A Sunday walk through the three essential museums of the Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City – those of modern art (MAM), Rufino Tamayo and Anthropology – allows us to find out a key issue about the culture of this country: Is Mexico a country surreal, an expressionist country, or both at the same time? This was a fundamental question for the father of surrealism himself, André Bretón, and for the brilliant Jewish and Madrid critic and anti-fascist Margarita Klein Nelken who settled in Mexico after the Francoist holocaust.
“Mexico is quintessentially surreal,” Breton declared upon arriving in Mexico City in April 1938 for a four-month visit. Hand in hand with his avant-garde guests Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the French poet found the raw material of surrealism everywhere. In Aztec and Mayan art, in the Teotihucan pyramids, in ethnic miscegenation, even –after admiring the voluptuous volcanoes and cacti in Rivera’s work–, “in the Mexican relief and its flora”.
The country’s ability to “reconcile death and life” in a million smiling skulls was the conclusive proof of Mexico’s surrealist pedigree.
Syncretism too. In a Cholula church, before a horrified Leon Trotsky who was accompanying him on the tour, Breton was so taken with Mexican baroque with its Aztec touches that he ripped the altarpieces off the wall and stuffed them under his jacket to take to France.
Perhaps Breton, with a well-intentioned dose of cultural colonialism, found what he had already set out to find. But the truth is that Mexico lent itself like few other countries to the purpose of the surrealist manifesto – signed in 1929 by artists Dalí, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy – of creating a revolutionary art born in the unconscious and in the world of dreams. In the end, as the French Nobel Prize winner for literature Jean Maire Le Clézio explained during a recent Hay festival in Querétaro, the “Mexican dream”, an indigenous worldview that seamlessly fuses the unconscious and the conscious, was only interrupted and not annihilated. for the conquest It still lingers.
For Klein Nelken, who would arrive in Mexico City the following year for an exile that would last the rest of his life, this was the country of expressionist angst. Born into a Jewish family in Madrid in 1894, she was a biographer of Goya at the age of 15, a translator of Kafka into Spanish at the age of 20, and a PSOE deputy for Badajoz, with which she participated in the defense of Madrid.
He found expressionism in “the most remote and permanent Mexican idiosyncrasy” as he wrote in his book El expresionismo mexicano, published in 1964. “The expressionist aesthetic sense is not exclusive to the 20th century or to modernity; (…) It has been present in Mexico since the time before the Spanish colony”, explains Daniel Garza Usabiaga, who has curated a recent exhibition on Nelken and Mexican expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the other German Expressionists of the Die Brücke (The Bridge) group were inspired by African masks. But Nelken went a step further in criticizing him by considering that the pre-Columbian masks made of fur and hair were already expressionist works.
Along with the masks, the melodramatic muralism by José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros are cited as expressionist works, as well as paintings from the horror genre such as La niña y la muerte, by Cordelia Urueta; La manda, by Carlos Orozco Romero, a peasant woman with a bandaged head like a living mummy; o Our current image, by Siqueiros, in which two gigantic hands come out of the frame in a grotesque torture.
Despite allowing himself to be seduced, like Siqueiros, by the dogmas of Stalinism – he even defended Trotsky’s murderer, Ramon Mercader – Nelken was a subtle and eclectic critic. He includes in his definition of Mexican expressionism graphic artists such as José Luis Cuevas and caricaturists such as José Guadalupe Posada, whose black humor was for Breton another key element of Mexican surrealism. Painters such as Matthias Goeritz also enter.
For many critics, “figurative and abstract art were antagonistic, not for her,” explains Garza Usabiaga.
It is enough to cross into the adjoining rooms of the MAM in Chapultepec to verify that if Mexico was not a surreal country before the arrival of André Breton it would soon be so. Now, 90 years later, in times of “fridamania” and other feminist surrealism trends, there is no doubt.
There are lines to see Kahlo’s iconic painting, The Two Fridas, connected by a tube dripping blood onto a white dress. It was painted in 1939 and exhibited at the International Surrealism Show in the same city the following year. Nobody wants to miss the detailed surrealist fantasies of Leonora Carrington, who came to Mexico two years after Nelken, or the works of the Catalan surrealist Remedios Varo, another exile in Mexico from Spanish fascism. Varo has been one of the favorites at the MAM since Walter Gruen donated a collection of 38 of her works in 2002.
But, to solve the surrealist-expressionist dilemma once and for all, you have to leave the MAM and cross the Chapultepec forest in the middle of a mass of young people on excursions from the far periphery of the megalopolis. First stop, the Rufino Tamayo museum, leader of the “rupture generation”, according to Octavio Paz’s phrase. For Tamayo, true Mexican art did not consist in painting indigenous people with modern methods as Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros did, but in “painting modern subjects as a pre-Hispanic Indian would,” as summarized by Carlos Granés in his fascinating book American Delirium. Perhaps for this reason, Rufino is usually categorized as a surrealist, expressionist and abstract painter at the same time.
But the crucial stop in Chatultepec is the Museo Nacional de Antropología whose collection of pre-Columbian art – from huge Olmec heads to friezes of Mayans transformed into jaguars – defies categorization. A series of modern murals connect past and present. Dualidad, by Tamayo, represents the battle between the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl and the jaguar Tezcatlipoca. The magical world of the Maya, by Carrington, captures the worldview of the Tzotzils and Tetzatals in a surreal fantasy.
Out in the woods, there is more evidence that Mexican art is hard to pigeonhole. A group of artists dressed as Aztecs tied with wires to a pole about 30 meters high, spin in the air in an ethereal dance to the sound of a drum and flute. Below, hundreds of children watch the spectacle eating potato chips smeared with psychedelic pink chili and fluorescent green lime juice. Breton and Klein Nelken would have been in their element.
