken always acknowledged the value of the avant-garde muralist movement and the realist painting that emerged from the Mexican Revolution. Nevertheless, she was also critical with regard to the institutionalization of this aesthetic, and of a realism understood merely as “excessively direct representation, frequently limited to external appearance”. Nor did she see a work as justified merely by its “straightforward affirmations of ideological principles”. The author preferred a different type of painting that emerged on the fringes of muralism, favouring works that went beyond “the facile character of this realism” in their relation to or updating of reference points. Nelken always sustained that “the enduring nature of an art such as that of Mexico is due to its diverse and wholly subjective exponents, and not to a single pathway of expression”. For example, she highlighted the importance of the work of Agustín Lazo at a historical moment in which “a realism that lacked imagination was predominant”. Nelken was interested in the development of surrealism in Mexico and followed the careers of several European artists who, like her, were exiled in the country. One of these was Wolfgang Paalen, whose paintings she described as “canvases purposely devoid of formal significance, in a spell of chromatic nuances with vibrations of indefinite living forms”. Mother of Agathe (1946), for example, presents one such vibrant solution, with waves and chromatic particles, which refers to the human figure reduced to its essential form, as happens in much of the sculpture of ancient Mexico.
Nelken was not only interested in historical art and that produced by her contemporaries. Generally speaking, she was also enthusiastic about the art of the younger generation. The work of Pedro Friedeberg excited her as an updating of surrealism. Similarly, she followed the practice of artists who explored the field of non-figurative work, such as Enrique Echeverría or Rodolfo Nieto. In her appreciation for abstraction, Nelken responded to the considerations of José Ortega y Gasset. As the proponent of an understanding of artistic practice bound up with humanism, she celebrated the non-figurative painting of Rodolfo Nieto, whom she saw as “the first abstract artist with a markedly vernacular slant” thanks to his indigenous origins. His work – like the art of the first half of the twentieth century – also engaged in an updating of “ancient forms of expression”. In this way, Nieto infuses “a human sense” to the field of abstraction, “a modality that is frequently dehumanized”.