The spirit of the Mexican Revolution lives on in a printmaking exhibition in Philadelphia.
By: Ilene Dube
Just what do tourists from the United States look like to Mexicans, anyway? At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there are several depictions, most notably José Clemente Orozco’s 1934 lithograph "Tourists and Aztecs," in which tall white people in white suits, smoking pipes and dangling binoculars, stare smugly at a group of darker-skinned, shorter people in conical hats, whose shriveled features make them look as if they have weathered life’s burdens.
The print is part of Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920-1950, on view through Jan. 14, 2007. (To complete the Mexican experience, the museum is also offering Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820, through Dec. 31; separate tickets are required.) With 125 prints and posters from its own collection as well as the collection of the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, it is possibly the largest such grouping of Mexican prints anywhere.
The exhibition features the work of Diego Rivera, best known for his murals, and his fellow group of printmakers who expressed their political beliefs in woodcuts, engravings and lithographs. Just as murals were intended to address the masses, prints, too, could be distributed inexpensively and reach a wide audience.
The very first press in the New World was established in Mexico City in 1539, according to Lyle Williams, curator of prints and drawings at the McNay, in the exhibition catalog. Just 20 years after Cortes conquered the Aztecs, the press was used to print books about the Catholic faith in order to convert indigenous people. In fact the edifice the press was in was built on ruins of the Aztec civilization.
Later, engraving was considered one of the "noble arts" and continued to be used to illustrate books in archaeology, mathematics, botany, engineering, astronomy and medicine. By the Modern Mexican era, printmakers were taking a renewed interest in their culture before the Spanish invasion.
As the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) redressed land inequities redistributing land to peasants and farmers and sought to achieve full literacy and racial equality, the art world evolved to find a new appreciation for the art and culture of the native people.
"Some artists, like Rivera, who may or may not have had Indian blood, claimed it," says John Ittmann, curator of prints and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who organized the exhibition with Mr. Williams.
As a form of public art, prints and posters helped to disseminate political, social and artistic ideas. "This was an art of the people for the people," says Mr. Williams.
José Guadalupe Posada, considered by some to be the father of modern Mexican printmaking, illustrated the Revolution with images that were followed by later artists: revolutionary leaders, retaliatory executions by firing squads, soldiers bidding goodbye to loved ones.
Artists, as well as collectors, dealers and curators, came to Mexico City from all over the world to see the Mexican murals, and it became a haven for intellectuals and the avant-garde. Many foreigners settled in Mexico and nearby Taxco, a center for artists and writers, where they could live and work inexpensively. One section of the show includes prints produced by foreigners living in Mexico at the time.
Americans and Europeans who traveled to see the murals brought their enthusiasm back home. Prints made from photographs of sections of the mural were "selling like hotcakes" because there was such demand, says Mr. Ittmann. "These were not slavish reproductions but reinterpretations."
Carl Zigrosser, director of the Weyhe Gallery in New York City, was drawn to this excitement and began publishing and distributing the prints of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo in the United States.
Mr. Zigrosser went on to become the first curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of art, building up its collection of Mexican prints, as well as his own. After his retirement, the museum acquired his collection. Duplicate impressions were found between the two collections, and so the museum deaccessioned these to the McNay Museum, which already had its own significant collection. It is from these two collections that the exhibition is drawn.
"A young generation came to the fore and felt printmaking was a great way of speaking to people as the mural program was," says Mr. Ittmann. "It speaks to a broad public, it’s not tucked away in museums."
Diego Rivera’s "Zapata," depicting the revolutionary hero and agrarian reform champion Emiliano Zapata, is possibly the most famous of all Mexican prints. It is believed that Rivera only made 12 or 13 prints, and most of them are on view here, as is the one print made by his second wife, Frida Kahlo.
Titled "Frida and the Miscarriage," it refers to the unfortunate termination of her pregnancy during a visit to Detroit with her husband, there to paint the Detroit Industry frescoes for the Detroit Institute of Art. Kahlo was unable to bear children, due to pelvic injuries sustained in a bus accident that nearly claimed her life 10 years earlier. In this self-portrait, the moon is weeping, as is the transparent artist, tears dripping halfway between her unibrow and iconic beaded necklace. Tears from the fetus in her womb drip down one leg, thinner and darker than the other leg one of the artist’s legs had been mangled as a result of childhood polio. The tears continue down through the subsoil, where they nourish the roots of plants. At left is a newborn, its umbilical cord wrapped around the artist’s good leg, and in her third hand she holds a heart-shaped palette.
At the time, Kahlo didn’t consider it Surrealism, but rather an "ex-voto painting," or small storytelling painting on tin that is donated to churches by the faithful in thanks for recovery from an accident or other good fortune.
Diego Rivera, too, experimented with Surrealism, most notably in a poster for a lecture on Surrealism that never took place by poet and theorist André Breton.
The Taller de Grafica Popular, established in 1937, was a collaborative workshop set up to "benefit by its works the progressive and democratic interests of the Mexican people, especially in the fight against fascist reaction." As a result, the workshop avoided abstract art so it could be understood by the masses. Just as the murals taught Mexican history and the ideals of the revolution, prints were distributed to be "relevant to workers and the struggle to create a workers’ state," writes Mr. Williams.
In order to make cheap prints for the masses, limited edition prints on good paper were sold to those in the United States who could afford them.
Mexico & Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920-1950,
featuring the work of Diego Rivera and fellow revolutionary artists, is on
view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway,
Phila., through Jan. 14, 2007. Museum hours: Tues.-Thurs., Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.-5
p.m., Fri. 10 a.m.-8:45 p.m. Admission costs $12, $9 seniors, $8 students/ages
13-18, under 12 and members free; pay-what-you-wish Sun. For information, call
(215) 684-7860. On the Web: www.philamuseum.org