Modern Art from Mexico
Notes on the history of modern art in Mexico
Margarita Nelken was a critic with an acute historical awareness and, as such, she took into account traditions and legacies in the formulation of modern art, while favouring historiographical revisions. In her texts and manuscripts, she sketched a history of modern art in Mexico that is defined on the basis of the Revolution of 1910. In her view, very little art of interest had been produced in Mexico during the colonial period, right up to this historical event. A few exceptions included the self-taught painters active in the nineteenth century and turn-of-the-century artists such as Saturnino Herrán. The author situated the latter as a transitional figure between “European academicism and Mexican expression”. A number of works produced around the century’s end by other artists, such as the early landscapes of Dr. Atl or the painting of Francisco Díaz de León, represent a similar approach.
The Revolution of 1910 brought with it a cultural revolution that was first experienced in the 1920s, leading to large-scale transformations in artistic practices, imbuing them with a “decidedly progressive” outlook. In terms of visual solutions, one feature that in Nelken’s view defined modern art and made it distinctively original was its updating of local and historical reference points. In her own words: “The roots of this Mexican art liberated equally from outmoded academic and formulaic realist residues are twofold: pre-Hispanic and popular.” The works of Jorge González Camarena and Luis Nishizawa illustrate this point in their references to popular or folk arts. El coco (1955) by Emilio Baz Viud is another example, one that also serves to emphasize a recurrent characteristic identified by the author: the fascination with and representation of death. In her view, this updating of regional and historical reference points took place not only in figurative art but with other more experimental or abstract approaches, such as found in the work of Carlos Mérida. Nelken also celebrates as a distinctive feature of modern art its self-taught roots, as opposed to the academic grounding of the European tradition, as found in artists like Francisco Gutiérrez and Amador Lugo, as well as historical figures such as Hermenegildo Bustos.