The mention of "Mexican art" immediately brings to mind images of the infamous couple, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Conventional art history teaches from a distinctly Eurocentric perspective. Therefore, those with little knowledge of art are likely to have heard of Frida and art history majors wouldn't get much further recalling other Mexican artists. Mexican art, in this way, has been reduced to a few iconic images, a series of generalizations and basic premises lacking in the criticism and scholarship of European movements.
Tufts Art and Art History Assistant Professor Adriana Zavala addresses this issue in her courses, teaching Latin American Cinema and Latino/a Body and Visual Culture this semester. Next semester she will teach 20th Century Mexican Art. Her concern for recovering the complexity in Mexican art recently found an opportunity for exploration in her ambitious endeavor to curate an exhibition revolving around that very topic.
The exhibition, which opened on Nov. 10 at the new cultural center at the "Plaza of the Three Cultures" in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, showcases 42 paintings by María Izquierdo, a female Mexican artist, and is part of a larger permanent show of Mexican art housed in the center.
According to Zavala, the name of the site comes from its incredible history: it contains a pre-Columbian pyramid, a Hispanic colonial church from the 16th century and modern housing developments built in the 1950s for workers in the modern international style of the French architect Le Corbusier. Among these architectural histories, the cultural center, run by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, was created as a memorial for the deaths of hundreds of student protesters executed by the government in a massacre in 1968, a brutality only just recognized by the Mexican government in 1998.
Zavala discussed the importance of the site, "This is a signal moment in Mexico for revisiting all of the master narratives, and it's appropriate that this collection should be exhibited there because this collection forces us to rethink the master narratives about Mexican art," she said.
Private property made public
The collection she refers to is that of Andrés Blaisten, who owns 30 of the 42 works in the show. Zavala came upon him in her research of Izquierdo's works and jumped at the chance to work with the collection when invited by close colleague and Assistant Professor of Art at Wellesley College, James Oles. He is one of the curators of the permanent installation.
Explaining the collection she said, "[Andrés Blaisten] started collecting a little after the rise of international interest in Mexican art, so he was priced out of buying the big artists, and instead he started a collection of what were considered the second-tier modernists." Before this exhibition of his works, Blaisten set up an impressive, lovingly designed website as a virtual museum, at www.museoblaisten.com, intending for this to be a teaching collection.
His insistence on sharing these works prompted Zavala to do the project. "We now understand through studying his collection that Mexican art is much more complicated than conventional stories have told us," said Zavala. As a scholar familiar with Izquierdo's works, she is excited to see 42 of them in one space, thanks to the extensive collection Blaisten offers.
A challenge for Kahlo-centrism
Zavala first stumbled upon Izquierdo's life and work when she began researching her book, "Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender and Representation in Mexican Art and Culture," set for release in 2009. Zavala sought to go beyond Frida Kahlo as the epitome of the Mexican female artist, finding her problematic because she never achieved much fame in her lifetime.
What interested Zavala was the way female artists, and images of women in art, were received in their time. The answer came with Izquierdo, a female Mexican artist known primarily for her late works, which are more quintessentially "Mexican," but who, unlike Kahlo, was written about by many critics and Mexican intellectuals in the 20th century.
Most recent scholarly essays and exhibitions of Izquierdo's work have been limited to the late works of the 1940s, because, as Zavala said, "that work is much more typical on its surface of what we expect 20th century Mexican art to be like - so there are religious images, there are folkloric elements, the paintings are very bright in their color, and there are a lot of still-lifes." Yet Zavala was interested in her earlier body of work from the '30s, when her contemporaries, including poet Pablo Neruda, were writing about her.
What she found was that Izquierdo's earlier works were especially unusual, attempting to combine personal imagery with the lessons of modern European painting. Izquierdo is also the Mexican artist who most extensively represented the nude female body, which, as a female painter, is atypical.
By delving into this woman's career, Zavala found that her life, like her art, was atypical. Married by the time she was 13 years old, in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, Izquierdo had three children by the age of 18. When she moved to Mexico City with her husband, she enrolled in the academy, an extremely unusual thing to do at the time since students enrolling were typically nine-year-old boys.
After she divorced her husband, she decided to become a working artist and managed to make a living as a successful painter in her lifetime. During her early period she, an artist with little training, was trying to find her voice. As an insight into this early period, Blaisten owns two or three of her earliest known paintings, which make up the first theme in the exhibition.
A transatlantic balancing act
The themes Zavala delineated for the show include "Images of Mexico in the World of the Circus," "Images of Rural Mexico," a section on Izquierdo's surrealist works and her late works.
Izquierdo's extensive representation of the circus is usually interpreted as a representation of folkloric Mexico. Zavala's aim, by showing many of her circus scenes together, is to explain that categorizing these works as "Mexican images" is a gross simplification: "When you look carefully at a lot of her circus scenes you realize that she had a really intimate understanding of that world, and that she's actually showing the ways in which it's a kind of world turned on its head - that the normative structures of daily life fall away in the world of the circus, and it's a world of fantasy," said Zavala. As Zavala pointed out, Izquierdo was painting these fantastic images at the same time as Picasso and Chagall, and, through a more careful examination, it seems for the same reasons.
This tendency to generalize Mexican works under Mexican themes and to marginalize them is disconcerting for Zavala.
"For a very long time, because of the way that the discipline had evolved, artists from 'other' locations were considered peripheral imitators," said Zavala, "and when you finally take the time to do some rich and detailed studies of these artists you realize that they are interpreting modern idioms in very different ways."
This issue of imitation, explained Zavala, wasn't a worry at all for Mexican artists while they were creating - they viewed their work as a legitimate engagement with European subjects and discourses, and this trivialization happened much later.
The Surrealists were partially to blame for this; Izquierdo's late works took a turn much like Kahlo's, after being taken under the wing of their respective male French Surrealists. Though Kahlo's style was famously "discovered" by André Breton in 1938, making her the leading Mexican surrealist, two years earlier a French surrealist, Antonin Artaud, who had been "excommunicated" by Breton, went to Mexico and found María Izquierdo. The idea of Europeans appropriating Mexican motifs as a form of primitivism is detrimental to these artists' identities.
Surrealism without the label
Izquierdo inserted strange imagery in her Mexican landscapes far earlier than these "Surrealist" works, which makes her particularly unique and was also the source of critical attention during her lifetime. In the first half of the 20th century, Mexico was still predominantly an agrarian society, and so a large portion of her work focuses on rural Mexico. "But when she inserts a lion, or a mermaid, into this rural world, you begin to have to question - a lot of these rural scenes are very metaphorical," Zavala said.
"The thing about this artist is that she uses all of the elements of her world, but she creates poems. So, her images are not simple narratives. The more you stand in front of them, the more you realize that they are an interesting assemblage of iconographic motifs and symbols, and that each of us is going to come away with a different interpretation," said Zavala. She describes these images of rural Mexico as "opportunities for contemplation, meditation and for reverie, with familiar themes."
By bringing together 42 important works by this singular artist, Zavala has found a way to bring her research to the general public, tying together scholarship and criticism with the actual physical experience of art.
Blaisten's extensive collection endows the viewer with a more well-rounded understanding of this artist's history and personal struggle with subjects, modern painting movements and the medium. Therefore, her late works become testaments to her own process and growth rather than shallow icons of Mexican art. "[The exhibition] is an opportunity to enjoy these works, but part of our goal is to have people come in and to give them the tools to understand. What we're seeking to do is to offer a more complex story," said Zavala.
An impressive finished product
Putting together the exhibition was a meaningful experience for Zavala. Because it was an international collaboration, most of the work had to be done through e-mail. The final display was a momentous event for Zavala.
"It's so frustrating for me that I can't always show my students actual works of art, because you really have to stand in front of a painting to understand the color, the use of light within the painting, the use of the medium, and so even for me as a scholar who knows this artist very, very well, to walk in and see these 42 works was just the opportunity of a lifetime."
She hopes that the exhibition can travel, though financially and logistically this poses some difficulties. For now, the cultural center at Tlatelolco offers a microcosm of Mexican culture in which these works are fitting testaments to Mexican history.
Zavala believes Mexicans are interested in exploring the internal complexities of their history, and that within a global context, to reconsider our preconceptions is crucial. "So part of it is being at the beginning of the 21st century; we are naturally looking back, not just on the cultural movements, but on the way those cultural movements have been described, and we're beginning to rethink and revise and reconsider. And so I think the moment is ripe, not just in Mexico, to revisit these narratives, and for complicated political and socio-cultural reasons there is an interest in doing so."
