Modern Art from Mexico
An interpretation according to the ideas of Margarita Nelken, art critic
The Blaisten Collection is the most important collection of modern art from Mexico. Although it includes work from prior to 1900, as well as pieces subsequent to the 1950s, the great majority of the works are from the first half of the twentieth century, when the art produced in this country became an avant-garde movement of historical significance and international impact. The collector Andrés Blaisten has undertaken rigorous study of this period, specializing in the work of artists such as Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl), Alfonso Michel and María Izquierdo, all of whom he has collected avidly. For decades, the Blaisten family has distinguished itself with its initiatives to foster the study and dissemination of modern art from Mexico.
The scale, diversity and complexity of the Blaisten Collection makes it possible to articulate a number of different narratives on modern art, its history, and its creators, as well as the practices, themes, or concerns held in common. This exhibition by the Fundación Casa de México en España offers a reading of the history of modern art in Mexico through the ideas of Margarita Nelken, a Spanish intellectual in exile who enriched the cultural debate and deepened discussions about art in the country where she lived from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 to her death in 1968. She wrote books and essays on artists – many of them women – together with studies on painting and sculpture. She worked tirelessly for cultural publications and her writing was a decisive influence on art criticism columns becoming a regular feature of newspapers and magazines.
This reading of the Blaisten Collection based on Nelken’s ideas about modern art in Mexico contemplates a point of overlap between the collector and the author. Both value and express interest in the study of artists and practices that emerged on the fringes of the muralist movement from the first half of the twentieth century, and the aesthetic offerings formulated by figures such as Diego Rivera or David Alfaro Siqueiros. The paintings of María Izquierdo, Alfonso Michel, Carlos Orozco Romero, José Clemente Orozco and Roberto Montenegro are a source of fascination for both of them. Furthermore, as this exhibition demonstrates, Nelken and Blaisten consider a characteristic feature of these practices to be the renewal of local visual references and solutions (whether traditional or historical), while maintaining an appreciation for self-taught artistic forms of expression.