Expresionismo mexicano

Mexican Expressionism

Margarita Nelken’s most ambitious book was Mexican Expressionism (1964), a mature work that summarizes and recapitulates many of the ideas she had put forward presented and revisited about Mexico’s modern art and its artists since she arrived in the country in 1939. What makes this volume unique is her formulation of a theory on Mexican modern art. The author postulates and underlines the presence of an expressionist will present in the art from the time before the Spanish colonization up to the young artists of the 1950s and 1960s. For the author, local expressionism is not particular to twentieth century art, nor does it derive from the historical European avant-garde. Rather, it can be seen in the ancient art of the indigenous peoples, in popular art and in the modern art of the first half of the twentieth century. In her equivalence, Mexican expressionism is the expressionism that has always been there.

In her formulation for Mexican Expressionism, therefore, her interest in cultural continuity and the updating of legacies and reference point remain present. The genealogy of these artistic forms in the twentieth century begins with Mesoamerican works of art and continues with folk art masks. José Guadalupe Posada occupies a significant position in this aesthetic lineage. After him, in the post-revolutionary context, there emerged the twentieth-century expressionism in the modern sense that many artists gave to that legacy. Here, José Clemente Orozco takes a central, paradigmatic place. Nelken admired his output, considering it “overall, the work most intimately popular and revolutionary”, and identified several of his works as expressionist. She underscored his concern with the representation of the human figure, present in La ronda (1913), which combined “imagination and reality, pathos and satire, raw materials of individual analysis, and synthesis in the expression of a character, which far surpasses the individual”. In these considerations, which seek to intertwine the individual with the collective, we can appreciate the humanist concerns of the author.

Some of the modern artists that Nelken associated with her category include Rodríguez Lozano and Jean Charlot. Of the former she mentions his “gigantic nudes” – disproportionate representations of the human being – while of the latter she highlights certain representations “of figures of a perfectly defined expressionist sense”, outlined by the aesthetics of ancient art. A similar association with the past is seen in La Sibila (1945) by Alfonso Michel, another artist who was prominent in the early days of Mexican Expressionism. With regard to his production, Nelken emphasized his attention to the theme of death, for example in Still Life (1954), an expressionist work par excellence and “a constant that goes from the art of pre-Hispanic Mexico to that of the most modern images”. A notable merit of the author in the formulation of Mexican Expressionism was her conciliation of deeply opposed artists such as Michel and Siqueiros, whom she added to her study by focusing on his portraits and self-portraits, with succinct features and expressive materiality.

This strategy is exceptional, especially if we consider that at the time there was a debate between artistic forms that held different types of representation in contention. With her proposal, Nelken transcended this logic, offering a constructive alternative.