CONTENTS

The Artist as Copyist The Painter Sees the World Concrete Abstract vs. The Geometry of Art and Life Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art The Ancient Maya The Saint Christopher of Santiago Tlatelolco Mexican Heri tage José Guadalupe Posada : Printmaker the Mexican People Portrait of Latin America Mexican Prints José Clemente Orozco X G Az c A avier uerrero, te rtist Rufino Tamayo Lola Cueto : The Tapestries The Cut- out Papers The Etchings The Lithographs of Alfredo Zalee Renaissance Revisited All-American — American Prints : 19 13 1947 Old Masters for Tomorrow Murals for Tomorrow 2 El c as M c 245 2 . Gre o ysti Eric Gill l c Art Its d Catho i , 'uan aries To the Editor of Liturgical Arts Reflections of an Occidental Painter h n Ink-P i t A t L n C i ese a n ing, f er ooki g at the Works of Tseng Yu -Ho Renaissance in Haiti List of First Publishers ILLUSTRATIONS

PA GE Frontispiece

- H Bru h n ink A s a d . o Tseng Yu o z Riverscape .

tual size .

Albrecht Durer : Illustration to the Treatise on

M m W dcut 1 525 . i r . oo eta l ac easu e ents , D ,

h k rom Ma Matila G y a : Logarithmic spiral . F f tila Gh ka G m r Art and L . y , The eo et y of i e

M i Gh ka : t m c an at la y The Par henon, Har oni H m id e r m Matila Gh ka a b . o alysis ( g ) F y ,

The Geometry of Art and Life .

m c Diego Rivera : Tehuantepec arket pla e . i Litho ra h. etail actual s ze. g p D ,

m re- c Aztec God : Tlaloc . Detail fro a p Hispani m H rbert inden Intro du c c d . ro e o ex F Sp , Ex osition o tion to American Indian Art. p f 981 Tribal Arts, Inc . , 1 .

r m S 10 Xultun m . o tele , , Peten, Guate ala F

M rle Anc M . . o S . G y, The ient aya ” Mural aintin in the Saint Christopher . P g A hurch o antia o Tlatelolco Mexico . C f S g , p 1 61 0 irc . 4 in hei ht. a proximately 4 ft. g C Inscription relating to the restoration of the m m sa e ural in 1763 . “ d d : Ar P r Gua alupe Posa a tisans in urgato y . Metal cut

G d d : P e ie ua alupe Posa a The risoner. R l f etchin g .

G d d : f Re ua alupe Posa a Skull o a Coquette .

lief etching .

d P ad : x M u etal c t. Gua alupe os a Don 'ui ote .

“ d M d z : L b M in W ood Leopol o en e a or eet g . cut tail a tua i h . e c l s ze. ourtes o T e D , C y f Metro olitan Museum o Art p f . “ L dr i m The ine awing after a rel gious i age, Man S r d b of o rows , a lithograph printe y X M XI th centur . ri inal in The urguia . y O g A Metropolitan Museum of rt . “ L d in L d tud ine raw g after Our a y of Soli e , an

XVIIIth centur . etching signed by Garcia. y Original in The Metropolitan Museum of

Art.

’ Woodcut illustrating Fernandez de Lizardi s M N 24 A . l de lo s o 1 18 . ctua Dialogos uertos , , e ri inal in the New Yor ublic Li siz . O g k P

brary . Lith José Clemente Orozco : The Flag . o

l actual si e . ollection ra h 1 928 . etai z g p , D , C

of the Honolulu Academy of Art. ‘ — Brush José Clemente Orozco : Self portrait . 6 and ink, circa 1 91 . P A GE

l Brush and José Clemente Orozco : Schoo girl. r ink, ci ca 1 91 0 . “ I di t Ink raw Xavier Guerrero . n an Cour esy . D

ing . “ ”

Rufino m : G di . Woodcut Ta ayo irl Stan ng , he al r New circa 1 930 . Courtes We le y y G y,

York.

Lola Cueto : Design for a tapestry after a ar ind Ch tres w ow.

L - ola Cueto : Cut out paper.

L : c Etchin rst ola Cueto Puppet musi ian. g, fi b A ual state e ore a uatint. ct f q size. “ d Zalce : M iz A ith r r m Alfre o est a . l og aph f o h lbum Im de t e a Y c . etail ao agenes u atan D ,

tual size. Collection o W . . tallin s olo f S S g , C rad in o Spr gs.

A d Zalce : etail rom a litho ra h actual lfre o D f g p , llecti o size. o on W . . Stallin s Colorado C f S g ,

Springs. “ C : L d resc Min Jean harlot avan eras . F o in istr o Education M 1 exico it . 923 y f , C y .

hi d c S . K m XIXth cen el over iowa, Oklaho a .

tur . aintin k olle y P g on s in. C ction of the United tates ational Museum Washin S N , g

t . on D . C .

Max W b . dcut 191 . Woo llee e er Figure 8 . Co tion o the Museum o Mo er Ar f f d n t, New

York. A b Ed d I : I . Woodcut 1 934 Josef l ers ge , .

ourtes o . B uman . e New Y n or . C y f I N , k P A GE

etail o resco in Jean Charlot : Paratrooper . D f f ournalism Buildin Universit o eor ia J g, y f G g , 4 Athens eor ia 1 94 . , G g ,

’ El Greco s signature . ”

E c : c fix . Wood en ravin actual ri Gill Cru i g g, ourte o the N Y ub L size. C sy f ew ork P lic i brary

’ : Brush and Jean Charlot Veronica s Kerchief. k in , actual size . 263 “ 73 h : m Brush and ink. 2 Jean C arlot Holy Fa ily .

- T Yu Ho z L d c e. Brush and ink ao seng an s ap , l i tua s ze.

T u - Ho z A dia seng Y Prerequisites for painting .

ram actual size. g , Tseng Yu - Ho : Portion of a horizontal scroll; ” A u i 2 - ct a s e. . 90 1 River Landscape . l z

V r A itian ma i dia ram 302 Anonymous : eve s Ha g c g .

W odcut. Dieudonne Cédor: Crucifixion . o

rom elden odman c i . 303 F S R , Renaissan e in Hait MEXICO CHINA

THE T T Y T 1 . AR IS AS COP IS

’ There is a maxim of Delacroix s that has helped to lead astray many an artist, and that defines a great extent the shortcomings of many of our “ ” “ modem s : The artist should use nature as a dictionary . This representation of natural vision as a phenomenon which, if not actually to be despised, is nevertheless to be considered as a m n means only, has i bued many a pai ter with a disrespect for the world as we see it and an exaggerated admiration for the shapes and ’ fancies that dwell only in the artist s head . Yet u n in if, before using nat re as a spri gboard for r the n spi ation , painter would exami e and analyze t t he the na ure of his accessory, would perhaps , so as other masters have before him , become engrossed in his analysis and full of admiration for ul the results , that there wo d be no need to spring, that he could paint what he sees , and replace the sense of his own importance by a sense of awe before nature. The world we paint is a different one from ” the world we live in , for it is already a photo 2 graphic image inverted on the sensitized inner our coating of retina . So that this problem of translating a three - dimensional world into tw o i one d mensions is a theoretical , for the world we see is in reality already flattened on the con c of cave surfa e the inner eye . It is a world which lacks many of the proper of for its ties the real world, objects , though z recogni able, are deprived of the qualities we r know them to have in ou everyday life . A not sat painted chair is made to be upon , a fruit

' of icture of made pigment to be eaten , or a p a c n woman to be made love to . Whi h explai s the indifferenc e of a lot of people realistically in clined for this world of the artist in which their c senses find no meat . This lack of a tual useful ness of the subject matter in pictures is a handi c cap to an extent, but the obje t , emptied of the un meanings we know well , acquires new and expected ones . a The rtist deals mainly with the physical , for “ t as Poussin suggests , There is no painting wi h f out solid . He will tend to classi y the different objects in the world according to their shapes of and relations of shapes , with utter disregard established conventions : Thus when Velasquez went to Rome to paint the Pope , he first did a of color rinder portrait his negro g , to prove to

His Holiness how well he would paint him . For features in painting are a problem independent 3 of or the majesty lack of majesty of the sitter . z in of Cé anne , engrossed the representation spherical surfaces , could hardly tell a skull from an apple . And the painter who relishes cubes may be equally impressed by a pair of dice or a c pile of skys rapers .

A b c u : c l re ht D rer The Perspe tivist .

2 THE T THE W . PAIN ER SEES ORLD

’ The theme of this article is the artist s descrip tion of the Optical world in its most naked sensorial state , before this description becomes loaded with the emotional or mathematical com ’ utations The assum p bred in the artist s brain . p tion that the painter who merely” copies does an inferior job may arise from a failure to discriminate betw een the world as we know it in and the world as we see it; for it is , fact , when the artist 0 0 pies most closely that he is furthest removed from the commonplace . When he copies through the eye alone he not only shuts out all the knowledge arrived at through the other senses and through scientific research or usage; he also denies the common ground between art and sc ience— the preconceived postulates of mathematical o r geometric composition . We could go further and say that the act of copy ing even precludes the many compromises be tw of een vision, the properties pigments , the wrist and arm movements— all that in painting co ncerns craft and craftsmanship . 5 6

Putting nature on canvas is an activity simil ar to that of the botanist drying flowers between the leaves of his herbarium; to change live n n thi gs into dead ones , to flatten thi gs that are

r of f round, may seem to an obse ver dubious use i fulness . Yet the botanist, class fying the weeds of su erim the dishevelled garden of nature, p poses order and thereby adds to nature . Perhaps there is a similar voc ation that spurs a painter ’ to paint; his addition to the world s knowledge n if is bound to be of an esoteric ki d , for it could c be expressed in words , the slowness , umber someness and limitations of paint would make it the least desirable of mediums for the com munication of this knowledge .

Vermeer sits before his easel . That the model is Fame the trumpet attests . The artist has started to paint the leaves of a coronet of c laurels . The rest of the anvas is untouched as

c - r c t yet . Inse t like his b ush will over his plain surface stroke by stroke as with a petit point stitch . He has no plan , if we discount the humble personal Opinion which explains the choic e of a. model and a light . If there is logic , if there is in ctu beauty, even emotion, the finished pi re , c z these traits will ome from the outside , sei ed ’ upon by Vermeer s attentively cool eye . A Tie polo may astonish us with a Fame flying en velo ed of c p in a rustling train varicolored s arves , a picture whose reference to the actual optical world is as slight as the toe-marks of the diver against the springboard . The painter alone is responsible for whatever beauty there may be c in the Italian picture . But the Dut hman aston ishes us even more with his Fame solidl y planted on o f both feet, the logic his work emerging from the outside, just as it does when the jigsaw puzzle addict fits together tidbits and completes a picture whose effect he had not had in mind at the outset . Yet the plastic spectacle , gathering ’ on the sensitized mirror that is the painter s of eye , testifies in terms optics to the ordered of scheme the world . The painter who uses his brain to check on natural vision is greater than the painter who c f accepts a commonpla e version o the world . Poussin beau tifies his pictures with much knowl of edge other arts , antique canons of beauty , tem i poetical fables , musical p ; he reenforces this knowledge with the rules of geometry and a philosophic climate that bind firmly together the too fluid elements of vision . One must also admire the terrific impact of a Tintoretto or a t Greco , shat ering the optical world and reform ing it into another world after their own image . But perhaps greater than both types is the painter who se whole struggle lies in the effort to coordinate this inverted image on the inner eye and the man behind it , without reference to other sources of knowledge and without the 8

of t interposition personality . This s art from rock n bottom, this primary struggle featuri g man and the l i his senses naked, may be on y discipl ne out of which the permanent metaphysics of paint can emerge . Whereas the outer world is in three dimen ul im sions , a conglomeration of b ks that can be acted i p , circumvented , felt or bu lt, the world which the painter knows is different; it is an

Optical world, smashed flat, and upside down f ar n o . on the d k coati g his retina Or rather, not r truly flattened, it cu ves along the concavity of the inner eye, is received on this spheroidal screen which corresponds in the realm of optics of to the factual shape of the universe . Out the n of i terrelationship these twin round worlds , the c physical macrocosm and the Optical mi rocosm , n grow a series of identities , overlappi g, displace ments and transformations which may yield a ’ clue to the validity of the painter s language . If one magnifies a newspaper photograph the see hi better to a detail , t s detail vanishes further and is replaced by the meaningless dot- and ’ man blank of a printer s screen . Similarly the who plumbs natural vision finds that a blur

dl h . gathers , mud ing the neatly labeled t ings Neither the line nor the color of the world as seen can stand a curious approach . The Optical world is dependent on physical bodies only in sofar as they are revealed by light . Light is its

10 is a unity , as is a straw matting or a shingle l n roof, each unit dovetai ing i to the next . The

Optical outline is not free , as in a mechanical rendering, but receives impacts from lines out m side itself, is sucked in by tangential move ents , ' is thus anchored securely to things far and near which it need never physic ally touch . Local color also reacts to its surroundings as edge meets edge . The apple, which the fruiterer knows to ’ z be solidly round, yellow and red , in Cé anne s eye magnifies its yellowness against a purple cloth , reddens to deeper hue against the green o ut of a bottle , is dragged of both shape and m tone by the agnet of a wallpaper design . The Object is tie d further to its surroundings by the shadows cast; they transcend the Object that z c i casts them , oo e over neighboring Obje ts l ke tentacles . The scientist has to explode the things we know into particles heretofore unknown be fore he reaches their common denominator . But n the visual world, retaining the image of thi gs — a as we know them table , a bottle , an apple commingles them into a oneness to which com“

- mon sense experienc e Offers no c lue . c Optical obje ts , unlike factual Ones , are not capable of measurement . With calipers and rod the anthropologists can subtract from man enough to equate him with a row of ciphers . But the shifting relationships in space Of bulk and limbs make such a job imprac ticable for the 1 1

W for painter . hen Durer attempts numerical mulae he enters the realm of anatomists ; if his of etched Adam and Eve , instead cautiously imi

has- tating a relief, behaved with the reckless gusto of the leaves of the trees about them or the blades of grass at their toes their postulated c measurements would ollapse . The painter must reconcile himself to scientific monsters . A model extends his hand forward and it becomes as c large as his torso , drags a foot ba k and it shrinks to the size of the big toe of his forward foot . There is more than a joke in Parmigianino’ s self portrait , distorted in a concave mirror, for this bizarre and unscientific relation of limb to limb within a single body is of the essence Of the

Optical world . Such a world reacts in a most unEuclidian manner to Objective spatial truth . When Raphael “ scorns perspectives as those measures that seem to be and are not” he brings a fresh wonderment to the somewhat jaded view we take of sc ientific perspective; it is an incredible world where all z parallels meet, where hori ontals foreshorten c tu into verticals; an ar hitec ral scene, drawn in perspective , Opens and closes its right , angles with the reckless dash of a senorita maneuvering i of a fan . This render ng from a single point view is only half of the Optical truth , for the fact from which the painter starts is not a single t image in the camera Obscura but win images , 12

o ne on n . not each of his reti as Twins , but iden if f our s one tical , for we shi t emphasi from eye to the other, backgrounds slide sharply in rela tion to the object; the object, as we look at it one the ll x through eye and then other, wi e pose , one if it is close enough, more of side and then f th o e if . hi other, as it were pivoting gently T s primitive triangulation achieves computations in depth which the cubist tried to emulate through both eyes used simultaneously we . can of of see both sides of a sheet paper , five facets a die . in The distances involved Optics are relative, not measurable by yardstick but created anew in n each picture . In a Cézanne landscape the pi e tree in the foreground is related to the Mont

St . Victoire in the background by a pocket of space that may be no wider than ( in his “ Mardi ” ’ gras ) the space between the harlequin s right and left foot . The relative importanc e of things in the Oh ective j world is graded according to man, his u hobbies and his needs . The optical approach p Of t sets this egocentric order . Snapshots a grea man may focus candidly on the creases of his rk trousers rather than on the pose he st i es . Inas the - as much as painter copyist, too , functions a camera he creates a new order based on shape on o re and colors rather than ethical , s cial or n t ligiou s values . Pai tings which a tempt to pre 1 3

’ serve the order based upon the laymen s usage can present only a useless world : painted chairs he cannot sat upon or sketched houses entered, t no etched beggars ga her alms , frescoed kings n r ca not ule . When an astronomer computes the orbits Of planets, man disappears from the landscape . When a scientist makes researches on the col ' ’ loidal be scale , man s body dissolves into cells ,

n of, the c omes unrecog izable . With his vision man known world upset, loses his supremacy and even his identity . Without changing the scale Of vision but by shifting his point Of View from routine knowledge to pure optics the i pa nter also faces a revolution . of V1810 n Thus , born this new , paintings which are great plastic organizations glorify the in organic rather than the human body . Giotto lav r ishes care on buildings and rocks . To st engthen ’ man s body into the equivalent o f a plastic tool he must needs cover it with heavy all- hiding cloaks which bring it closer to his beloved moun ’ tain forms . Raphael s bonneted pope I S dwarfed a by the upholstered tassel Of his throne . Vel s quez juggles in one picture three spherical _ with : shapes an apple , a dwarf, a prince . The human body can hardly c ompete with purer geometric forms or his fleshtone with that of flowers and skies . With man dethroned, other bodies assume 1 4

-flames i dictatorship , as do those candle to wh ch

- Greco dedicated a prose poem . However aloof the new-found hierarchy no float which governs his choice, the painter is in d The g spirit but a severely anchored bo y . world he discovers from his ambush is condi tioned by the elasticity of the eye-lens and the n of W t varyi g length the visual ray . i h each given focus he finds himself at the core of a hollowed sphere with a range of visibilty coinciding with f its periphery . This spherical grasp o the outer z as world, which Cé anne refers to in a letter “ n of the concentric vision , bri gs what we see universe out of a state Of infinity and apparent disorder to a state limited, orderly , and as such within the range of human purposes . The classi cal concept of the world apparent in Raphael or Poussin is not wholly a mental construction but an echo of the humanistic order reigning n within the optical sphere . The painter, havi g through candid vision upset the established hier “ ” of archy things , finds in this concentric vision - uni a new dignity . His becomes a pre Galilean verse with man again at its hub . Thl S assumption of a rigid focus is adopted ’ for clarity s sake . But when we observe a scene our eye changes its foc us according to the range hi of the Objects successively sought . T s gives a quasi- tactile reality to the selected details while the marginal areas become indistinct . Vermeer in 1 5

” his New Testament at the Metropolitan Mu seum focuses on his background and fills the foreground with an amazing rendition of a tap estry seen in blurred vision . Titian in his neutral backdrops solves the Gordian problem in a dic tatorial way by wiping the unfoc used planes out TO Of Optical existence . make everything in a r z picture equally sha p or equally ha y, no matter how far apart from each other in space , is to establish a composite image— which in painting is the equivalent of time . Successive focuses in the act of seeing collapse into simultaneity in n the pai ted result . In terms Of physics , the world that ebbs and flows inside the painter’s eye jus tifies styles ranging from the sharpness of Man f tegna to the fogs o Monet .

The gentle light, the amiable scenes favored by Vermeer, .the humble Objects Cézanne paints , are the wilful choice of men heroic enough to be copyists yet wise enough to channel natural vision into problems that are relatively simple ’ of — and capable solution Cézanne s apple , Ver ’ meer s bare walls , approximate laboratory con dition O s. Thus the man who opies finds that a style has been imposed on his work through the extreme chastity deemed wise in the choice of subjects— a simplicity such that beside it the pur est antique groups of Puvis de Chavannes seem ambitious exertions . Others may relish stranger moods in nature , fantasies in optics tinged with 1 6

is one sa a content that demonic, is tempted to y

. a Germanic Such a scene confronted Leon rdo, according to his own record— an Old woman in in black whose head, bonneted white, seemed nl in the su ight twice its natural size . Rembrandt seized upon the optical prestige of night devour ing bodies; Griinew ald recorded the miracle of n their vanishi g into intense light . ’ his However candid the copyist s approach, “ ” choice of a motif will tend to harmonize the physical fact that is his canvas with the optical f ’ facts O vision . Into Vermeer s optical world the canvas itself with its four square angles attracted square window panes , chessboard floor patterns , rectangular pictures that hang within the pic ture; this affinity translated into depth explains ’ the cubed space Of Vermeer s rooms , the cubical constructions Of Cézanne and Giotto . Concentric Vision produces a taste for spheri n n cal forms . Agai Vermeer illustrates the poi t in his astonishing picture at the Metropolitan Museum which bunches together those spheres — m a amundi the pp , the crystal of a celestial to globe , the apple , the breast which the hand or c of points . F him the ommon denominator Vision is the globule of light and color dropped from the brush tip— to his painting as vital as the round cells in its blood are to a living organ “ ” i it of ism . In The M lkmaid transforms a loaf - a bread into a star studded universe . It is spheric l

B T T T 3 . A S RAC CONCRE E

In a world so topsy- turvy that labels are from describing the goods they cover, where , ” for example, peace mediation means an act of war, we must not be surprised that in our own smaller world of art, similar double talk exists . 1 9 T hus the artist who refuses to tell a lie , who to wants pigment be no more than pigment, lines to mean only lines , and pictures to proclaim that they are but gesso or canvas daubed with a coat “ ” of paint, this artist becomes abstract, with all r in the nebulous , spi itualistic and ectoplasmic nu endos that such a word suggests .

On the other hand the man who , far from calling a spade a spade , wants to pass his blob cow of paint for a , or a sunset, or the likeness o f Aunt Mary , this man who tells you that flat ”

is . is round, and near far, is labeled a realist If the issues remained in practic e as clear—cut as that , there would be no doubt that the abstract painter is the more reasonable Of the two , for he deals in reality instead of mirage . But one “ ” c ognizant of all the isms knows that they span the gap betw een concrete . and abstract by im so perceptible transitions , that they may all be c c overed by the juggling of two per entages , those two ingredients that are to be found in all works

art . of , Nature and X Even within the purest non-Objective art subject matter raises its ugly head, and even the most photographic perform ’ c an e differs from Nature s achievements . The philistine who enters the portals of the museum where the Art of the Future is stored , finds that instead Of enjoying such pictures as “ z fro en music , he speculates on such idle facts as whether circles are not intended as balloons , 20

e u moons or cheeses , v rticals as trees or g tter ’ n pipes, diagonals as rai or Jacob s ladder, and whether free-hand scribbles are not in fact frozen microbes . If pictures could exist without an on t art ul looker, the pristine puri y of abstract co d n be guaranteed; but alas , the huma eye that r n catalyzes the painting is an impu e chan el, trained by daily habit to interpret colored areas in Of dis c function subject matter, to judge tan e in terms Of change of scale as well as dimming Of sum - n of hues , to up in the ever changi g arc a mouth all human emotions from laughter to drama . The Optical proj ection of a painting is the sine ua non n in all q of its bei g a paint g at , and auto matically means the introduction ( valid or not ) f in all paintings O problems in subject matter . It is better for the painter to deal with this truth instead Of denying it . Once acknowledged as a factor always present , subject matter can be mas tered for plastic purpose , as one deals with the other chemical and Optical ingredients of the picture . t i nn On the o her hand, however perfect the ” c dis sion in a realistic pi ture , it remains quite “ W is t in . t ct from reality To the riddle , hat it hat see has ears and cannot hear, eyes and cannot , legs and cannot walk?” an answer as true as the “ accepted one is A painted donkey . It illustrates the l -nill mon fact that art breeds , wi ly y, abstract 21 sters t , abstract inasmuch as hey are unfit for r i practical pu poses . N0 man could be so s ngu larly naive as to confuse a cow by Cuyp with one that could be milked; only the birds fancied that there was nourishment in the grapes of Zeuxis . The gap between abstract and realistic paint in ur f t g exists only in o reading O them . Pic ures the c most ridden with subje t matter, let us say “ ” r of the Auste litz Meissonier, are made of ex actly the same plastic elements as pictures most ’ “ on devoid of it, for example , Malevich s White ” of White . Both are a complex lines , areas , colors , t f values , tex ures , the only di ference being quali i tat ve z e t . , one of si e , numb r, affini y and contrast But one thing happens in this particular case that happens also to humans : the one that was intent on spinning a heroic yarn neglected his shape , and thus became a comical sight . The Old masters have proved that one can per fect r both a d eam and a shape , that there is no incompatibility between formal balance and h heroic thoughts , t at in fact a great idea is more fittin l irn c a it g y clothed in plastic pe c bil y. The man who looks at their paintings hurdl es the problem of subject matter at once because of the clarity of exposition and the lack Of equ ivo

. a re cation He is then cleansed , and free to pp tu ciate the pic re for its plasticity only .

Modern art , when it tackles subject matter at r : all , favors its most inve tebrate categories a bowl 22 of n so fruit, a napki , a guitar, a nude , and does with such deviations from natural appearances that most of the time we look at the picture is passed in comparing our own Optical experience “ ” of r the model with its esthetic defo mation . One is thus made prisoner Of the subject matter that should be but a prologue of esthetic enjoyment . Rarely does modern art aspire to what the ” ancients proudly called historical painting, that is of , the telling great events and exalted fables . It may be that the trivial content and equivocal treatment Of contemporary subject matter justifies ah as logical its total disappearance , and that stract art is fated to be the art of the future . The other alternative is that subject matter must increase in interest, complexity and emotional re- content, that there will be a emergence in modern terms of the higher genres represented in the past by the St . Francis series of Giotto and f the Loggias O Raphael . 4 THE T Y ART . GEOME R OF AND LIFE

W amter hen a Greek p , heady with success , signed

“ ‘ ” He whose his pictures works are divine, a wag, of by the change a few letters , made it read, “ ” hot He who shakes a stick, in derisive allusion to the cuisine of encaustic painting . As in antiquity, the modern artist remains split wide between the physical job of art making and the spiritual heights Of esthetic contemplation . Prob ably the safest attitude for the practicing artist 23 24 is to stick close to what in art overlaps artisan m s ship , and to disclai any magic power to u her of m other folk up the steep rungs art enjoy ent . Of 19203 on In the Paris the , cubism was the part Of th e painters an attempted return to com mon sense . If lines and color areas be the means n t an of pai ting, hen why pretend that the c vas is a meadow and a spot of brown pigment a cow? The increasing process of rationaliz ation that ’ brought a re- estimate of the painter s means was bound to sidepass the more unpredictable ele in n ment, color, favor of li e and especially of those lines that can be Obtained with rul er and dr a riori of compass , and that are thus ained p ’ the personal idiosyncrasies that it was the cubist s aim to shake off. Thus geometry appeared to the painter to be the possible common ground where the rational it of y science could permeate art, its tempera fi mental and repentant brother . The scienti c n traini g Of most painters is shaky , but with the help Of mechanical aids artists managed to intro duce in their pictures enough straight lines and related angles to give them a geometric flavor . t Na urally, the cubist looked at nature to find fi b ut saw a justi cation for his doings , what he t t of was disappointing . Wi h the s rict state mind u to be expected from a convert , nat re seemed to ff him a very loose a air . The painter frowned at the Old r t — the standa ds Of beau y the swan, rose ,

26

few choice proportions , a mathematical beats tu n consti te the common denomi ator . h hi r The fait ful who kneeled in a got c cathed al, of U cello n the metallic assertions an pai ting, the c t n Fren h finesse of a Seurat, all owe some hi g to hi the golden proportion . As t s is not an Obvious Of one in i element the work, is justified speak ng c of esoteric knowledge . But one shoul d be are r ful not to mistake the hidden for the Obscu e , and not to attribute to numbers supreme spiritual qualities . This may be right in the case of a

Pythagoras who deals in metaphysics , but the painter is at work onl y when hi s hands are at work . To be fruitful his meditations must be n short and to the point, and a certai mumbo r jumbo that has crept over art geomet y, saddling — ill it with quasi mystical properties , w perforce leave the practicing artist unmoved . Golden pro c E portion , harmoni door, gyptian triangle , fur nish him with a set of handy recipes no more mysterious than those to be found in a cookbook . A good cookbook put to ac tion procures sub stantial delight, and the painter who uses the diagrams proposed by Ghyka will commune through these mechanical means with ways the whose soundness is already proved by flower,

- c the sea . the rystal , shell , etc That the method is not foolproof is shown by

Of r . some the illust ations That it is an open chan ‘ nel to mood appears from the dissimilar resul ts 2 7 i that Guardi, Seurat, Durer and V llard de Honne i court Obta ned from a similar preoccupation . Rereading the book in its new form and at this date , I find that the same truths acquire new l resonances . Meanwhi e, an American mural ren aissance has forced many painters to experience , as they fit a skin of color over the inner space to of a building , the inescapable order inherent Of the thrust its verticals , the level of its horizon tals , the abstract relationships between width, height and depth . If at all gifted with a sense of

fitness , the mural painter will work in accord ’ ance with the painting s permanent habitat, feel hemmed in by the resistancy Of materials and ’ Gh ka s the why Of proportions . y book , though it bypasses the peculiar problems Of mural paint il of ing, w l prove useful to muralists in search the magic that may match the illusive painted world f t with the reality o an architec ure .

Diego Rivera : Market Place . Detail .

5 TW TY TUR . EN CEN IES OF MEXICAN ART

On my way to the Mexican exhibition at the Museum Of Modern Art the words Of an elderly

Indian came back to me . Speaking of the Span “

: . ish conquest, he said It was fated If it had not been the Spaniards it would have been some

r . w as n of other t ibe He thinki g, perhaps , the

U . S . tribe . I also remembered an experience in a museum library where I was looking in vain e of i for slid s the magn ficent stelae of Copan . At last, approaching the librarian I was told to look “ ”

i . for them under P , for Pr mitive 29 30 The exhibition now in New York may help in smoothing over some similar misconceptions in

- other quarters . It is well nigh all inclusive , but “ ” “ ” on leans heavily both primitive and folk art .

To enjoy it to the full, the Yankee spectatorneed not stoop to what he may assume to be the level

Of the Indian and the peasant, for those dead z Indians , A tecs , Mayans , Olmecs , were good

Indians ; indeed they were great . And the Mexi c an peasant is heir to an unbroken tradition dat ing back a few millenniums . Nor should a desire for a short cut to better understanding result in shaping a roly- poly image Of Mexican art closer perhaps to the Optimism of our Elmers than to the more important truth. h of c c T rough the course Mexi an estheti s , a leitmotiv c subjective re urs , linking together the

- three great epochs , pre Spanish , Colonial , and

of i . Modern , in spite outward d fferences Totally unrelated to the cult of physical beauty which ow n is the mainspring Of our tradition in art , it deals with physical pain and with death . The motio is skull equally dear to Aztec theogony , to the Christian hermit who fondles it lovingly in his cell , and it still runs riot today in those bitter pennysheets sold in the streets Of Mexico

on . the Day Of the Dead It is , however, but the outward sign of a mood of deeper significance . z tu Lips drawn in an unanestheti ed ric s , eyes rtu glazed, teeth clamped in to re , her body spent 31 d an r . strained, a woman gives bi th The sculptor carves the hard stone with furious precision into a symmetry that makes the basin arch and Open of with the dignity a church portal . To the Aztec, - Th birth giving was the privilege of woman . e same goddess who hallowed soldiers killed in battle threw her heroic influence over women

- who died in child birth . Pain as a positive asset in the building and cementing of the world is one of the Aztec dogmas , consistent with their belief that the universe has come to maturity through the Four Destructions . o ur To deodorized minds , such bold facing Of f the biological is distasteful . Yet the Church O i his colonial times nsisted, as did the pagans , on t f o . We carrying a cross see here the saints , lips d rawn and teeth clamped in anguish, ejecting through bloody martyrdom their own soul to be n born i to eternity . Again today the great Mexican murals depict undainty subjects— the flagellation Of a stripped agrarian tied to a pole, the Opening of wounds n with pistol and k ife, women again weeping , this time over the dead . Those pictures deal with r Of the bi th , through revolution , a new social order , with the tortured parents wishing it god speed . The section of pre -Spanish art is especially strong in Aztec sculpture which more than any illustrates the loving intercourse that should 32 exist betw een the sculptor and the material he ul t chooses , a problem of pec iar ac uality to the of r The modern partisans direct ca ving . Aztec standard for good sculpture is identical with that : m u of Michelangelo to be proclai ed beautif l , the statue shoul d roll intact from the top of a to mountain the valley below . Most admirable are those egg- shaped stones that lack a base and refuse a pedestal as if the sculptor had carved them not for any static in display, but to nestle the palm of a giant “ ” hand . In the same degree that the russet locust “ ” c and the green gourd mimi a bug and a fruit, i t n they emphasize the r quali y of bei g stone, as if the ul in tools of the artist , however successf r r thei description of the subject, were as natu ally tt a uned to the material as is weath er erosion . The same respect for organic laws ac counts for Te onaztle c r ocelotl the beauty of the p a vings , the n as ready to spri g as a stalking feline , yet so truly wood that the roughened grain and split trunk do not subtract from but add to the sculp ’ tor s achievement . a In the representation of gods and hum ns , n fingers and toes , plumes and fringes cli g close to the core of the stone as if sucked in by c en t tripe al forces . Elbows and hands push into the ‘ k of th e t i fe torso , the nees and soles squa t ng males telesc ope into the main bulk as do the

- wings and wing shells of a beetle after fli ght .

34

If u - n Aztec sculpt re is self contai ed, colonial ul art is , on the contrary, a theatre . Its sc pture preaches to the congregation; its forc e is cen trifu al n g , radiati g from the dummy heart and soul of the effigy through extensions of contorted of n limbs , up to the very tips the extended fi gers , into space . To know such sculpture through tactile tests would be no more of an esthetic experience than to frisk a window dummy, for the baroque taste Of the colonial masters favored a choic e of mixed

. W tu materials ooden sta es are gessoed, lac quered, and painted, with eyelashes and wigs of r made human hai , teeth , and ribs of true bone , Often beribboned and dressed in damasks and velvets , their wooden feet shod in silver . Some l c Of the sculptors, sti l unsatisfied by the stati n limitations of their materials , dabbled in ci ema to ra h : the g p y the skull of the saint was emptied, - n orbits gouged out, and eyes on ball beari gs , as ’ ll impressive as doll s eyes , bulged and ro ed in hin the mystic agonies , moved from be d scenes r by a discreet tug at hidden st ings . The man who is a purist as concerns technique c an only one feel indignation at such license, but should rather admire the strength of an impulse that did not shy at using such bastard means this art that broke all the rules of good art 1n its

to . desire to stir, to expostulate, and convert Colonial sculpture may look weak when com 35

one pared with the Aztec , but could hardly call z it squeamish . Souls siz ling in purgatory, with hr in a pope or cardinal t own , windlasses unroll of rt ing the guts ma yrs , eyes served on a plate fla ellation and breasts ditto , Christ after g , on skinned to the ribs , bleeding all fours in his cell like a wounded animal in its lair— such are f r the favorite subjects o thei art . It is strong stuff to - compared the sugar saints sculptured today, sporting their sanctity as a kind of social ac com lishment p . The section reserved to folk arts is especially n complete . In its quaint ess and color it is also one the that needs less training to approach . It may be viewed as decorative art if one forgets the soulless , fashionable connotations of the r word . Out Of humble mate ials , clay , straw , of gourds , thousands Objects are made , exquisite alike in their shapes and colors . Such Objects are rather bartered than sold and in any case will bring only a few centavos . The ingenuity in planning and pleasure in executing them is matched only by the indifference of the artist to the problems o f distribution and of gain; they belie the theory that man works spurred only t by the profit motive . Ra her do those Mexican crafts illustrate Verlaine’s Opinion that the last to vestige of divine freedom left man , driven i from Paradise , exists in his creat ve capacity for work . 36

To know what folk art really means to th e folk who make it needs as much Objective re zz f search as to scan the pu le o Az tec relics . Those bright masks with comical beards and horns which connote for us a gay mardi-gras are to the man who wears them more akin to ’ r Th t f xer a priest s su plice . e impe us o muscular e tion that seizes the faithful on the day of the ’ of the feast Guadalupe , uses peacock s splendor Of the bouquet of feathers implanted in a grin The ning mask as if it were on an Optical prayer . rattles held and shaken rhythmically through the as dance acquire a propitiatory meaning, does “ - ll a Tibetan prayer mi . The Arab masqueraders , topped with huge horns should be seen in ac tion when the danced pil grimage of Chalma pro c eeds— hundreds of devils spring in ordered bed lam in front of the main altar, as if exorcized

- into sight by the powers of its life size crucifix . or z z Even the pottery, to us charming qui ical , may be heavy with feeling for its Indian owner . A little girl was passing through the streets of Aca anzin o n p g holdi g a jug of water , a plain

- ull . jug, egg shaped with the g et sideways Sug “ ” an gested a tourist , It looks like a duck . She “ ” sw ered c indignantly, It is a du k , hugged it in tighter and ran . They have no dolls to love

Acapanzingo . Folk painting is painting done by people that some well -to -do critics would not enjoy meeting 37 f socially . Out of this anonymous limbo o folk l art have emerged a ready such artists as Posada , l r Mani a, and Est ada, that will rank as old mas in f - r ters the eyes o the twenty first centu y . Thus the distinction made in this show between both species Of painting— the popul ar and the profes u — sio al should be taken with some grains of salt . one There is a lovely portrait in white , done by the t Of folk, tha the artists in the next rooms have good grounds to study and envy . There are mila ros or - of con among the g ex votos , pictures summate art and great depth . for re Among us , people give thanks graces i c e ved : . health , money, ambitions satiated But the Mexican devout pray for less Obvious gifts . There exists a mila gro representing a lonely room and a bed , and in it a woman very dead

d : . and green , dedicate as follows Mrs having left her village and come to town wished c tu to die . Her family ere ts this pic re to give thanks in her name that her wish has been hap pily granted . After Murger wrote his Boheme and it had of become a bestseller, a number elderly bums , once his friends , nourished a lively controversy as to which one Of them was the original bohe mian he had been writing about , and made a few pennies lecturing on how picturesquely they had once sowed their wild oats . Whenever I talk or write about Mexican modern art I am re 38

1 minded of th s incident . What was once alive , n strong, and seething has now faded i to club W talk . hat we created that was without prece

nl . dent has established, o y too well, its precedent There was a heroic scope to the gesture of on those men who , turning their backs both art n dealers and patrons , and their mi ds away from 0 s the Parisian novelty sh p , planted their work ’ on l i indelibly the walls Of Mexico s bui d ngs , with no incentive to do so but that of an i nner z r urge synchroni ed with the social un est, with no assurance that they would ever be noticed “ by the cultured , but with the positive belief that they had ceased being artistic and were now r artisans , companions to the ca penters and plas rer i te s who were collaborat ng in the work . At Of a this stage , Rivera would smash the camera press photographer that had sneaked up on him , with orders to expose the spending of govern ment money for things people considered ugly . t Siqueiros , receiving the news hat a friend had his just been assassinated , painted in tribute “ of in burial a worker, secreting the wall behind the painted coffin a bottle with a message of z adieu . Oro co , his works stoned and maimed, would with superb indifference ask his mason not only to patch, but also to repaint the work . Such intensity of collective creation could not last long; as an attempt at erecting a painted monument in the anonymous mood with which 39 l the ancients had bui t cathedrals, the Mexican experiment comes to a close before the end of the ’ twenties . Another group was in the meantime indulging restramed in a more painting, with the accent a l on pure plastic values . Let us s y that whi e the of r n full orchestra Mexican mu alists was blari g, for those who had keen ears some chamber music f was still to be heard . The best o those easel painters have been able to ply to their ends the i nflux of modernisms , and yet retain genuine t style and Scope . The impe us they gave gathers ’ i force with the th rties , spreads the reaction against monumentality . A new emphasis is laid upon the qualities that mural work lacked per force : the full rainbow range of chemical pig

o f . ments , a variety textures , a lighter mood Steady eyes and hands perform on a miniature scale pictures as astonishing as the O ur Father inscribed on a grain Of wheat . The disc reet portion of the Museum of Mod ern Art allotted to the modern art Of Mexico does not tell this story in full : for unexplained 1930—40 u reasons , the decade is feat red, thus glossing over the important period before . Even though murals cannot be transported for exhibi tion purposes , there exists a body of works : closely related to them geometric diagrams ,

- studies of details from nature , full scale tracings n now used o the wall . Much of this material is 40

ff r lost, thrown from a sca old and t ampled at the end Of a work day; much that remains coul d have been reassembled and shown . Even the painters that Opposed in style the school of mu ralists in i , would have increased sign ficance i h v against this h storic background . T e o ersight of a bare five years ( 1921—26 ) punches a gigan tic hole into the close -knit trend of those two a art thousand ye rs of Mexican . Releases given by the Museum to the press suggest that the arts of Mexico are characterize d “ by gentleness and a love of fun and play . The emphasis put by the display on the tender inno of r of cence Mexican toys , the colo fulness tu so peasant cos mes , the amused exercises of histicated p artists , comes dangerously close to x proving this point . It is as if the vast Me ican panorama had been surveyed through a rose so r lorgnette . Considering the world today, c uelly different from the Optimistic world of yester Of year, the art Mexico at its most severe scores a prophetic point; it would have been a more responsible performance if the present show had had courage enough to underscore it .

THE T Y 6 . ANCIEN MA A

This fat book IS beautifully illustrated with photographs and diagrams that confront the ancient Maya with the living Maya who lives today Off the harsh Yucatan soil . It gives us a knowledge of and a respect for both . Dr . Morley is a great specialist , whose enthusiasm for his subjec t Orchestrates into a unity of mood the many facts assessed . The volume manages to review most of the available evidence concern ing a civilization as strangely complex as that of any lost Atlantis . It adds clues and parallels taken from the present folklore Of the descend Of n ants ancient ki gs , warriors and pagan priests , of who , stripped Of the paraphernalia plumes , jewels and embroideries that clothed their an cestors so histi , still retain a regal courtesy and p t d ca e manner . ‘ ’ i l Dr . Morley s personal interest is pr mari y hr concerned with c onology, with the finding and refining of a correct correlation between the Mayan and Christian calendars; and yet this book rightfully comes within the scope Of an 44 art review bec ause the maze of evidence through which th e researcher wades before attributing n l a date to a stela, interpreti g a codex, or rebui d n ing a rui ed temple , is mostly a conglomerate of art Objec ts . Even though the codices be filled with mathematical and astronomical computa c tions , each letter and each figure is a pi torial glyph pregnant with esthetic values . In the or the Mayan texts , painted sculptured, reigns unmistakable Mayan profile , with hanging lower ni lip , beak nose and receding forehead, retai ng humanistic content despite the strange markings that identify each personage as a sound or a number . This strongly characterized standard of human beauty is as far evolved from nature and as as noble the Greek, and bespeaks an ideal as rich. It is also to us more mysterious and more n of poig ant , because while we still partake Greek literature and philosophy and can appre ciate hellenic marbles against this framework nl Of thoughts , the o y spokesmen left for the ancient Maya are their plastic remains . The phys ical bulk of buil ding stones and the grooves chiselled out of hard jadeite are our only ap proach to the understanding of a people whose inclinations were mainly metaphysical . When the conquistado res crossed through the Yucatan jungle in the sixteenth century Mayan ruins were already half-digested by the stone 45 eating flora . For a few more centuries Mayan cultural witnesses remained secretly stored in n our this giant deserted gree house , to emerge in days as a timely esthetic revelation . Mayan art is well appreciated from the pecul n z iar vantage poi t of our modern art . It pu zled rather than excited enthusiasm in its Victorian c n dis overers , being an art form totally disdai

’ n ful of beauty as they understood it , i nocent of the concept of Italian perspective and of the muscle parade known as anatomy . Such zealots were the Mayans in their belief in their ow n peculiar ideal Of beauty that artists were called upon to produce it not only in stone but se o f tw in living flesh . With a t planks and a ist of rope they tampered with the new-born to force its growth along the lines of slanting fore head and elongated skull that alone seemed beautiful . Mayan art passes through a c omplete stylistic c c c c y le , from ar hai to baroque . It is only in its last gasps of life that it approaches the anecdotal c or the photographi . At its height it was wil fully abstract . As social arrangements increased c c in omplexity, as the means of exe ution were enriched— an important c onsideration for men working in a Stone Age— the Mayan artists dealt so increasingly in abstractions . Through sheer histication Of p , the proportions the human body became as unrealistic as those of an African 46 fetich . Limbs and torso were hidden under a r r h vine g owth of symbols and o naments . T e face itself, modelled already after an unnatural ideal, hid under a mask even further removed from k nature , perhaps beastlike , godli e perhaps , but notably lacking in those safe standbys of occi dental art, the speaking mouth and soulful eyes . As Mayan art reaches its peak of grandeur in

t A . D . in z the eight cen ury , a bla e Of geometric forms blended with the writhing frozen flames of o is an acute bar que , not even a toehold left c for the two Vi torian art standards , ideal beauty and photographic realism . The great stelae still standing can no longer be read according to the theogonical content woven into them by their builders . But with the fading out of the stiff theocracy that commis sioned the works , the personal message of the artist is released from its Official bondage in a purer form than before . Our epoch feels unusual kinship with the point of View of the Mayan sculptor . Modern art has also shed the fetichistic “ the cult of the form divine , and even though artist does not attempt to impose his plastic ideal on living beings and by surgical means , deformations are again held in high esteem . Tak ’ ing advantage of the present day s unfamiliarity with the gods and godlings that crowd the

Mayan pantheon , surrealists too have made it a field day for interpreting the many striking 47 symbols along most subjective if unorthodox lines . Better than an art treatise confined to a single theme , this book illustrates how art becomes the c ommon denominator of the many pursuits of man in any highly evolved culture . Having read the carefully factual relation and consulted the f c plates that clari y a custom or che k a date , the sensitive reader would do well to wash his mind of all previous connotations and to look again at the plates to receive this time only the artist’ s

. t e message Despite the diversi y of mediums , p rio ds and subjects he will thus familiarize him an self with undercurrent, the spirit of Maya , that vies in power and in depth with the best f f O Greece and O China .

“ M a . 1 0 S int Christopher ural painting . Ca . 61 .

50

n New Spai adopted the belief at an early date . Don Manuel Toussaint mentions a Saint Chris to pher painted in the sixteenth c entury in the stairwell Of the Dominic an convent of Yan hu itlan n t i , a pai ting hat, in his op nion, shows a f O . survival Byzantine style In Mexico City , Don Bernardo Couto mentions a giant Christopher frescoed by Baltazar de Echave over the main of c portal of the church San Fran isco , and yet ez another Christopher, painted by José Juar , at f the side entrance Of the church O St . Augustin . As happened in the case of many another of custom transplanted from Europe , the cult Saint Christopher acquired a distinctive flavor in the New World . A parallel came to be drawn tw his the be een the Saint and modern namesake , n discoverer of the Americas . Whereas the origi al Christopher forded a river carrying the Child t Jesus , but found even his giant streng h no r match for the mi aculous weight of his Burden , the modern Christopher crossed an ocean bear ing on his shoulders the weight Of the whole d . su cceede , but Catholic Church He too , became a martyr in the effort . Another detail that struck American consc ious hr ness was the fact that , before discovering C ist, f the Saint had been a servant o the devil . In the tu of Opening cen ries European Christianity, the moral of this had found ready application . t In the sixteenth cen ury, however, the episode 51 had lost some of its aptness , at least in the Old

World . It recovered its initial apologetic value in Mexico , a land barely emerging from pagan ism . The episode spoke forcefully to crowds of brown converts such as those that Father Moto “ linia described in 1540 : Whenever the doors open in the early morning, there are the Indians t already waiting . Having neither o put clothes on c nor to shave , they start for chur h at the

first sign of dawn .

Despite its primitiveness , the Saint Christo pher of Tlatelolco is not a true contemporary of these , the earliest converts . The first chapel built on 1530 this site , circa , was destroyed before the present church was built and Opened for wor ship in the first decade Of the seventeenth cen tury . This constitutes the earliest time , and also for the most probable one , the date of this painting . -five The gigantic figure , close to forty feet n on in height, is a true mural, pai ted directly the lime mortar in a technique resembling that found in the sixteenth-century churches of Acol man and Actopan . These murals are usually al resco spoken of as painted f , though the Mexi can walls lack the visible joints between day-by day areas found in the orthodox fresco buono Tl atelolco of Italy . In the case Of , the medium resco seco appears to be f , in which the whole wall is surfaced at once and left to dry. It is 52 painted afterwards with pigments mixed with leche de cal o r -t m . The , water hinned li e addi tion of lime to the pigment results in light f atelolc values and a generally chalky ef ect . In Tl o we meet a range Of values wider than that Oh tainable seco in the medium , which suggests - h an all over retouc ing in distemper, probably

- glue tempera . r The iconography is mostly O thodox . Christo pher walks through the shallow waters leaning o n f his e a makeshi t stick to match giant siz , a ul tree trunk cut whole . His torso is mo ded in - Of the skin tight armor the Roman legion, of which he was once a soldier . He has rolled his trousers over the knee , as the Indians do to this day with their calzoncillos to keep them dry To ns while fording a stream . protect him agai t \ i u the cool of the n ght, the Saint is b ndled in a n huge windblown cape . Perched o his moun tainous i shoulder is the Divine Ch ld, tiny as a T the r humming bird . o clarify spi itual meaning of the - scene , a discus halo levitates over Christo ’ her s p curly wig, and light shafts radiate from n the blond curls of the Child . Rustic surrou d ings are suggested by the grotto from which t emerges the hermit, the only human wi ness Of he the prodigious sight . T nocturnal hour is em phasized by the horn-lantern carried by the her its wit mit . A moon and attendant star , celestial

- e . nesses , nestle in a hammock shap d cloud 53 Three distinct styles overlap and blend im in irn perfectly this plastic pal psest. It appears probable that this seventeenth- century image is one based on a still Older , either a mural that or santo decorated the primitive chapel , a folk , perhaps a crude woodcut from which the mural ist derived his inspiration . Such an assumption e is sugg sted by the fact that, in this image , a kind of mil itary aggressiveness dwells together with the religious spirit; a fact that hints at the generation of the conquistadores rather than at the cultural clime Of the following century . This puzzling throwback in style may be simply one of the stylistic anomalies often found in both colonial and provincial works . W k un hatever the reason , there is a stri ing f O . The balance body proportions legs are strong, and knots of muscles give them a resemblance i to the rugged tree trunk by the r side . The Saint is as solidly based and as pyramidal as is the

teocalli. neighbouring Aztec temple , or His bulk to shrinks and tapers towards the p, with the tiny head of the Child as its apex . Perspective de m i for ations add to the painted ones , s nce the unusually high wall is sighted diagonally from

n . underneath , increasi g the pyramidal illusion A second stylistic stratum consists Of elements incongruously borrowed from the Italian Renais r sance . The plastic counte point achieved by the contrasting circular folds Of the two mantles is 54

its in its essence, if not in realization , at the The Opposite pole from the primitive . Roman armor reveals all the muscles of the strong torso in an exaggerated folk version Of the pride of the age that discovered anatomy . We also taste the somewhat theatrical archeological ’ knowl edge Of the Renaissance in the scalloped fringe of leather tongues that ornaments the belt . n Concerni g the third, and more modern ,

. N stylistic stratum , we have concrete data earby hi n the Saint, a rococo s eld is i scribed with this “ proud statement : With money raised and dedi cated to the task by our most Reverend Father

Manuel de Najera , then provincial of the Order for m New Spain , this i age was retouched and the whole church cleaned and whitewashed both inside and outside . The main altarpiece w as l l gi ded anew, as well as the pi asters of the - h tw o side altars . T e year Though not specifically mentioned in the in are c scription , there inside the hurch small decorative murals that can be safely dated as n of the same year as the renovation . Painted i side niches and meant as backgrounds for statues nl semis now disappeared, they are mai y of floral motives in imitation Of rich brocades . They are an index of the taste of the Tlatelolco burghers t tu so f in the eighteen h cen ry, a taste di ferent t in i a from hat shown the Christopher , pa nted 55 century and a half before . These later people a were enamoured of roses , ribbons and g rlands , and must have found the ancient image truly T r coarse and ugly . hey may have been st ongly tempted to include the mural in the thorough job of whitewashing then in progress . That they resisted the temptation and respected the Old mural must have meant a compromise with their esthetic principles for the sake Of religious of convenience . It is the deeply rooted cult the image on the part of the more ru stic parishioners that saved it from the wrath of the more cul tured t folk; saved it from being des royed, but not from being retouched . Not even in periods that aim at historical Oh jectivity can ancient paintings be retouched in n the spirit in which they were Originally pai ted. ‘ not r Consciously or , the b ushwork of the restorer O will bean expression of his own period . N such problems were even raised in an eighteenth cen tury exclusively engrossed in its own exciting The n Of 1 63 novelties . pai ter 7 conscientiously the i tw o gave Sa nt a new skin , prettiness to the i r heads and orderly curls to their w ndblown hai . the thr — t To ee centuries six eenth , seventeenth, — eighteenth to which this mural is related, we

ul a dd . few sho d still another Indeed, periods of history coul d appreciate the merit of its colossal r i kw size , its b utal force , its Obv ous aw ardness 56

ur and far from academic proportions . Yet o twentieth century feels a special gratitude to of Tlatelolco wards the Saint Christopher , a precursor that unconsciously embodies some Of the characteristics Of modern Mexican murals .

A EX pe nfas folicita alas Iica da s or N V an u e l l r. M l ' de N aX e ra fienclo Com . ' Grat ae es lé Nuev a FS ah a ' 9 0 fe reto co efte imqgen: 33 16 ue 3’ bl anq o mda efra. ordeniro se P ’ '

d eNu exfze 19 10 . Me ‘ o r l o sclos la tera les

cl e fu s Pi la ftres

afino del 5

58

’ niscent of the number in a rogues gallery. Even w is of hen his subject lifted out a museum case, Ho nin en Hu ene y g suggests what climate , what o landscape , and often what spiritual mo d con curred to produce it . Architectural fragments are caught in the process of being digested by green leaves that soon remake temple into hill and mock the meanders of gesso ornaments with of n t webs roots o a whit less baroque . The dosage of mystery in these photographs deepens in the same ratio as the sunlight in creases . Sunlight brings out, from the core of the carved stone , marks even more ancient than those - vol left by the pre Hispanic chisel , the mottled canic r i fierce textu e , the congealed geolog cal ness that matches ( and perhaps in the begin ning inspired ) the fierceness Of the theogoni c al concept . The tropical zenithal rays that beat di upon the ancient remains , by sclosing every r Of trail of the tool as well as eve y chip erosion , c - make all the more lear to our Greek fed, routine taste the uniqueness of an esthetic that could just as well have evolved on another planet as on this continent that had not yet tasted of

Europe . Hoyningen Huene is at his best in a make believe world where he may use the technique the n t of show wi dow, wi h its pretended scale his all and elusive depth . When model is re y t colossal , like the staircase at Teo ihuacan, crawl 59

the k ing with pagan gargoyles , photograph lac s To the conviction evoked by tinier spectacles . his a r is as c mera, t uth not quite as convincing i the white lies of ngenious fiction . confi ura Of the landscapes , which show the g tion of the Mexican earth long before the most n ancient civilization had i truded upon it, the best - and are the close ups of leaves rocks , modeled by the sun with the same precision with which it heightens the quality of pre-Hispanic sculp

tu . re When the lens takes in larger vistas , the to for tendency is eschew substance filigree , to cut out artful black silhouettes against a back f n i i drop o clouds . Nothi g s trite and postcardl ke; “ ” t t here is instead a certain Vogue impeccabili y, and a curious suggestion of perpetual moonlight at variance with this arid earth which sows the spiked maguey over the sharp volcanic rock, and in the tropics engineers a machine infernale which none has yet conquered . r r re A thi d section , conce ned with colonial n Ho nin en Hu ene mai s , is the one in which y g adjusts more easily to his subject . The Catholic architecture that fell upon Mexico as a spread arras of liturgical embroidery is now in tatters; it fits only loosely over a land churned deep by r Successive revolutions . It is this metamo phosis of one era into another, this tension between past theocracy and present laissez-faire that here r t info ms the sensi ive camera vision . The mon 60 astery steps smoothed concave by the long traf fic of sandaled feet, the deserted refectories and fireless kitchens are as much ruins in these plates as the pagan temples that served forgotten cults; and the planners who had the faith and muscle to build these machines a prier are present as a mound of skulls piled in a niche of the splendid habitat which their brains once conceived and wrought . Ho nin en Hu ene - Here again, y g is at his best - n tu of in close ups . A si gle tor red face a saint ’ with enameled doll s eyes convulsed in ecstasy , ’ n r its nose eaten by time s leprosy, reveali g a co e

Of gesso and wood, tells more about colonial mores a than battalion of . saints drilled to stand in the beehive Of a baroque altarpiece . A view Of a whole carved and painted ceiling r and ornate with angels , bi ds curlicues , is no more rewarding as concerns human values than The a patch of jungle vine . camera must come re closer, catch a unit of the artificial forest to lease its stylistic and spiritual flavor . One naked utti p with his suggestion of flesh pink, of blue i c berry magenta lined with gold for a fly ng s arf, fluttering in his childishly holy way among thick stemmed buds as gaudily daubed as he , magic ally concentrates in a single plate the anachro nistically medieval fervor with which churches were built in Mexico from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, with the compact crudeness 61 and sincerity that in Europe one associates with the twelfth century . n From colonial to folk art the borderli e wavers , and Hoyningen Hu ene includes ex-votos and clothed sculptures that carry us straight into the SO nineteenth century . intent are the sacred s h dolls , attired in velvets and dama ks and mot on eaten linens , performing convincingly their of sacred mimicries , that it is difficult to think f ’ them in terms o objets d art. Blood oozes lavishly from wounds in all- over patterns whose brutal and holy meaning is neutralized by the photo graphic refinements Of an unusually selective ‘

. of eye Beautiful as are some these plates , one may feel that the deviation from the original exegetical meaning towards decorativeness has too z one a been only successfully reali ed . As p preciates the delicate tracings drawn 111 red On b ’ white y the martyr s blood, one remains cal f h ' n n lou sly unaware o t e mea i g Of martyrdom . Only a very few people are pictured in this book and these furtively . Live Indians are the “ ” heirs Of this Mexican Heritage . But they would intrude in this world which is not so much their native land as it is a vision the artist has engen dered from delicate balances of shapes and re

fined textural contrasts . The plates also stress a of tw o clash cultures , but fail to indicate how both cohabit in their common heir, the Mexican

. is of today The mixture dynamic , as witness the 62

80 0 1211 many flourishes of changes, and the few r mode n works Of art that would rate nobly, placed alongside the best of pre-Hispanic and colonial works . A few such plates are needed to l f f take us from past into current i e, and to justi y in plastic terms what use modern Mexico has f n made o its contrasti g heritages . It woul d al so of of t ul correct the sense lethal split, frigh f bilocation which— after the plates have yielded the kind of abstract delectation that Hoyningen ’ Huene s trained shutter finger rarely fails to convey— emerges from a survey Of the two

Mexicos described .

66

Of i the pedagogical must ness of the classroom . The statues a nd reredos of the Hispanic period al so proved masterly models of plastic elocution for the fresco painter of the twenties groping r n towards a fo mula for public speaking inpai t .

He now dared, as had the Colonial sculptors , to offend the rules of good taste and of plastic propriety in his urge to preach, to convert and

- convince . The would be painter to the people undertook to forge a secular equivalent to the full plastic vocabulary used in the church : e filigree halos , stucco d fingers that point, bless , or damn , glass eyes bulging with ecstasis , clotted

l . blood, flayed skins , go d damasks

Paradoxically , the period Of national inde pendenc e ushered in a meagem ess of taste that

- makes most nineteenth century art , at least the tu art taught at the Academy, discussed in cul red n circles , and hung in drawi g rooms , little more the than a provincial reflection of Europe . To n casual eye , the li k with the past snaps .

However , the great national tradition did not k a . t die , but went underground Branded as fol r, a label that made it unpalatable to collector and connoisseur alike , Mexican art humbly persisted ’ in the church retablos that were the people s tu the ul ueria pic res , in p q paintings that were the ’ s people s murals , and in the graphic work of enn sheet r in t p y illust ators , rich poli ical and human implications . 67

While murals and ex-votos remain veiled in m anony ity, graphic works conjure up the name f n o o e . man Guadalupe Posada , who appears placed at the narrow neck of an hour glass which every grain of sand must pass as it slides be tween past and future . The bulk of an ancient and rich tradition funnelled through his work at a time when it w as fated to leaven modern h ’ formulas . T at Posada s stature proved equal to this task is one reason why the painters of the 19203 fail ed to collapse into antiquarianism as

- f had the Pre Raphaelites and the men o Beuron . Artists of the generationof Rivera and Orozco acknowledge their debt to Posada, although he was not a teacher and would have been mildly d “ skeptical had anyone ad ressed him as Master . 18908 his In the his Open studio , or rather work tu r shop , was cked inside the disused ca riage in entrance Of a private house Santa Inez Street .

1n of -b Posada worked plain sight the passers y, on i housemaids the r way to market , urchins r e ast ay from grade school , ven loitering art students from the nearby San Carlos Academy . TO this day Orozco , then ten years Old , remem bers the fat brown man in an ample white on blouse , who drew and carved metal plates ’ with a single motion of his engraver s tools such “ perennial best sellers as The Man Who Eats ” “ The - l His Own Children , Two Headed Sti l ” “ on born , Lovers Go to Hell Account Of a Dog , 68

Woman Gives Birth to Four Lizards and Three ” sh Boys . At times the y lad would summon up enough courage to enter the workroom and pur ’ c loin po ketfuls of the master s metal shavings . on A little further as he ambled to school , young Orozco passed the sh0 p where publisher Vanegas Arroyo sold Posada - illustrated penny sheets— wholesale to city newsboys and rural — n peddlers retail to hou seserva ts and schoolboys .

c “ The plates , now be ome pictures , were hand tinted in sight of the customers by the women of c l the Arroyo clan , armed with sten i s and gaudy c r glue pigments . One ould admi e in the final display such exciting subjects as “The Massacres co Of i c Of Chalchi mula , piles p nk orpses gashed r with scarlet wounds , t ampled under the uaraches of c g stretcher bearers , fa es averted ll under yellow petate hats . Hero of the guerri as c against Maximilian , a maroon harro lassoed an orange gun and galloped away with his booty, leaving behind him discomfited French Zouaves who blushed to match their sc arlet pants . Skies remained ever serenely blue . of o e The bold, brusque line Posada, all the m r muscular for being dug in metal , the blatant color patches smeared on a black and white web , made so strong an impression on Orozco that later years of studying anatomy and perspective at the art school could not disroot them from his mind or from his hand . 69

of ff In contrast, the Academy Fine Arts o ered the young painter art of a far weaker character . Its halls were hung with lithographed charts of feet and eyes , clusters of ears and noses that he was enjoined to duplicate neatly in charcoal . to C lastercasts One graduated opying p , first in low relief, then in high relief, and lastly in w as the round . Relaxation provided by a class in — landscape drawing after prints and photographs . Such methods reached a zenith under the

z . Catalan painter Fabres , imported by Dia His prideful tenure whipped Mexican artists into self- assertion at the very time when Spanish overseers were unwittingly driving Indian peons “ ” to arms . The revolution was a Posada still come

— - to life . Scenes he loved to portray anti Diaz c meetings with bri ks and bats flying , skulls bashed in , stabbings , shootings , chained prison ers hemmed in between men on horseback- what had been but a line inked on paper found its consummation in a true depth and a true bulk . This monstrous Galatea moved in a quick stac cato akin to the tempo of early newsreels , with a dubbing of deafening sound effects , pistol shots ,

zz . bullet whi es , clanking of chains , screams , sighs z of Arms , till then fro en in the delicate balance n an engraved desig , let fly the stones hidden in their fists . Paper machetes became steel dug into the wicked rich, easy to spot in the cowardly uniform that Posada had devised for him , high 70

a n i on coll r and high hat, gold chai dangl ng a mf co ortable belly soon eviscerated . The revolutionary themes Of Orozco para phrase Posada not only because of his youthful f more b ecau se af ection for the master, but much _ , the revolution was first rehearsed within this n baldi g brown head, and its tableaux charted by this able brown hand before it had even

u . 1922 ff lis beg n In , as the sca olds of the mura ts mushroomed against the startled walls Of ancient n San Ildefonso , Orozco ( who was far from k ow ing that he too would soon paint murals ) smiled at the juvenile enthusiasm with which we de nounced ivory towers and groomed ourselves “ for the role of painters to the masses . Why paint ” for the people? The people make their own art . ’ Of This aphorism Orozco s , which we did not n relish at the time , remai s the most straight f ’ forward appraisal o Posada s function . ’ n Posada s work falls logically i to three phases , conditioned by the three mediums that he : t adopted in turn li hography, wood and metal The n t cuts, relief etching . bland ess of li ho graphic crayon permeates his youthful provin cial a its r n manner, m rks accu ate drawi g and - T delicate half tones . hese stones are Often politi cal Ou in cartoons , big heads spindly bodies the taste of the French caricaturists of the 18605 . A critic ignorant of the true sequence could point ’ to Posada s first manner as an obvious refinement

74 bag of the pilgrim . Anthropologists who spy on remote Indian festivals and take down in pho netic shorthand the chanting, the pastoral skits , t the cruel and leng hy Passion speeches, the Mystery plays that evoke a world of sharp hier tw archy, man sandwiched be een Heaven and ask or Hell, might rather politely the coach prompter for his book, much thumbed and yel the m Of lowed, where i print Vanegas Arroyo ll be may sti deciphered . The firm catered to the city mestizo as well ’ Ar aceta Cal as to the Indian peasant . royo s G lejera startled the city with extras as hot as the handsetting of type and the handcutting of the n pictorial reportage allowed . Recurring deadli es n a forced Posada to cy ical economies . A stand rd “ ” Horrendous Fire picture doubles for every , a sign on the burning house being recut each time - l n onfla ration to fit the latest and best se li g c g . t t Ano her print shows a s reet demonstration . Men a n shout, women scream , fists fly, b n ers and streamers are displayed— left blank to allow the type - setter to dub in whatever rightist or leftist - riev slogans , whatever religious or anti clerical g ances would transform the well- worn block into the news of the day . These uninhibited short-cuts Often resul t in “ The extravagant fantasies . In the first state of — t Death of General Manuel Gonzales , Ex Presiden ” The r l of Republic the bearded co pse, elegant y

77 i clad in black, lies in state aga nst a sober back of ground thick draperies . A few days later a second state and a new title bring the subject “ up to date . In The Burial of General Manuel ” - e of Gonzales , Ex Presid nt The Republic a

- plumed hearse and high batted mourners , h atched out Of the dark curtain, slowly cross the background of the funeral parlor with their n burden and fade i to its wall, watched by the

c Of . orpse itself, a relict the first state

Each year, for the Day of the Dead , while c hildren teased their appetites with sugar skulls and their elders prepared buffet suppers to be ’ d on evoured the family tomb , Arroyo s press let fly by the thousands broadsides known as “ ”

calaveras the of . Wi , Mexican Dance Death th of high glee , Posada conjured up the skeletons politicians with tortoise-shell glasses and c ellu of loid collars , generals whose ribs sag _ under of i medals , coquettes hiding the r bald skulls under the funeral flowers of imported chapeaux. or The medium of this second manner is wood, t - t more Often , ype metal . The direct cut ing with n burin results in a white li e on black ground .

While in the making, the block was coated with r aza con. Digging into this red lead composition helped Posada to evoke all the more easily the flames that heat and the blood that splashes his The r mu scula visions . furrowed line acqui es a tion the lithographed one lacked . Journalistic 78

n im deadli es , provisations in a hard medium , and an adjustment of his plastic vocabul ary to a im t e special audience , combine to give a pr i iv flavor that earned for this manner the approval of Paris . ’ Posada s third and last manner comci des with of in r his discovery relief etching , made an effo t to compete cheaply with the increasingly popu

- lar process Of photo engraving . In this unusual medium, zinc is drawn upon with an acid resisting ink, all exposed parts hollowed in an k hi is acid bath . Unli e orthodox etc ng, the plate k l inked with a roller li e a woodcut . The on y - n Wi other well k own relief etcher is . lliam Blake , who claimed to have received the secret of its ul process in a vision from above . The res t is a i on black l ne penned white ground, and Posada , Of in a swagger calligraphic arabesques , cele brates his release from the exacting bondage of the burin . of e hi Showing no trace naivet , t s last manner tends to irritate devotees of Posada who like to s think of him as a Mexican Rousseau . Wherea “ ” the aging French master played Clochettes of own on hr - his composition a t ee quarter violin , we can picture the aging Mexican slapping his t thigh and belching a Rabelaisian laugh as Dea h ,

- his . favorite model, tip toes in ’ Not all of Posada s works are prints . The widow o f Don Antonio knew of two large ledgers in 79

r c c which the a tist had sket hed many s enes , “ ” Some very nice, some very horrible , as she remembered them . A humble man , Posada did not scorn such menial tasks as came within the f saw f r scope o his craft . I one o his ci cus signs n z still in use in the 19205 . Pai ted on unsi ed can vas ll e of and fu y signed , it repres nted the floods 80

n Leon with his own people drowni g . This use of a personal tragedy to drum crowds under the big top is a reminder of how deeply different good neighbors may be . It has become trite to remark that Mexican l for a ' murals export bad y, that they need frame s n Hi pa ic patios and arcades , and for lighting ’ effects the crystalline silver of Mexico s plateau r its t o the golden pathos Of ropics . But Mexican graphic art, uprooted, labelled, priced, caged ll n a t . W behi d glass , f res none too well ei her i the visitor to an American museum understand ’ Posada s prints proven function? Will he be lieve that the guns shoot, the blades rip , that the ink is blood? ll an And if he does , wi he not feel cheated of expected esthetic delight?

0 T T T 1 . POR RAI OF LA IN AMERICA

Latin America encompasses such a variety of one lands , climates , men and tongues that would need to rise to stratospheric heights to survey it as a unit . And unity would only come with to blurred vision, with all details levelled foggy lf o neness . As varied as the land itse are the of graphic arts Latin America , and here also an a ttempt at inclu sw eness in the spac e of a short introduction is bound to fail . Because I write f rom Mexico , I will instead speak of the quali t in of its ies this land which echo those neighbors , tr y to uncover what common denominator, if an d the of y, permits the han ling of graphic arts “ the twenty- one republics as Latin American ” prints . n in In Lati America as the world over, beauti ful prints have been made with an eye to esthetic ow n on values alone , that hold their exhibition walls without clue to a special birthplace . One c an appreciate these prints with ready-made u niversal standards , and there is no need here to on r expatiate thei Obvious beauty . 83 84

n on Other prints , rather than bei g a frosting the cultural cake , are so strongly rooted in Latin

American soil that, to appreciate them , one must n be aware of the milieu from which they spri g, Often quite divergent from the twentieth-century f . o of norm I would rather speak these , what may not be readily learned by the northern neighbor, keeping silent as regards the aims , arts and culture equally shared by both Americas .

f k - two Despite a finities , basic differences mar of of distinct concepts art, north and south the

Rio Grande . The United States started its art evalu career as a buyer, and art definitions and ations are even now colored by the peculiar ‘ of n problems an art market . Lati America, only has an indifferent buyer, always been a lusty of the producer, and its concept art, being point the Of View of the maker, differs from that of northern neighbor. of To give an Obvious illustration, the murals

Latin American modern masters , though steadily the labeled great art, cannot find their way into hl s United States art market, but remain wort es because of their bulk and their anchorage to an Nor c an architecture . the genuine lighter out Of s put the same men , geometric composition for odd- l shaped walls , broad , hasty charcoa Of - dimen studies details from the model , three sional Of maquettes vaulted ceilings and domes ,

fit the Procrustean bed of museum requirements . 85 i f As regards graphic art , sim lar basic di fer ences also breed awkwardness . In the United

States print collectors are usually men of wealth, who hoard their treasures in portfolios that open on only rare occasions , and keep a sharp watch on what other collectors buy . They are happier or when their own prove exclusive , nearly ex i n clus ve . To the collector, the rarest pri t will have a tendency to be also the most beautiful, n i being certai ly the most des rable . A top ex ample Of this trend was a piece included in a New York print show a drawing on paper with r this proud caption , Crayon po trait prepared

never . for lithographic transfer, but transferred

This may have been the rarest print in the world , ’ “ ” rarer even than Goya s Giant , rarer than unique

no . proofs , for here was a print with proof wl incunabula Less learned in the i es of , less interested in what others have or have not , some in times even less skilled the three childish Rs , the Latin Americ an print-lover knows that graphic arts are the arts of reproduction , of the c multipli ation of an image , and cutting through aflirm the Gordian knot of Sophistication , would “ ” bluntly that the rarest print in the world is no print at all . The North American collector dotes on etch not ings and drypoints . Let us deny that some is are magnificent, but it on these mediums that Of the parasitic fungi trial proofs , states , margins , 86

- la- tt avant le res . , etc , grow thicker . When Rem ’ ’ brandt s son tried to peddle his father s abilities as ll r t - an i ust ator to a publisher, his level headed merchant answered that he had no use for them, w as nl as Rembrandt o y an etcher; and the son, s eager for a sale , answered that this was a lander, T that Rembrandt was indeed an engraver . his c episode, whi h means less than it seems to as ’ regards publishers esthetics , preserves for us an ancient and sound hierarchy o f mediums in the ratio Of plate fitness to stand a trade edition . What interests us in this anecdote today is that collectors have reversed the scale , and that its unfitness for n very the job puts etchi g at the top , because the plate tires easily . For that very reason , etching is not a favorite ‘ c medium with Latin Americans , who prefer blo k r print and lithograph . The fo mer will stand a pull of thousands of proofs before being smashed into illegibility . The latter, contrariwise from t etching, gets be ter and better as more proofs are made . The professional printer knows that it takes some five hundred pulls to bring a ‘ design on stone or zinc to a state of clean per

fection. W in here plate presses are still current use , blockprint is favorite because of its technical out identity with type . Raised to type level , the can be printed with no extra effort together with i a caption , political or sent mental , whatever will 87 tug at the public heart, for it is to the people at large rather than to a select minority that the n f pri t more often addresses itself. And the di fer ences between bois de fil and de bout are Of r little conce n to men who , following the logic that equates cuts and types , prefer to engrave t emetal t i yp ra her than wood, to equal ze through o ut stresses and erosion . ne t r Through the ni teenth cen u y, revolutions Of have been prime movers the graphic arts , for the hundreds of Opposition sheets aimed at the liver of their political victims with the litho Daumiers of graphic crayon . American , men the Of Vill asafia scope and Escalante , ground , i grained , etched and inked the r stone , week after week . As with Daumier, political police k e smashed press and s ulls into sil nce , or politi t cal victory whisked the yrant to limbo , and both failure and success spelled a stop to the

. of Philippic Thousands lithographs , some Of t of of hem great works of art, were born anger, Of of love of justice, cussedness even, but rarely n an artistic urge . With the comi g of the rotative l t r press , the i hog aph goes to metal, a zincograph now, but just as biting, just as fierce and crammed with unwonted art .

- Come photo engraving, the photographic process removes the print from the range of a n graphic rts , unless , maki g the same allowance ’ that had to be made in the case of B aumier s 88

ill ot es is late g yp , one decides that it the standard ’ i c class fi ation that is wrong, for the artist s claw mark is still there . a Even more than in Fr nce , where most Toulouse-Lautrec posters rotted on damp l m Parisian walls, benign Latin American c i ates ‘ for hi call outdoor displays . To t s day posters or m the are cut from wood linoleum, at ti es by

f f- - hand o a master . Hal tones and four color too processes being expensive for most, a dearth of economic lever enriches Latin American graphic art with some of its most unpressive examples . To understand better some of the print forms more exclusive to certain countries of Latin one America, should remember that there exist local traditions that shape modern graphic arts

- into century tried molds . Not always the work of popular artists , these prints patterned after local standards can best be understood by dig ging deep to their popular roots . Let us admit that it is in part backw ardness ft that keeps handcra s going in Latin America, where handlooms and potters footwheels are at work long after machinery has replaced them in i t . the Nor h But let us add that , as far as esthet cs - ll are involved, the slickest four color i ustration spewed at the rate of hundreds of copies per minute out of roaring gigantic presses lacks what enn sheet i the rough , tough p y still reta ns of

90 1946 grace , describing better than any theory what Objective springs move the Mexican print maker.

New Year . Prayer and thanks to the

Supreme Being .

hr n . January 6. Feast of the t ee ki gs f n February 2 . Oration and praise o the Virgi of the Candelaria . The seven utterances of Jesus on

the Cross . Condolences to the V1rg1n of the

Seven Dolors . Praises Of the Virgin of Lomeli

ness . nn h Patriotic pe ys eet. Prayers and praise to Saint

Anthony Of Padua, revered in

Calpulalpam .

Leavetaking from same .

August 15. Leavetaking and praise to Mary n o her As sumption .

8. n September Leavetaki g , good morning , r Of prayer , praise and mi acles ven the Virgin of the Remedies , erated in her sanctuary of

Cholula .

16. September Mexican National Hymn, Com memoration of the Dolores up

rising, and poem to the Flag .

Folk santo .

94

c or sophisti ate . A similar streak links the Mayan c frescoes of Chichen Itza, depicting human sa ri fices z c , the A tec tiger vessels made to re eive the of c fla ellated hearts human vi tims , the g Christs ’ skinned to naked bloody ribs , and today s car toons that pile corpses under the boot Of some local dictator with a realism that makes of the subject matter more than a figure Of speech . f I have stressed recondite di ferences , racial, one stylistic , rather than the most obvious of

s . a ubject matter As I write this introduction, pl c ing myself on the borderline of tw o vast civiliza ct tions , the word pi uresque loses its meaning , or

double entendre . r acquires a To be sure, the tou ist finds most of Latin America picturesque and delights in what seems quaint and c olorful . But he should beware Of’prints and albums that stress the regional curio , peg on men and women sombreros rebozos uaraches sara es a , , g , p , peas nt c embroideries , and tropical ac essories to the point where they lose all human meaning . One should not forget that Saxon America is a will ing is art buyer, and that the temptation strong, even or ur among good great artists , to manufact e prints that will look the way prints from Latin

America are expected to look .

My Latin American artist friends , immune to of the sights their native lands , find New York F r extremely picturesque in their turn . o who would choose to live in vertical bee-hives— men 95 piled Ou top of men up to the reach Of the clouds -when bush and pampa offer open spaces on an invigorating horizontal? Or who would fight his way through piles of snow when a plentiful sun spreads over half a continent? Most picturesque o f 57 all for the Latin American artist is th Street, where art is caged in rooms lined with wine-hued n velvet and made to si g by neon lights , where santos just like those that sell . at Indian pil grim i ages for a few cents are chained to mats , ja led in portfolios where their devotional message is of i fu silenced, clipped the r nction and prized for r t ra i y . Some print-makers of today switch from the of l praise God to Marxist social topics . Sti l n en masse cheap , still pri ted to reach number less consumers , the prints are the work of the same masters who paint walls with the same 0 purpose . Such newspapers of the 192 3 as El Machete printed woodcuts that are masterpieces of to n the new mode, already hard get si ce their very cheapness has scattered them to the ashbins . Some may have been used to strengthen a book to binding or decorate a chest, be rediscovered f r o the delight of unborn museum curators .

After centuries, the pious function Of medieval images is forgotten by the collector who admires instead the plasticity Of the thick black line that

zi - shapes draperies in abstract g zag folds , while his eye tastes the carmine Of a stenciled blood 96

on rt r t splash the split pate of a ma y , wi hout n f seei g the martyrdom . The Marxist message o some of our modern artists will fade o ut even hl as t more thoroug y, dealing it does with ear h ” Das Ka ital and p , not with a timeless Heaven and naked plastic qualities wil l come to the fore . All such prints born Of a non- esthetic purpose ’ ’ Old of l art our l art raise the argument p , and answer it all at once . Truly felt emotions leave i all th e l nes , values and colors etched more The deeply to match a warfaring purpose . war or over, win lose , lines , values and colors keep imprisoned the vibrant heat of the message long after its topic al meaning is lost . Any attempt to define what makes Latin America tick in the graphic field on another rhythm than the United States , is bound to puzzle Latin Americans and paint to Saxon eyes o f a picture of forced quaintness . There are course more points Of contact between the ff Americas than there are di erences , and besides l Of the art, a pioneering phi osophy Open spaces links north to south more closely than either to

Europe . I like to think of the Americas in terms of the

Biblical episode of Mary and Martha . Martha dl was practical , han ed her pots and pans with “ ” ” m sti Saxon efficiency . Mary was Latin and y the cal , and her mind wandered far above regions staked by the rules of good housekeeping .

1 X T 1 . ME ICAN PRIN S

The power of the graphic arts lies in repro duc r t tion, multiplication . This ve y multiplici y points to the people at large as the potential users Of prints with which they, at least, share the quality f em i o b g many . Th s broad premise is attacked n - who by a few pri t lovers advance , in dubious r Malthusian fashion , that rarity is more desi able h than plenty . Perhaps bot theories may be recon

- ciled if we admit two levels of art making .

Limited, numbered editions of prints are all very well for the kind of graphic art that is de luxe in truth or in pretence , and thus declares itself expendable . Another kind of art may be a true necessity that it would be as senseless to ration as bread . The story of the Mexican graphic arts parallels r that of Mexico , whose history is not all pleasu e art and leisure . Mexican was never meant to be dl a hothouse flower, cod ed in the rarefied air of nl f r the studio for the delectation o y o connoisseu s .

- the tlacuile Since the pre Conquest days Of , who brushed painted magic on lime-coated paper to 98

1 02

of feit, admit the exhumed monsters reminiscent ” the art forms o f Hindoos and Egyptians? What the German Baron visualized as a curiosity— the chance meeting of violently contrasting esthetics — does in fact plague the inner eye of all Mexi can artists . They hardly need see side by side Apollo Belvedere and Coatlicu e to realize what potent tension results from the churning of bloods that begat them and their art . Their quandary is illustrated by the career of the first graphic artist of authentically mixed - z o parentage, Fray Diego Valade , born in Mexic of a Spanish father and an Indi an mother .

Trained to be a Franciscan missionary , well in in travelled both Europe and his native land, Fray Valadez engraved a set of plates meant for visual aids to teach Christian doctrine to un hr as lettered Indian converts . T ough his origin i well as his calling, the artist had fam liarized his eye only too well with the squatting figures in n s to be found codices , huggi g the earth, knee the a to their chin, in manner Of his savage p rishi ner n t e o s. Havi g tasted Indian humility at h sight of these geometrically defined human fig ures , their folded bodies inscribed in the cube or seemingly gathered back into the sphere of the of womb , Fray Valadez , though possessed great technical proficiency and keen anatomical knowl edge , could no longer , in his engravings , be con 1 03 tent with the display of swollen muscles and the extrovert gestures stamped on art by the Euro pean Renaissance .

- The human form is at its loveliest skin deep , awaiting only the added health and glow of

Greek genius to become a Narcissus or a Galatea . The m the of Aztec, i mune to sight religious f autopsies performed with a sacrificial kni e , pre ferred to observe the same human body piece — a ck or meal ne lace of steaming hearts , a

or a ll . c basinful of blood, hi of skulls Unni e as is its death in plastic manifestations , it has never

theless n r . i spi ed great art In Europe , bones , shrouds and worms were the leit-motiv of medi of eval dances Of death . In the America the x t r of si teenth cen u y , the rattling the imported Catholic skeletons was to find its perfect match in of te onastle the staccato rhythm the p , the

- lo r . m Aztec g d um In colonial ti es , Death tri umphed in the showy funeral pyres that Mexi t tw cans , wi h ou ard sorrow and perhaps secret the of pleasure , erected at death emperors and kings whose absentee power they had experi enced only at second hand . Crowned skeletons loom big in the engravings that adorn the result ing pieces de circonstances. n t Early in the ni eteen h century, Fernandez de “ knicknamed Lizardi , El Pensador Mexicano , assisted at the birth of Mexican political inde 1 04

HTDALGO E pendence with a rash of pamphlets— from four — to eight pages each, on cheap paper that he

- set n . wrote, to type , and distributed si gle handed A woodcut of a plain skull and crossbones mod elled with deep Chiaroscuro which embellishes ” of of tw one his Dialogues the Dead, be een the shade of hero Hidalgo and the freshly-laid one -E the of ex mperor Iturbide , marks the rise Of

r calavera . modern, wholly i reverent, comical It is dated 1824. calavera assm hr This graphic ( skull ) , p g t ough ever more complex forms , reached a climax in the metal cuts and relief etchings of Guadalupe low Posada, undoubted master, versed in the

1 06 l quickly wither . Equa ly doomed by the success or r enn sheets failure of thei endeavor, these p y s could not outlast the i sues they raised . Only their names have kept a sting : The Mustard Plaster The Bla ck Widow The Gu t- rater The , , G , Tickles The hark The Carvin Kni e The , S , g f , Loose-Mouthed The Whi The cor ion The , p, S p , ’ Blin Man d s Club . Mild-named and longer lived than most was the far from mild La Orquesta that featured ’ Constantino Escalante s masterly lithographs . z in These cover the Juare Reform, the French ’ vasion two r Re , Maximilian s empire , the Jua ez “ ” n publics . Escalante was as a rule agai st it . He ’ lovingly dwelt on the picturesque Zouave s forms , but their unhappy owners were impaled on k of the spi es maguey, drubbed by barbed l ll n cacti . General Zaragoza funnel ed horse pi s i to a sick Napoleon III; a comical Maximilian lent

he . his imperial foot to kissed Juarez was a tuna, nO al c the tasty fruit of the p , prote ted from

French appetites by bristling vegetable bayonets . - - i Mexico was a bronze skinned , plume sk rted Indian maiden who lolled in a hammock tied di of to palm trees . She greeted the lan ng n the dimi utive , pompous Frenchman with a “ the smile , and a popular refrain, Here come ” monkeys . Thr ough this vast graphic work, as a kind of 1 07 hieroglyph that stands for the mechanical prog - E c ress featured in that mid century , s alante drew variations of the iron horse . His locomotives , their valves and pistons rearranged in quasi f organic fashion , chug and pu f with an animal 86 . 1 8 life all their own In , as the artist and his i t w fe were re urning from a party in Tacubaya , they both slipped under the wheels Of the local

t to . train hey were board, dying soon after La Or uesta El Ahuizote Heir to q was , named after a nahuatl monster whose voice lured men ’ Villasafia s to an aquatic death . It published great f “ ’ lithographs o the seventies . Truly a blind man s c c lub , it helped rush a democratic president ,

Lerdo de Tejada , and boosted as a hero young P rfiri z l H o o . E i o General Dia A generation later , j ’ del Ahuizote The Ahuizote s Son ( ) undid , in c c tu three de ades that bridge the en ries , what its Porfirio father had done . It swatted mature Don until his senile exile . 1911— 1913 Ahuizote In , a new kept its car toons aimed at President Francisco Madero up to the minute when he was actually shot in c the ba k . In this paper , José Clemente Orozco cut his milk teeth to razor sharpness on the fu ture martyr, Madero . The Mexican mural renaissance in the twen w as ties especially concerned with true fresco , the mural technique par excellence . But its art 1 08 ists had not turned muralists primarily through a love of fresco , but rather in their desire to bring art to the people . In sharp contrast to what were then the tenets of the School of Paris , the Mexicans were bent on creating a didactic type of art aimed at a wider circle Of men than tu the esthetes . It is na ral, then , that they would also try their hand at the graphic arts in an effort to reach an even wider public than could be r a touched by murals . With this pu pose appe red “ El Machete the of , financed by Syndicate r Painters , an i regularly issued, blatant newssheet

- r . Of extra large fo mat For it , muralists Siqueiros and Guerrero literally carved planks into brutal n woodcuts . These were i ked and run together

- with the type on a commercial plate press , minus of nk n the niceties special i i g, graded pressure , n and rag paper that o e associates with artw ork .

Poor as the resulting proofs undeniably are , these few woodcuts remain as a precious testimonial to a moment Of heroic endeavor . They were done in between mural work by men familiar with sc affolds and mortar and totally disdainful Of the finer points which constitute the pride Of col ’ As t n lectors portfolios . a result, here is a big ess in them that no later work by these same men could quite recapture . af In the next decade , the pioneer muralists firmed their technical proficiency and esthetic An maturity, mostly by hard , sustained work .

“ José C lemente Orozco : The Flag . 1 1 1 other generation that was then born to art found s f in tw it el hemmed , as it were, be een the walls where their elders had frescoed brown giants shaking fists and holding banners loud with le . scm s slogans Naturally enough, adolescent p The shied away from these hardened displays . young artists took refuge from the very big in the very small . Leopoldo Mendez and others learned to cut wood so fine as to squeeze a con tent equivalent to that of hundreds of square feet of buon fresco into prints the size Of an

- ex libris. Mexican graphic arts then branched towards exquisiteness as a natural antidote, a phase perhaps best expressed in the few prints of r - l sho t lived Julio Caste lanos . ’ the fu In today s Mexico , it can be said that nc tion of public speaking so ably performed by murals in the twenties has been taken over by th n e pri ted poster. Perhaps simply bec ause photo -engraving remains more expensive than in l Obsolete methods , posters Mexico are stil - The mostly hand made process or relief cuts . print-lover would do well to follow the over alled t aste ot man who walks the streets wi h a p p , a of brush, and a sackful new posters that he slaps all over the walls of the Capital . The yel s n low, pink or purple sheet , apart from advertisi g t or n a spor fest denounci g a politico , may also s be first edition , strictly unlimited, of the orig inal graphic work of some famous artist. 1 1 2

c Of to n Another bran h the arts which, i directly, ll the revolution gave a boost is book i ustration . It started with the same practical intent as many of c t so another endeavor which art onsti uted, to

- b . speak, no more than a y product Modern book illustration was linked early with the campaigns launched by successive Presidents to teach an increasing number of citiz ens how to read and ’ c m F rmin . i i e write Typi al is Rivera s ch ldish pr er, L ee in . , with its exquisitely primitive line draw gs

Printed by the State , it was distributed free to rural schools . More sophisticated and aimed at a smaller c Of ll t ircle , the best the later books sti hold hat technical excellenc e and human values are inter El S ombreron il dependent . Such is , lustrated by Zalce t Alfredo , shown here toge her with the preparatory studies that preceded the final lino see cuts . It may come as a surprise to some to ’ how the artist s mind worked; how complexity meant for him only a first step towards simplicity . In the effort to single out Of Mexico what will t seem to an outsider the most Mexican rends , t a there lies a danger of distortion . It is rue th t in the twenties much Mexican art was clashing with much Parisian art as to the why of art making . It is also true that Mexican artists con tributed their share to rounding ou t the inter d be national school . Rivera could har ly have

1 14

u in Murg ia moves me most, and it, the set of n t of santos sai ts , or ra her , as stylized, as geom

etrized . T r , as an ABC hese images, py amidal i i m V rgins or beribboned Cruc fixes , are anony ous r of chips from functional fo m art, rich in e the didactic clarity, and m ant for people at large .

One of these woul d be my choice .

1 1 8

’ Orozco s technique has only its chemistry in com mon with the delicate washes of ancient Italian frescoes so blanched by the centuries as to meet spinsterish tastes . His come closer to the opaque , - the l n lime thick Slavonic murals; and model i gs , contrasting dynamically active hatchings of black

- and white, could be a muscular free hand adap tation of the delicate webs of gold that highlight the veils Of Byzantine Madonnas . But the little that remains of the routine wisdom of ancient recipes is done violence to by sustained inspired ’ the improvisation . Seen at arm s length , dis jointed brushstrokes are only a puzzling giant is be calligraphy . A far greater distance needed fore the walls are ready to disgorge their searing message .

As to subject matter, compact diagonal col umus of Heaven-sent fire are the one flaming ao in cent an otherwise colorless world , conjured up i mostly with moss green and corpse gray . A t mid , vitiated echo of this burning red are the Phrygian caps with which respectable-looking masked bandits attempt in vain to deflect the well-aimed k lightnings . Massive bookshelves , raised li e skel etal skyscrapers , and shaken by the attendant out earthquake, pour books and stacks of legal documents as if they were wounded innards . On

- a high pedestal in front of a tottering, half split palace of justice , Justice herself lolls through the confla ration g , sword and neck limp , snoring 1 1 9

and mouth agape . A giant empty closet Opens , a before its disclosed vacuum , a kitchen table p The rades as a legal bench. Chair, stuffy with plush and gaudy with gold , lies upset , buried in a mounting sea Of notaried papers curled by the ’

. Orozco s flames The inhabitants of this , private atu planet, hide their judicial fe res behind safe ’ o n the crackers kerchiefs , give false weights of scales justice , pronounce loaded decisions , or, or less subtly, sock and bind poor adolescent ff phans , gag and rope night watchmen , stu a hastily gathered loot inside bulging knotted sheets . ’ of Orozco s One latest mural ensembles , this one , like all the others , has the power to irritate The n layman and art critic alike . former rese ts the indecency latent in the totally unabashed of r a exposure romantic inspi ation, fe rs the nug The get Of truth latent in the gross indictment . f latter, whose delight is to burrow a sni fing way under the surface of an art work and retrieve t with canine fidelity what influences , rends and ll comparisons are hiding in there , is stopped sti in his tracks by an originality not yet catalogued in history . 1882 José Clemente Orozco was born in , in

Zapotlan , State . of Jalisco . His family mapped out for him a career as an agronomist, and the willing youngster went to the Capital and won a diploma as an agricultural engineer after three 120 hard years at the Escuela de Agricul tura de San

Jacinto . dl Six years later Orozco , deciding belate y n upon an artistic career, entered the Fi e Arts of n School San Carlos , sitti g in class with mop pets of seventeen . The art academy was a for s bidding place, its courses devi ed as an elaborate set of rungs and traps to smooth to academic polish whatever 1ndividual asperities were in the -u t man initial make p of the s udent . Orozco re i ed t con Orozco , yet remembers wi h gratitude the ventional grind that forced him to take stock of his innate capacities . After having drawn from the cast and from lithographic prints his share w as f of noses , toes and ears , he admitted to li e class . An elaborate stand could rotate the model, or t raise her to successive levels , ba hed in alter nating layers of diffused and reflected lights by E a panoply of bulbs and screens . ach pose lasted l a month, and a photographer was then cal ed in to take a picture, against which paragon the students could correct deviations from nature in n their drawi gs . The academy was only the more sedate half ’ of Orozco s art im education, portant inasmuch as a thorough knowledge of perspective and anatomy was the one safe way eventuall y to i t in throw both overboard . More eas ly raceable his present work is ‘the other broader lesson that he gathered from the many sights Of Mexico

1 22

l on t belching its shel s the Capital, the reason of ’ r Hue ta , Madero s assassination, the comeuppance of Huerta , who tumbles from the Presidential to in chair a sick cot a United States jail , the a d ill royal battle between Carranza , Zapata n V a, the whole newsreel with its obbligato Of slug n s gi g, looting, shooting , rape and arson , is the paradoxical background against which the deli ’ cate springlike unfurling of Orozco s genius as serted itself . Poet José Juan Tablada recorded in 1913 a ’ “ visit to the painter s lodgings : The studio was a small room furnished with the accessor1es m and — an dispensable to working living easel, a

for . l table colors , a bed, a washstand On the wa ls and in portfolios the watercolors , pastels and drawings that are up to now the whole work of Orozco Woman is the perpetual theme of all these works Young women meet and n r ff c es kiss endeari gly, fu tive looks and a e ted g t erfidies ures rehearse nascent p , weapons are being tried and sharpened for the coming duels of passion It is with reluctance that I close r the po tfolio of Claudines , with a last look at childish heads made larger by the coquettish of note a knotted ribbon , at bodies where svelte ness and plenitudes express a first try at the ” mature form . tr r It is ue that, if his watercolors of schoolgi ls r were all tende ness , Orozco was already sharp

W José

1 26

. l n 1920 hardly stomach Back Mexico , is his low ebb . He confided then to José Juan Tablada that “ ” Those people have even ceased to insult me . It seemed as if his career as a painter was at an end . W dl hen the mural renaissance started, i ing Orozco watched with cynical amusement his overalled brothers painting with a socially con scious brush . Perhaps because of a past political z of affiliation with Carran a , once the foe c Maecenas Vasconcelos , perhaps be ause he was c pigeonholed as a artoonist , it seemed at first that Orozco would be by- passed by the renais

- 23 c c . 19 san e But in mid , Vas oncelos relented, and gave him the walls of the Preparatoria

School to decorate . Orozco came to mural painting late— close to — forty and possessed of a strong personal style .

Newspaper cartooning , with its deadlines on wit k and its political, quic ly fading allusions , water colors depicting gestures and postures surprised with a snapshot eye keyed to translate emotion n t into plastic playacti g , had been up to hen his trademark . They contrasted sharply with the of l manner his fellow muralists , come to wa ls r via cubism . The cubist treated each easel pictu e c as an ar hitecture , built it patiently from the n i itial rectangle Of the canvas , with a faith amounting to fetichism in its four straight angles h and four straight lines . W en cubist Diego 1 27 Rivera turned muralist he did not have to change his point of view but only the scale of his Opera ’ tions . Even the muralist s scaffold proposed a well-known theme : verticals and horizontals and diagonals ordered as rigidly by function as a

Juan Gris by logic . Instead of the somewhat of meager postulate the rectangular canvas , complex Mexic an colonial architecture offered r more int icate canons , but the geometric prin ciple remained the norm .

Orozco had never been to Paris , had not ex erienced p Parisian training, could not validly lean in his mural work against the architectural tenets that ruled the modern art of the twenties . i As is true of his whole l fe , he was not eager to learn either, and somewhat skeptical of what his colleagues erected with a great show o f giant compasses and stretching chalked strings in lieu

Of giant rulers . When Rivera unveils his first mural in March “ 1923 z , Oro co writes pertly, Some verses are fi spelled very nicely and polished magni cently, yet they are worth a peanut . Some paintings boast of the golden proportion and that famous cubistic technique, they are worth another pea ” nut . fli ant com Discounting the pp wording, the parison between painting and poetry comes nat urally to Orozco at a time when the more ad vanced critics and painters preferred to compare 1 28 painting to scientific endeavors . To his Paris l Of n anointed co leagues , proud bei g in the know, i his romantic approach seemed a prov ncial flaw . And yet the element of Parisian fashion present in some of those other Mexican murals dates them as of the first third of the t wentieth cen t z ury, while the frescoes that Oro co painted at the same time escape dating; 30 subjectively en grossed was he as to be impervious to the chant of the cubist siren . The negative creed expressed in face of a n Rivera is soon complemented by a positive o e. On the eve of beginning his career as a muralist “ ( July 1923 ) Orozco writes : My one theme is HUMANITY; my one tendency is EMOTION TO A MAXIMUM; my means the REAL and R t of t INTEG AL representa ion bodies , in hem ” selves and in their interrelation . SO severely noble is this program as to seem n l or i capable Of human fu fillment, rather let us sa i n y that Orozco , the budding mural st, i stalls himself guilelessly in Michael Angelo’s private pew. 1923— 24 In his first frescoes painted in , now the i mostly destroyed, artist elaborated th s state t ir one ment . The human body was he subject of tr of matter, stripped racial tags , s ipped cloth ing, stripped even of those nondescript draperies that classical masters were too prudent to shun . “ ” Time , the present, was waved aside as just

1 30 striking change Of mood contrasts the succeeding versions . The latter, borrowing from Nahuatl t my hology, pictures earth as a rocky abyss , and the moment as the fearful one when the rising evening star forces the waning globe dive /to into the nether regions below the horizon, to z consort there with the dead . Oro co must have understood this theme as a parable of genius at h bay, as he did when he later painted Promet eus and Icarus , Greek counterparts of the Mexican myth . to Begun as a paean the Revolution , another fi panel ended as its bitter condemnation . In its rst state, a faceless spirit personifying Democracy arouses humans to revolt, like the Republic that

Delacroix saw sprinting over the barricades . An aged thinker and a young worker stand by, ready for the planning and the action needed to make the revolution a fact . In their hands , square and ill are blueprint , wrench and dr tools to forge Of the new order . A radical change mood and partial scrapings and repaintings soon modified the theme to what it is now . As the spirit of i civil str fe hovers over them , the worker exhibits t i the s umps Of his mut lated arms , while the n r older man , havi g d opped blueprint and square , clasps his hands to his head in inarticulate despair . n 1924 one r On a morni g in June , yea after z u Oro co had t rned muralist, a mob of students 1 31

t a nd armed with ro ten eggs , sticks stones , as saulted and defaced the Preparatoria murals . n Public opi ion was largely with them . The news papers , and even the critics excused the gangling iconoclasts on the ground that they were “lovers of the beautiful driven to fury by the sight of ” these monsters . To make sure that such outrage n would not be repeated, an i dignant government official dismissed the painter and talked of white

the . washing unfinished murals Now past forty, Orozco once again sought his livelihood in newspaper cartooning, and once again his career “ ” as a serious artist seemed at an end . From this forced interlude in his government sponsored work date the wash drawings on revo i n lut o ary themes . Critics who assume that this famous series is contemporary with the events depicted discount both the working habits and the mood of the artist . At the Opposite pole from the impressionist painter hunting for a motif and z to bagging it on the spot, Oro co needs turn his back on the model to see it clearly . This unphotographic strain made him paint delicate watercolors with women for a theme while before his eyes the revolution staged its bloodiest 1925 tableaux . In , with peaceful reconstruction m deemed just around the co er, while politicos exchanged pistol holsters for fountain pens and ’ r r O ro zco s aradoxi thei horses for swivel chai s , p cal retina chose to relive in brusk black and 132 white the colorful episodes of an earlier decade . Of the same year is the mural that he entitled n Omniscience , pai ted for Francisco Sergio of Iturbe , owner the ancient and beautiful Casa z The de los A ulejos . climax of his classical pe riod on es , it is also an important statement thetics . It complements with forms what the “ of artist had already said in words , Art is first

E . E all GRAC Where GRAC is not, there is no

c - art . GRACE annot be conjured up by so called c cubistic re ipes . The core of this saying is a belief in old- fashioned inspiration to be achi eved

t . only by spiri ual experience In the fresco , Grace , with commanding gesture, orders both Force h tu re and Intelligence , w ile her up rned face ceives in turn the light from above . Her ex pression implies a mediumistic state of passive f expectancy, suggests that all e fort to press a con sc ious logic upon the work in gestation can only injure those imponderables more vital to art than articulate laws . 1926 In , Orozco returns to the Preparatoria

School to finish its decoration . In a chastened he mood, he abandons the gigantic scale that affected as a mural beginner, casts aside an earlier pride in craftsmanship and anatomical display . Instead of relishing godlike nudity, ’ Orozco s men now keep their shirts on. Once swollen torsos exhale their lungful of pride and n cave in . The shru ken heroes go through valiant

1 34 tion succeed each other so quickly as to be practically simultaneous . Where the French ’ t man s wisdom isolates subject ma ter from art , and light from form and color, Mexican Orozco t n is quite satisfied to let na ure and i spiration , n means and ends , aggluti ate in the same mono in chrome , shapeless mess which living organs ’ so u n are revealed under the surgeon s scalpel , like the red, blue and yellow wax organs that stuff anatomical dummies . h of W en Orozco is at work, hieroglyphs passion pour forth from his inner recesses onto or wall canvas , with not even a pause after birth for them to get accustomed to the new climate and new milieu , to be slapped and bathed and s t decently swaddled , as are atements , in words

or . forms , that are meant for public exposure The strength of his work does not come from any strangeness or keenness of idea , but from ’ - O rozco s of its lack of make up. system plastic thought is a chain of clichés forcefully expressed . I do not know if great poems can be made on “ themes as simple as the world is in a mess , “ ’ O rozco s things are getting worse, but great pictures are built around a simil ar core .

Because of such negative emphasis , many a his c u critic , and more keenly communist olleag es whom he alternatively raises to hope and sinks

hi . into despair, brand his thought as anarc stic

- It would be, and an old fashioned bomb at that, 1 35 thrown haphazardly and scattering its small shot on such an expanded radius as to prove mostly i t f neffec ual, if Orozco was only a sco fer and a denier . The closest literary approach to his work

’ Blo vic is that of Léon y, who could impale his tirn on hot words as efficiently as any devil on - lo a cherry red fork . If B y is recognized today as great, it is not because of his attacks on per sona es g now mostly forgotten, but because his constructiveness so immeasurably transcended ’ ’ Blo s— rozco s— his aggressiveness . y and O positive so faith and positive vision are radiant, even though jealously kept to themselves , as to make them dust and vacuum and scour , with an excess of muscular vigor, their private universe of the stains and specks of all persons and things that

- fall short of an ever pulsating ideal . Orozco the cartoonist could represent man in his variety , from president to pimp , from school of girl to prostitute . Man is still the theme his the t z later work , but ma ure Oro co forgets the many masks , plows under the motley moral and psychological nuances . His murals are peopled z with generali ed men as clustered , as naked , as tw inter ined as putti m a Fragonard cartouche , ’ O rozco s but of a more bitter hue . So intense is preoccupation with man that landscape is re duced to a shorthand version , even in country i l - anthro omor scenes , and his few st l lives are p re phic . A large tempera of late date featu s a 1 36 kitchen cabbage that somehow becomes a human il n cranium, wh e the curli g edges of leaves mimic r a crown of lau els , and the whole becomes a comment on the perishable nature of fame . ul i This obsession with men is not e og stic, for r shortcom the a tist admits , in fact relishes , the n t i gs of his subject . Yet he is not a rue pessi n n ru mist, for in his pai ti gs man, however c elly otentiali frustrated, never ceases to declare his p Gol ties of grandeur . In the Martyrdoms and ’ O rozco s gothas that he paints today, affirmation of faith is none the less impressive for being unconsciously uttered and consciously denied . One should not assume that a belief in God ’ r Far would soothe the a tist s frenzy . from a of nl salve, faith is for him a means e arging ’ ’ z n man s distresses to God s si e , a poi t of view that coincides by instinct with the one cogent reason advanced by theology in explanation of con the Passion . On the type of faith that is ceived as a social appendage to gracious living, Orozco gives an unflattering comment in his “ ” Father God , who holds a geographical globe c instead of the medieval ma rocosm , winks the ff ll rich into Heaven and shoos the poor o to He . Translating the Magnificat into Mexican terms “ He has humbled the proud and exalted the ” meek -Orozco expects to witness in a next world

~ the last and best of all revolutions .

13 X V U Z T . A IER G ERRERO , A EC ARTIST

XaV1er Guerrero was born in northern San Pedro

C achu ila . de las Colonias , whose native name is His Indian ancestry makes him by blood an o ne Aztec , the undiluted Indian of the original group of Mexican muralists who recreated Amer india on modern terms . To describe the warm ochre of the Chil ean soil, poet Pablo Neruda wrote that it was of

Xavier Guerrero color . This elliptical image holds The ainter true both ways . p melts into a land r scape as readily as its rocks o flora . He resembles - t n the boulder textured Aztec sculp ure , squatti g men apparently as immobile as the volcanic stone they are carved from . Compared with the

Discobolus , these figures seem idle; feelingless , matched against the writhings of a Laocoon . The ’ white man s eye must get accustomed to their vegetative twilight, made to measure with the f o . dense green an underbrush Once in focus , he realizes that Aztec sculpture is as alive as the the Greek, only less blatantly . Belying impassive l features , the symmetrical fists of a figurine wil 139 1 40 press amorously to its flanks tw o half-hidden of ears corn, as a miser counts his gold . 'uiet Xavier Guerrero is the uncommon c om mon denominator of the individual trends that weave into a Mexican Renaissance . He helped shape the medular marrow Of its works by evolv ing most of the unusual techniques that did as much towards defining national forms as the ’ painters personalities . 19103 nd In the , Paris cubists talked of sign a house- painters as being truer masters than many c an academi ian , for they alone kept alive wise traditions long forgotten by fine art schools . A t lit le late in life , Picasso and Braque proceeded m to experi ent with the recipes of the trade , and to handle its specialized tools . In Mexico , Xavier i r Guerrero tapped the same vein by b rth ight, as the son of a skilled master house painter who f rated crews o his own. Xavier learned to toddle his winding way be tween paint pots and ladders; the fat or flat brushes of the trade were his toys . The future muralist watched his father at his job of painting of he walls , learned a plastic alphabet before a was introduced to A B C . Soon , he tried his h nd i at it, challenging with juven le exercises in make ’ believe woods and trompe l oeil marbles the pa ’ ternal chef d oeuvres . The training of hand and eye was rounded out by practical experience as e an architectural draftsman , and the fourt en

142 where he worked, while the nuns huddled and knelt underneath. His participation in the military revolution began with a quid pro quo that caught him h “ quietly at is job . I was asked to paint a mural / to in a hacienda, that is paint a new map of one the grounds to replace become obsolete . c Such good meals they served there , large pit hers of two creamy milk, and desserts to choose from .

But it did not last long . Came a troop of arm ed t men and they invited us outside , to wi ness the c c shooting of h‘a ienda hands . Said the hief when saw ll a . he me , You wi be my secret ry Get us ’ ‘ tu some medicine . Na rally I agreed, You can — ’ get some at Chapala .

They gave me a huge white horse, and I galloped at the head of the troop , and because

I knew most people in town , I took my caval c ade all through the main street to the outskirts ‘and back again . And people gasped and said , We did not know that you had been promoted to generall’ 1920 - Come the revolution was top dog, mural

n the l . painti g was m air , but not yet on the wa ls Roberto Montenegro was first to receive a mural commission from the Federal Government, the decoration of the former church of San Pedro y

of . Pablo , now become a hall free discussions He was wise enough to give Xavier Guerrero the post of technical adviser. The advice given 1 43 by the young veteran muralist was eminently : w practical let Montenegro do the back all in oils , i see as his fancy dictates, and Xav er would to the rest . The r beautifully prese ved decoration , painted on in distemper a white plaster ground, strews of garlands stylized pomegranates , blue birds , cornfl ow ers black birds, and camellias over walls , l n pi asters , and cupolas . Guerrero also pai ted the dome of a lateral chapel with the signs of the zodiac . When Diego Rivera returned in 1920 after a - for twelve year stay in Europe, he received his mural assignment the auditorium of the Prepara tory School . Montenegro presented Guerrero to his the cubist master, who also asked him to be i assistant . The new mural would be pa nted in o encaustic , a wax method that Rivera had pra ticed in Spain on a small scale . His European trials included rare and expensive materials , resine elemi extracted from lemon trees , and ’ essence d as ic p , a wild lavendar base used in in not perfume making . These gredients could be r bought in Mexico , and thei importation in the quantities needed for making a mural was pro hibitive. Xavier sensibly adapted the overseas technique to local purse and conditions by su g estin n g g plain wax, turpenti e, and the copal rosin still used by Yucatan natives as incense to pro pitiate jungle gods . 1 44

The r th job started from scratch, that is f om e wetting and grinding of the dry pl gment; but even the tools of this disused craft had to be made . A marble slab was chosen for a first grind; a glass slab for the final one . Xavier drew a plan and profiles of a marble pestle and had it carved to specifications . Carlos Merida, Xavier, and I n color rinders e were a willi g team of g , and cam in to know pestle and slabs intimately, widely excess of union hours . n Other mural chores were the i cising of. the i line in the cement ground, the prick ng and pouncing of detail drawings , the priming of the hot wall with rosin at the instant of painting, and the synchromzmg of a blowtorch lick with each of of stroke the brush, to vitrify its load pigment . Rivera’s conversion to mural painting occurred of in front Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, and his first mural retained the hierarchic flavor of its source, gold backgrounds and gold halos , that c presented another te hnical hurdle . Only Xavier could u se the gold leaf with success on the roughly chiseled cement . We watched in awe as he rubbed the brush on his wrist to charge it with how n electricity, and the i credibly thin leaf would leap to it and flatten itself on the wall as if W the by Indian magic . hen I attempted same, the leaf just crumbled into uselessness . Rivera moved to the Ministry of Public Edu in 1923 cation March , to begin there a job that

146 our regions , unearthing past plastic secrets . He was both the worker and the scientist of our group . “ ih Says Xavier, I made trips to Teot uacan to

- compare my results with pre Hispanic murals , then matched mural samples in the Ministry . At last I made a success‘ful sample and showed it who We l t to Diego , said, wi l save his sample, imbed it in the finished work and paint by it your ’ f - o . 1 su portrait, with the date the discovery g gested that Diego let me take the sample out c myself as he is somewhat lumsy with his hands , n on n i but he i sisted doi g it h mself . He hammered to the sample bits , and the last, rather large frag

to ll - dl ment fa , he crushed absent minde y under ” foot and spoke no more of painting my portrait .

As he already had done with encaustic , Guer rero thus streamlined fresco to fit the Mexican of milieu . One the minor features of the modified technique was the use of n0 pal sap as an ag i glutinant . This picturesque touch st rred the newspapers into eloquence , and they dubbed ’ “ Guerrero s method The Secret of the Mexica “ 1923 El Universal : is In June , said The art t painter Diego Rivera has rediscovered, in the of opinion certain technicians Of painting, the process used by ancient Mexicans to produce t i t he r splendid frescoes , such as hose that we admire today in the monuments of San Juan

Teotihuacan . It consists in mixing nopal juice 1 47 with the preparation , completing the work with a special polish, adopted after numerous trials Seiior by the assistant of Diego Rivera , Xavier

Guerrero . ‘And in July Rivera praises , in an interview, in of Xavier Guerrero , well versed the craft painting, who discovered in his noble approach to it as a laborer, a procedure that resuscitates the manner of painting of the ancient Mexicans . ’ ” I use this technique, adds Diego modestly .

By then the danger of failure had waned . Bucked up by his esoteric share in “the secret ” of the Mexica , Rivera gathered courage , and in a few weeks fresco had no terrors left for him . of In the chapel Chapingo , Guerrero also worked with Rivera and painted panels of his ow n , among them monochrome floral decora tions that prove the care with which the Indian

r tu . to obse ves na re Not content look at a flower, its he memorises anatomy, sampling inner shapes with lateral and longitudinal slices from tip to z c roots , after the manner Of his A te ancestors , the tlacuiles who left us exquisite botanical albums . The decoration of the house of the director of the Chapingo agricultural school is entirely his e r1 work, important as an isolated xample of p

t . vate decoration from hat early period Here , but a sotto voce , are the usual symbols customarily

flaunted on public walls on a colossal scale . 1 48

“ When the Syndicate of Revolutionary Paint ers i , Sculptors , and Engravers of Mex co was w as nl of created, Guerrero the o y one the paint to for ers take the move granted . His father had him been a devout union man , and would take d by the hand as a child, to walk in street emon ’ trations i U r s of the pa nters union . nlike his a tist i friends , Xavier had thought of paint ng as a communal affair since the days he trotted on hi - short legs be nd the unfurled, hand painted ’ of hi banner s father s guild . of n h ul As a member the new sy dicate , he s o for dered the responsibility its organ , a news paper that carried more woodcuts than news , the Machete wrathful , its name borrowed from the i curved blade, half hunting kn fe and half scythe , that the Mexican peasant knows how to use in

: war and peace . Its slogan read

The machete is used to reap cane , c To lear a path through an underbrush, i i To k ll snakes , end str fe ,

And humble the pride of the irnpiou s rich .

o f Left the left, its contents were such that neither right nor center nor left could find any

' solace in it; and it was butted in turn by enraged r politicians . Guerrero , Orozco , Siqueiros , cont ib uted of r to it some thei most mordant works , got fired from their mural j obs in retaliation .

150

the m - t of mai ed , shrieking figure of a semi my hi cal Indian hero . Guerrero, with selfless respect r for a people sated with t agedy, painted symbols of W reconstruction and hope . rote Chilean Pablo “ r n Ne uda , An outer harsh grandeur, an i ner clear ul h The core of med ar fres ness . peasants of my country will detain their horses alongside the ’ r decorated school, and look long at Gue rero s u fig res , obscurely conscious of the secret roots , the hidden waters that link our nations under a ” vast continent . n i Before pai ting on it, Xavier observes an arch tecture with the same oriental minuteness with The n which he dissects a flower . standi g building nl of is , u ike its blueprint, a fragment a larger habitat, ruled remotely by sea, sun , and stars . The painter encourages natural phenomena to intrude upon his geometrical schemes and to propose Optical accidents that he will make his norms . Outside the Chillan school , a pool of water strews shivering slivers of sunlight through the windows and on a ceiling at certain hours of in the day . Guerrero slanted figures movement r the after thei diagonal play, in contrapunto to i im ceiling square . Th s obeisance paid to the r material is repaid when, every late afte noon, the

figures swim in reflected light . His other Chilean mural is inside a modern

as . hall, used a recreational club for workers A hirt man and woman , each over t y feet long, fill 1 51 walls whose strong inner slants join at the top in a in V barrel vault, where a child levitates zenithal

. o ava position Of a sustained, fruity g y pink, the is on fresco painted a mortar rich in cement, modeled in part with thin airbrushed films . The mood is one of lassitude after an exertion that may be work or war . Guerrero usually does not paint on a scale that fits exhibition walls,nor subjects flattering to a dr n ex eri period awi g room , and yet he has p mented - in small scale, subdued , non didactic , surprisingly intimate easel pictures that contrast t T with his public s yle . hese he paints in Duco costal de ixtle over , a local gunny sack that comes r of in graded textures , from the tough , hai y fiber the common magueye pulquero to the medium f roughness o the Yucatan hennequen. He coats the tu f tu coarse s f with a mix re of fine plaster, sulphur, zinc white , glue and varnish, that ll hardens with the paint to wa hardness . We learn from Guerrero how an Indian visual izes Indians , and that is not as plumed, chanting, n the danci g natives , caught by tourists ( be they foreigners or Mexican citizens ) disgorged by on one of motorcades a given village , on the day the year when it does not look or act like itself. i Xavier succeeds in paint ng silence and repose, n emi ent characteristics of his race , so forgotten n To by artists who specializ e in painti g Indians . of n open a vast store Ameri dian knowledge , he 1 52 needs but to close his eyes to disturbing exterior so spectacles , of which he has so often and force ul an f ly been actor, and let an ancestral voice T t so speak . hat his easel pic ures are surprisingly quiet proves that they are the unadulterated echo of such a wordl ess meditation; they do not “ attempt to put anything over . They are simply the essence of a nature more finely attuned than most to that which is of wide human worth in a r given heritage and locale . The deep root nurtu es t a calm blossom, like the black spears that s retch against a white moon in one of his finer flow er i f pieces . Far from model ng itsel after a Fenimore of Cooper yarn, the Indian art Xavier Guerrero treads on padded feline paws .

U T Y 14. R FINO AMA O

Twenty years ago a small group of Mexican i t artists , eschew ng the international s yle center

g in Paris, brought forth an essentially local

. in esthetic The travail entailed shows the results , in especially the murals frescoed the twenties . of The magnitude the areas covered, the scope of the heroic subject matter, bespeak a gigantism l wit that jarred certain sensibi ities . A Mexican “ 1924 Thi ness writes in , s itch to paint deca lo ues r g , t anscendental symbols , philosophical is concepts , revolutions and revelations , either ‘a Riverism joke or childish delusion . says I o n yearn for m numental painting, easel painti g is petty . I wish to brush great frescoes and leave ’ “ behind something to rival Michelangelo s Last of if r Judgment . What it the bou geois shrieks ’ if I get ruptured trying . Though a youthful prize-winner at the San 1918 Rufino Carlos Academy in , Tamayo came of 1926 age as a painter about , when the first energy r of the mural movement was al eady spent , when the u s some ears , sated with ro tine of pipe organ 155 1 56

s going full bla t, sighed for chamber music . He , of and others similar mind, witnessed with amused awareness the sport of fellow painters pushing Sisyphean rocks uphill . Surrounded by red banners , closed fists , open mouths, clanging was chains , and eviscerated money bags , it a most natural thing for the dissidents to rediscover ’ ‘ for themselves with delight l art pour l art with i its exquisite soul searching, and the aristocrat c monologue of a subconscious talking aloud to itself. s Indianism was a major note of the renai sance . dl Whatever his inclination, Tamayo could har y discard a racial heritage that was not for him a Hi o cerebral Option but a biological fact . s c l leagues had picked the most gigantic of antiq uities as touchstones against which to assess their muscles— the monolithic moon-goddess from r Teotihuacan , the geomet ic serpent heads dug up Coatlicue t in the Zocalo , the colossus girded wi h n snake rattles , displayi g baubles made of human n hands and hearts . But a whole valid vei of Mexi can art remained closed to the muralist intent on size and scope— the archaic terra cottas of people r making music , holding hands , giving bi th , de ’ i n lousing each other s manes , yet rema ni g minute pellets of clay stamped with the functional T thumbmark of the potter . amayo adopted them T as stylistic ancestors , and also the arascan fat s s t r men sculptured in ba eball attire, rai ing hei

1 58

— flowers and fruits again wax fruits this time . The early muralists had solved the relationship between local and international art by turning r thei backs on the School of Paris , on which most t s had been nur ured . Their hearts et on plastic amnit oratory in the grand manner, they felt an y with such old masters as Giotto and David , mas Of in n ters propaganda pai t, and could seek no compromise with the Parisian attitude that tabooed substantial themes as subject matter . For n T Tamayo o such harsh choice arises . here tw t is a kinship be een those he loves , gen le Indian “ ” l th e old masters and fo k artists , and brittle is masterpl eces of Dufy and Laurencin . In h early work, traditional Indian and modern Parisian styles coexist in peace , with an easy grace and an unassuming relaxat1on that contrast sharply with what is usually understood by Mexican style . While his fellow painters favored heroic themes , Tamayo chose humbler models . His early ll — sti lifes heap childish wonders mangoes, ice — cream cones , electric bulbs juggle with them for the sake of color in a palette not intended to be r soaked through the eye , but gustato y as it were , not in the esoteric sense suggested by Rimbaud , but as if the motor reflexes of childhood experi d ence remained miraculously alive . An ré Salmon holds that painters’ climates should be common : human currency, suggests the weather report 1 59 “ Today Tiepolo skies , tomorrow Rembrandt ” clouds . In turn , Tamayo greens and Tamayo n pi ks equate celestial pistachios and raspberries . one of Born to it, Tamayo is the few who can validly claim as his the picturesque subject mat f o t . W ter ropical Mexico ith postcard splendor, O axacanian r native markets display , besides thei colorful wares , bronzed Tehuana types with the - naked feet hugging ground , full pleated t skirts , embroidered blouses , na ural flowers

r . braided with thei hair Add palms and parrots , All varicolored houses , and mangy dogs . this ’ to subject matter is be found in the artist s work, but used with a tremulous sense of responsibility i to the rules of good taste and good painting . Th s race of women that started many an ethnologist babbling of a lost Atlantis roams through his

- n canvases as bell shaped pyramids , with a flari g starched ruffle at ground level weighing more heavily in the painter’ s hierarchy than the fea tureless heads . His curiosity clarifies the nameless shapes that peeling coats of paint produce on an The hot sun otherwise plain wall . is culled and sieved into color patterns that studiously avoid the rendering of scul ptural bulk . The tropical ” “ ” if scene is recreated if you wish, abstracted you want .

Artists are often tempted to play the Peter Pan , inertia suggesting caroling and carousing in col En legiate fashion as an easy way to grow up . 1 60 dowed with a personal style, shown and sold by New York dealers who appreciate the affinity of c of between his vision and that the S hool Paris , Tamayo could have hardened his early success into the mold of a well balanced formula : enough r u sophistication to int ig e the layman, with e enough naivet to delight sophisticates . NO evolu such fate awaits this painter, whose tion steers its able course equally far from the somersault turned stale and from the paunch i grown at the Academy . A break in style , esthet c edimento mea cul a in p or plastic p , is nowhere f w evidence , and yet the di ference bet een the early and present work is emphatic . A change of of psychological approach signals a shift seasons , as the slow summer fullness of maturity takes its hold . The long residence of Tamayo in New York results paradoxically in a depurated inner com The f of . prehension, a si ting racial quintessence picturesque allusions in modern guise that his to northern public had come to expect, the y ll t shapes , the candy hues , fa short of his new urge whose far-flung motors feed on more dis t n e quieting s rai s . Distortions of the human figur are no longer meant for purposes of wit— as -fid of plastic puns . They are bona e distortions ’ ’ passion . While Greco s mark holiness , Tamayo s ’ ’ liberties with man s frame suggest a ripper s sur or gery , the craft of the Mexican village witch baking bits of hair and nail filings from the in

1 62

’ and the Artist the group representing Nature is composed of five figures the figure of

Nature is of heroic size . It has four breasts and of r lies in an attitude su render, to symbolize c abundance and generosity . From the ro ks there springs a blue female figure from whose f hi hands flows a stream o water . T s figure sym ol b iz es Water . Above Water is a male figure in red, symbolizing Fire . Another female

figure, coffee colored and representing Earth is represented as holding in its arms the figure t in r of Na ure, to show that it is the Ea th that we se ur i e Nat e in all her magn ficence . At the right a blue male figure represents Air. The whole group is capped by a rainbow which sym

bolizes of n . Color, the basic element painti g “ Another male figure represents the Artist en gaged in producing the Work of Art betw een the Artist and the group representing Nature there are a lyre and a compass , to show that the t Artist, when he looks at Na ure in search of plas so hr tic elements , should do t ough the medium of poetry and knowledge This description may conjure up for those who have not seen the actual wall , ladies in Greek l vei s toying with operatic accessories , such as a ’ seventeenth- century peintre d histoire bent on moralizing could have conceived . The chosen subject implies the representation of three differ ent t : degrees of reali y the artist, his vision, the 1 63 d work of art, in decreasing or er . Such a program l wou d tax even a realistic painter, though he could lavish on the figure of the artist all the tricks of his trade and taper toward lesser real i m s . Tamayo manages to carry his complex pro gram to completion without once falling into e photographic vernacular , as he doses with saga of ity diverse degrees abstraction . In the microcosm that the artist orders to taste on 400 those square feet of wall, geometry rates — over anatomy shapes elbows , knees, and should ers after the rigid fancy of ruler and compass . k Bodies as we now them are done violence to , breasts are multiplied, fingernails swell to the of size heads , heads shrink to thumbnail size while prismatic hues sally forth out of the rain bow z ou n r or for , sei e any ski as thei prey , fight possession in a piebald melee . While Nature 13 g1ven true weight and a r sculptural mass , Fi e and Air remain buoyant, their two -way traflic streaking diagonally the

- dense earth colored sky . Patches of brown on ’ n blue mark Water s subterranean origi . Earth emerges between the mountainous hip of Nature and the prismatic fluorescence of the rainbow,

- c like a star nosed mole, claws lamped at the egress from its shaft, as it senses the unwanted

- sky . Observing this semi abstract vision from the t in side , the painted painter abs racts it further a geometric scheme that deliberately sheds what 1 64

ll the ul sti clings to model of b k, weight, texture, and story-telling Style shifts by imponderable transitions from the massive Nature born out of n the steaming Mexican loam, to the i ternational n style in which the artist is worki g . its z o In spite of si e , its brilliancy, its el quence , this fresco affects the observer more through the handling of the brush than through its intellec t ual planning . One is prone to overlook the didactic purpose and to relish instead modul a

‘ t l t from red ions of color, especia ly hose passages hr hr cul ochre t ough darker oc es to burnt cork , a min ting in the figure of Earth . ’ This huge mural shoul d put Tamayo s mind at rest as to his a bility to produce the kind of full throated pipe-organ music that he questioned twenty years ago . It should not make us forget his other, major claim , staked in more recondite grounds of Mexican esthetics with those easel t s r i the pic ure that st ike two contrast ng chords, white magic of his early toyland and the brown f t magic o his ma urity.

ETO 15 . LOLA C U

The Tapestries

To appreci ate the needl ework . panels of Lola no Cueto , other effort is needed than to open our eyes and let them be saturated with the flow of n colors and nourished o the wisdom of designs .

- n n The patient, countless bee pricks of her k owi g needl e imply in their minutiae no smallness of of - heart . What stroke pigment loaded brush could compete with the variety of this magic petit-point in which the thread streams around c form and spa e with liquid ease, or forcefully breaks its rhythms against their outlined bound aries? This technique is a natural one to match r spi itual expression , wherein the thread is pres so ent, not much in its physical concreteness , as in its function as a snare to hold and to hoard to im light, and master its prism in the same palpable way that a copper wire curbs and channels electricity . The artist has pitted her unique technique n against another, older one , whose pri ciple is of the also that ensnaring light, the technique of stained glass in medieval windows . Her set of 167 1 68 panels embroidered after Biblical histories from r is n s Cha tres far from bei g slavish recon truction . What she brings to the fore may lack archaeologi tu ns cal pulchri de, but stresses heroic i piration . Rather than adhering to the letter of line and sun color, she evokes the spirit, that is , the rays that transform each chunk of colored glass into

i ni . l a chromat c u verse She te ls how each blue, c transfixed by sunlight, ranges from erulean to an Ul tramarine so saturated that it bleeds with

- carmine overtones; how the play of each red is from the shade of a faded rose petal to a hue so s deep as to become colorless , the same colorle s ’ ness that dyes the ocean s depths .

Truly a feast for the eye, these embroideries rt also reach further than the senses , even fu her than would a quest for objective beauty or for for subjective exaltation . The concept Of art art remained unknown to the artisans that built the cathedrals . Glass and lead, the stones used in

n . buildi g, all were respected servants of theology The stories that art told were meant to touch and to edify even the smallest or the roughest of W art ro a pilgrims . hen we refer today to as p p of a ganda , we think closed fists and red b nners , e hi t forg tting that other kind w ch, for cen uries , disseminated the lessons of martyrdoms and miracles . i in t In the t me we live , many a Ca holic, how ever heroic he may happen to be in his personal

1 70

idle pastime , but represented an earnest search , t at times stuttering, at imes disoriented, as has always been the way with genuine discoverers . mill eniums r For two , the Chu ch has managed

- an understanding of art and of art makers . r t and Th oughout, she has mo hered the slow con tinuous transformation of style that parallels cul tural changes . God has been served by artists who worked in styles as dissimilar as those of r of Byzantium and Cha tres , Raphael, of Cabrera in orou and Rouaul t . It is only our day that a tirn s critical approach attempts to deny this unity clothed in diversity, and would impose as the only Catholic art a synthesis of mediocre traits

filched out Of context from the arts of the past . Blending a modern approach with a true t understanding of ancient models , his show is proof that Catholic art is alive enough to make impossible the task of those who wish to force it

of . into the narrow mold naturalism Anyhow , in th e in religious paint g, whose role is to make visible visible , is the genre least suited to such a form . t of a Besides her tapes ry versions stained gl ss , Lola Cueto presents an original composition dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe . On this day— the Feast of the Indian Virgin— w e artists should apprehend with devotion the lesson taught by the miraculous image . Its esthetic , n t so conceived in Heaven , in its li ear puri y close 1 71 to geometry , in its flat hues so delicate and yet so h pure, has little in common wit photographic and realism, even less with the lessons taught in art academies .

The Cut-out Papers

Since Lao-Tse stated that the most active part of the wheel is its hub , made to receive the axle , a philosophy of the vacuum has underlined the fact that it is not only by addition that things and people are bettered, but often by subtraction . The extra matter flung from the matrix block transforms the raw stone into a statue; Diogenes is enriched the moment he throws away his n is wooden drinki g bowl . This notion in harmony mores the with the of Mexican artist, in a land where the uses of art are as widespread as those of - bread, where art making is not the privilege f f o the few but the birthright O all . While only a few can afford expensive mate it z rials , is generally recogni ed that art value does not depend on the rarity of the original material . What humbler material than paper? And to sub tract from it should make it still humbler— and yet what splendid results' r the For the t ue artist , pleasure of art resides in its making . Its permanency , its appreciation i in — all for generations , its enshrin ng a museum 1 72

n do are very good, but have nothi g to with the x rt creativeness, with one lu ury that the a ist : - n knows art maki g, that is both a collaboration his The tt with and a mastering of material . bri le ness of paper is not easier to master than the ” i hardness of marble . It may be the Asiatic stra n latent in the Indian race that made the native on artist try his hand paper, as the Persian war scirnitar on rior essayed his a floating feather . Also Oriental and Am erindian is the resigned n i of understandi g that, t me being short eternity, a work of art made to last a day is not much more ephemeral than one created to last for centuries . Codices have preserved the features of pre

Hispanic arts that were not made to last . To play its role in lay and religious feasts , a paper made of agave fiber was dyed and cut into fringes and de luxe rosettes , as splendid for a day as head dresses and standards; its garlands beautified temple and palace .

Come Colonial days , paper vies with lace to ornament churches . Impoverished by the Con quest, Indian master hands turn forever from the shaping of gold and of quetzal feathers to that of the humble paper, with as great a creativeness . Today paper has an important place in folk - ll art . There are pre Hispanic survivals . In vi ages paper is still made from the fibers of traditional ' local plants , its use limited now to sorcery and

- agrarian incantations . Cut out silhouettes of gods

Lola Cueto 1 75

in i s r t are buried the soil to n u e its fertili y . Other t the n cut papers , on display, add beau y to openi g ul ueria of a p q , or, made into fringes and flowers , ll fill wi be stretched from house to house, often ing the air over a whole village to celebrate the visit of a famed religious statue to the local the shrine , or even homecoming of a politician . The cut- outs of Lola Cueto are a valid quintes sence of the ancient art traditions which have

- merged into folk forms . Paradoxically , the mosaic of colored papers is made into the solid expres sion of Mexican modes . The grave religious im at of ages , the kneeling devout the feet a scourged Christ , remind one also of the Mayan reliefs , in which the pagan faithful perform in ir blood rites . The hieratic Virgins , stiff the il r brocaded robes , fac itated the religious t ansi tion long ago by their imitation in shape of ancient teocalis. Lola Cueto preserves a deep understanding of what constitutes the essence of each medium when she transfers to cut-out papers the stylized birds that nestle in the leaves of Michoacan lacquers , or the popular engravings of Posada, which range in mood from a comical tourist whose umbrella is no defense against a Mexican r bull to sensational dramas in which teeth, hea ts , and machetes are bared . The last show of Lola Cueto was that of her edl t ne ework , tapes ries of rich and heavy material 1 76 competing in splendor with stained-glass win dows . The versatile artist turns to the humbler paper cut- out as one relishes a glass of water

too . as in after rich fare Her pictures , light weight as they are heavy with tradition, preserve for a t all mOre while childish enchan ments , the ex quisite for eschewing - the permanency that marbles and bronzes rarely deserve .

The Etchings It is often stated that art must confine itself to the esthetic realm; that to make it serve other ends is to drag it down from its high pedestal .

Do we forget that, once upon a time, art was ’ an indispensable accessory of everyone s life , and especially the graphic arts? Woodcuts and metal ’

n edified . engravi gs instructed, or amused Art s main worth was its helpfulness to the people at large as it spread its delights and furthere d prao tical or pious knowledge . An exception to this commonsense attitude was the di e etching me um , whose physical blandn ss could hardly resist the pressure from the pres virt needed to print trade editions . Making a ue the r of necessity, etching came to play aristoc at

. To among other, tougher mediums this day, it is the darling of collectors and the prize of mu e scums . Its weakness has b come its pride, and

1 79 what few good proofs can be pulled from a plate ’ soon disappear in collectors portfolios to be r ai ed only on counted occasions . in r t Thus , it was fated that etchers thei urn , catering to the elegant and somewhat melancholy of r reputation thei medium , would adopt for r - of thei subject matter models equal refinement, and display flourishes of technique much in de

- mand from their over specialized public . The theologians of Old assigned a guardian angel to each nation . If we postulate in turn a guardian t angel for each technique, we may well pi y the one to assigned etching, closeted for ages with of artists most conscious being artists , familiar ized with distraction by the schemes of dealers and the feuds of collectors who love rarity above t i of beau y, its flight jailed with n the confines c the estheti and the exquisite . Doubtless , after s set peru ing this refreshing of etchings , both i c l wise and nno ent, this angel wi l smack a hearty r kiss on the cheek of thei maker, as the Sleeping Be auty did when the hero awakened her' These plates attain to art all the better in that they were conceived without thought of T making art . heir aim is to translate faithfully and respectfully the appearance and essence of n r these ti y const uctions of rag, clay, wire and cardboard; these statuettes whose worth in terms of material does not exceed a few cents; whose style was never described in art encylopedias; 1 80

whose destination , once their stage days are over, is not the showcase of a museum, but organic n disintegration . Bei g alive like us , the puppet is l m no more bui t to resist ti e than we are, and its motley parts last no longer than our own flesh and bones . n r The etched li e is thin as a spider th ead, and like it weaves webs paradoxically strong . Lola t gives to her puppets the digni y Of monuments . h of s z Through her eyes , we see t em as heroic i e, worthy of being raised on pedestals where they would, in truth, look better than many a one r among thei big brothers . Lola’s line captures so successfully both space i and volume, that the aquat nt washes limit them selves to suggestions of loCal color; the kind of unabashed color that raises the puppet from the status of statue to that of a living being . The many grays of the aquatint function as the rungs ’ o f this Jacob s ladder that bridges black to white, and evoke besides prismatic contrasts that range from lime green to magenta dye . To reach those eyes that miss the magical dd chromas latent in the range of grays , Lola a s to some of her prints hand-painted touches of - so in th e water color . In do g she breaks rule of purity of medium held dear by etching-lovers; she also intensifies the spirit of play and further cleanses these charming plates from the stigma of art for art.

THE T 16 . LI HOGRAPHS OF ALFREDO ZALCE

r nor Try as they may, neither a chaeologist eth nologist has pinned down by statistics of factual tu minutiae the spiri al complexities of the Mayan , as intricate as his own jungle flora and fauna . Zalce In this album , Alfredo , in true artist the fashion, does what scientist fails to do , recon structs whole breath-taking vistas from the one legible modern glyph, the Indian body, naked or or swathed in white , busy at rustic activities relaxed in rustic leisure . mill emum Dating from another , Yucatecan has- reliefs embody an ideal plastic concept as far abstracted from realism as the Greek . Eagle -in w noses , caved foreheads , skulls shot back ards , bulging eyes— the ingredients of Mayan beauty while they seem strange to the lover of classical - t art, please the modernist, hell bent on es hetic deformations . The scenes sculptured and frescoed on ancient monuments are enacted daily in Indian huts and

- Indian fields . In Chichen Itza , in the Court of T a the hous nd Columns , a stuccoed name glyph 1 84 shows a hand kneading dough over a stone of - metate . In nearby huts twig woven walls and t n hatched with palms , livi g hands perform the n n same task daily, their cinnamo arms issui g of hui il from the short sleeve the p , immemorial raiment of the land, white square blouse loose over a loose white square skirt— a costume that removes the female body from the indiscretions of artistic anatomy into the severe realm of geo

“ c . ll t metri al forms In no sense a fri , Indian beau y of — t exists in terms function as when the mo her, i n sub a few weeks after g vi g birth, offers her stantial for l hip the infant to ride ceremonial y, as an initiation into childhood . The traveler that brands as lazy the plateau n hi Indian , squatting with his k ees to his c n, - sara e bundled block like in his p , may also wish - a to pep up the bush born Mayan, long and le n of u muscled , elegant to the point ambig ousness , who moves in a slow motion synchronized with the lazy rhythm of hammocks rocked by the one u motor of big toe , alone watchf l in a siesta r i relaxed body . Yet the stone platfo ms on wh ch the temples sit, as large as modern city blocks , pyramids that raise to skyscraper heights the t frescoed altar rooms , were put toge her by men like the Mayan stone mason whom I watched flat- once , lifting a heavy block to a shaped fore head with misleading languor . f Zalce In this album , Al redo also does what

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r sun mounds d ying under a zenithal , starched huipils in the white heat of noon— gather enough gray between scratched lights to make clear that ’ the lithographer s goal is no t at all that of repro ducin r n of its g the t opical shee , nor duplicating gamut of leaf greens against strong magentas , even though he succeeds in doing this en passant .

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of the celos , then President University and later of Secretary Education , commissioned Roberto Montenegro and Xavier Guerrero to decorate the of walls the former church of San Pedro y Pablo . the i Painted in tempera, mural extends charm ng ' garlands of stylized birds and flowers over arches “ ” and pilasters . Rivera called it potted rather than painted, as the scheme leans to the curlicues found on much Mexican pottery . Diego Rivera returned to the patria inJ ul y

1921 . Painted in encaustic, patterned after the i c Byzant ne mosai s he had admired in Italy, his

first mural was completed by March 1923 . 1922 In May , Lombardo Toledano , Director of the Escuela Preparatoria and future labor leader, commissioned a group of younger men , C ahero de la Canal , Revueltas , Leal, , myself, to h hero t e . Ca paint murals in school That Of , an encaustic , and mine , a fresco , were completed o by the end f 1922 . 1922 In September , de la Cueva and Siqueiros Si uel ros set arrived from Europe . q to work in r of c the same stai case the same s hool, beginning

in to c . to paint encaustic , later switching fres o 1923 In July , Orozco began his first mural , a t fresco , on the walls of the main patio . Bo h works were violently brought to a halt by an uprising of students in June 1924 that left them stoned and mutilated . The brand new Ministry of Education was 1 91 turned over to the artists in March 1923; Rivera was ordered to paint the first court, while de la

Cueva , Guerrero , and myself were given the second court to decorate , a first try at communal

t Wi h an urge to brush time against the grain, I revisited the buildings where the movement

e . n start d To poi t the changes , this short survey describes the present state of the walls painted w t over t enty years ago, contrasting hem with l the latest crop of murals , mostly sti l in the mak — ing in the winter of 1945 46.

San Pedro y Pablo , dedicated by Vasconcelos n as a public hall , has been transformed agai , this s time into a public library . Thi new function has blocked the decorative wall s of the nave with tiers of bookcases and superimposed balconies of dark wood that slice the verticality of the polychrome columns , still rich with garlands of r cornfl ow ers pomegranates , bluebi ds , blackbirds , , and camellias . The ' workshop of the mural group was the cubicle of the back of the auditorium of the

Preparatoria . On the low thick round columns , patches of discoloration on the gray stone still mark the spots where our first fresco trials were ’ in the i made 1922 . In auditor um proper Rivera s “ ” fi a rst mural , Creation, is sc rcely any longer a truthful witness of the seething élan that saw it The t born . distinguished geome ric planning is 1 92

w ax x t still perceived, but the mi ed wi h the pig has i in ment opaqued, dull ng the once tense chromas . r fu The Orozco patio is of cou se beauti l , only it seems that time has frozen to a stop what once tu had depth and movement . To recap re the thrill n one of the work in the maki g, should be able to discern under a mortar become translucent the layers Of superimposed subjects that suc c eeded each other on the same stretch of wall the as the artist worked, wrecked work, and

“ on the tried again , bent an expedition to reach ’ “ ” to on or o f Th th is d style . Only e Strike obeys e rules of a plastic palimpsest, disclosing over the red banner held by two workers a fragment of the earlier theme , the giant head of the destroyed “ r Ch ist Burning His Cross . t Going up the main stairs , I pass the fresco hat I painted there twenty -four years ago; I can Obectivel m look at it y as it is not mine any ore, but rather the work of an adolescent who dreamt the tt of Ucello long and deep before ba lepiece , hidden at the time in the small room where Italian primitives were side- tracked by curators

of r . the Louvre , who far preferred Ca lo Dolci The for the fresco is intact, except exertions r of unkind students . The light washes and rese ves of white mortar proved too much of a tempta tion to scribblers . A generous quota of mustaches and eyeglasses has been added to faces; the

1 94 change will negate originally correc t formul a tions of scale and color. “ i ala mode The ground floor frescoes , pa nted ” Teotihuacana — n , by Rivera brushi g pigment mixed with nopal juice on a thin film of pure lime— have suffered from this unusual technical departure . The sand packed underneath has of burst through the film painted lime, each grain ul leaving a microscopic patch of white . As a res t, the early Tehuantepec and mining scenes fade of n as if seen through a thickness traci g paper . The Corrido on later series the top floor, done in the sounder Italian medium , have suffered in kn t The turn from the wea ess of the architec ure . walls are rent with cracks that also split apart the painted personages . To add confusion, each c is cra k scientifically recorded , bridged by dated ur paper stickers , some already b st as the cracks widen .

- dl These walls have also met with doo ers ,

- b e . 0 would wits , and plain defacers A cr p of scratched - in swastikas answers the painted crop of red stars; jokes of the privy type thrive on nude allegories . to The second patio , originally given Amado de la Cueva , Xavier Guerrero and myself for a

first attempt at communal painting, is crammed

“ with building material , just as it was when we were at work . Scaffolds sprout from eviscerated etates floors , planks , crates , and rolls of p pile 1 95

high against the frescoes . I rather liked the im plic ation : people feel more concern for a near

future than an academic interest in the near past . the And, at least day I was there , not a sight e se r besides myself . of Among the plentiful crop new murals , those zc of Oro o , Rivera,and Siqueiros can be singled k out, their names being best nown in the United

States . In Boston the Lowells talk to the Cabots and “ ” L s tres ra . o ndes they only to God In Mexico , g scream at the top of their lungs in a contest to see the which can outshout the others , in three tt neighbouring panels that fate , or a wi y sponsor, commissioned for the Palacio de Bellas Artes . This execrable building put all three in bad

. r artnouveau humor A polych ome interior, with enameled . orange c upolas and peacock blue sky it lights , reeks of the blatant assertions of world fairs long ago sold to the wreckers . The building c offers only cramped mural spa e , behind pilasters ’

c . and bal onies , finely visible only at arm s length

Ciceroni lie in ambush before the murals , tempting the tourist with chairs strategically fac ing the wall and a memorized patter . Favorite of is the Rivera , a shrunken replica the destroyed of Radio City Fresco , in front which the New

York scandal is rehashed . The many careful s t portrait , pyramiding like apples on a ray, the skimpy bodies hiding behind loquacious 1 96

r of t st eamers and slogans , remind one nineteen h tu i cen ry French political cartoon ng . Despite the i size , the craft remains exqu site . In a public on u lecture held the premises this past Aug st, Rivera disclosed to his baffled audience that the panel contains a detailed prophecy of atomic

. of u power As to frescoes his colleag es , not deny r t z ing thei artistry, he dismissed hat of Oro co as representing “men without shirts clubbing men “ of r with shirts , and that Siquei os , Democracy of one Breaking the Chains Fascism , as giant commonplac e . ’ The bulk of O rozco s mural work is to be seen f o . The in Guadalajara, capital his native state major ensemble is that of the ancient H ospicio; the robust architecture cringes from his brush l as from an earthquake . From the cupola fal s a

flaming cadaver Prometheus or Icarus . On the vault, a colossal Cortez embodies mechanical ll i war and conquest, on the wa s savage redsk ns z and mechani ed robots pound the ground , gray monochromes more blatant than flags . In twin - t a tu half lune tes , c ravels glide over a rquoise ocean , blown by an unearthly wind towards the black void ahead . This terrifying sermon addresses itself para doxically to the only lodgers on the giant prem ises - r , state endowed o phan children who pay no heed to the loud Cassandra , but instead lazily people the old patio , pile pebbles , chew fingers ,

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r of c In the stai case the same pala e , painted a o the in over a decade g , artist modeled black before applying the local color; now the film of gray comes through to disturb the polychrome balance . Today Diego Rivera paints . with pure color, the transparent washes made more intense c on as the mortar hardens to marble white . For of trast , the high dado the new work is of cement t n of a normal put y value, pai ted with mono r as- ch ome false h reliefs . What Rivera is painting in the National Palace c keeps the ar heologists breathless . The first two tu of re panels relate to archaic cul res , whose mains the painter has a copious collection, pre c c u ferring them to the Sophisti ated Mayan ult re , and to the later socially stiffened theocracies of the Mexican plateau . r - Just finished, the thi d panel , breath taking in c its s ope , effects the resurrection of the mer chants and buyers who thronged the market of Tlatelolco , after data furnished by recent excava tions of the site . The background is a panorama of - the pre Hispanic capital , based on aerial pho to ra hs of t g p the modern ci y , so close is the iden tity of plans from a height where a church can not be told from the pagan temple it supplanted, nor a main artery from the antique waterway . A motley crowd mill s in front of the risen c Teno htitlan , herb merchants , dog butchers , itu witch doctors , tattooed prost tes and cannibal 1 99

l - priests . Lower stil , at our eye level and most of in exquisite all treatment, are tiny objects and of shreds refuse that litter the foreground, bit out ten, spat and trampled fruit pulp , a toy clay do nl u se g on wheels , the o y known for this device t - i z in an o herwise wheel less civ li ation . Rivera is so bent on completing his record of

- Mexican history, that story telling has no more plastic terrors in store for him . Paris may frown ff on his present work, sophisticates sni at its -of- of matter fact craft, fans abstraction sneer that photography is just around the corner . Rivera doggedl y pursues his way to a conclusion that may mean a truly American style . Siqueiros has published much of late; his opinions may be summed up by the statement that murals are closer to moving pictures than to easel painting . While the latter presumes a n l -of- of si g e point view, films move in front an l immobi e onlooker, and murals , though immo

in . T bile, attract a spectator motion hus , the idea that the mural is serf to architecture is re placed by that of the mural as a dynamic unit that forcefully provides itself with room in its otherwise inert habitat . Siqueiros is practising his theories in the f l n . o Treasury Bui di g In spite its moneyed title , old n it is an colo ial palace, of a stylistic simplicity that borders on the primitive with marks of a - The soothing laissez faire everyw here . painter 200 has fallen heir to a vaul ted ceiling between two t t in in open cour yards , curved bo h width and i length, that promises perspective deformat ons t in aplen y, to be countered by draw g deforma The tw - tions . o end walls are V shaped to fit a r floor plan that is a maze of diagonals , a stai case with ninety-degree turns and bifurcating slopes that blur both plumb and level . The plan lends itself ideally to further twisting and the optical ’ ill usions that are the means of Siqueiros modern baroque .

At this stage, the walls are upholstered with e too celot x, rough side outwards , none rough for r i the rough t eatment st ll to come . A small model that duplicates in scale the complexities of the architecture is painted concurrently with the — mural added to , subtracted from , complete one day and whitewashed the next, in accord with a pioneering Optical research that recognizes no e precedent . A rickety ladder tak s one to just nk under the high ceiling, to a false floor of pla s so widely spaced that a body might easily fall betw een them to certain mairning on the stone dvan r . a stai case , way below A device with two l tages , it a lows the daylight to filter in from underneath and keeps out chicken-hearted ad mirers after their first visit. Siqueiros does not use the much advertised

Duco anymore . A need for authentically mat sur i z faces , essent al to the great si e and double cur

202

nl t taken for granted, u ess hey be by foreigners , dl as in the case of George Bid e, whose new fresco in the Supreme Court Building has raised The f an animated controversy . rediscovery o the mid-nineteenth century muralist Juan Cordero also has aroused much comment . A show of his easel work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes led to a reappraisal of his tempera murals in the of n churches the capital, pai ted with zest on walls and cupolas as large as those painted

. m today Like all i portant work, that of Cordero

“ divided the critics . Rivera championed it in a t public lec ure, while Siqueiros attacked it in t magazine art icles . The fact remains hat his work bridges with honor one of the weakest moments of n 0 Mexican tradition, when the mag ificent cr p of t colonial murals had long been ga hered in , and the modern renaissance was not foreseen . T r hus , adding a new st atum of murals to an sum already substantial of works , this year adds also to the woes of critics who think it is high m for so ti e the renaissance to stay put, as to give them a chance to utter definitive estimates .

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beneficent nfl had also its i uence . The sculptors of the Northwest boomed into a renaissance with the importation Of metal tools; to the paleface the plains hunter owes his horse, the forest i Indian his beadwork, the Navajo his s lver smithing . That a museum dedicated to modern art stages is z this show no hapha ard event, for Indian crafts are one of the sources of our own modern style . Amédée z O enfant, whom I met at the Opening, suggested mischievously that Indians were imi tating Picasso; but it is a fac t that Chilkat blan kets were admired by early Cubists as the living tradition onto which their own plastic inven l s i tions were grafted, whi e the di torted sp rit of c in masks the Eskimos , con eived in Visions duced or r by fasting by d ugs , receive today the of praise orthodox surrealists . The élite of each succeeding generation may flirt with what in the vast and complex body of aboriginal art approxi of the mates most its fancy day, yet, at its best, it far transcends such modish standards . our As is the case in own art history, where ? the golden age lies in the past, Indian Michel angelos have long been dead . Unlike its modern r of counterpart, st uggling in a morass folklore , pre—historic Indian sculpture exhibits a beauty of form strikingly set forth against an unfocused background of ritual pageants that no explorer in of scooped . Its might is at its best the group 207 eastern pipes for the most part made from in hardened clay, a material that suggests spite of direct carving the caress of the modeling

t . on humb Some artists , relying texture and geo of metric shape alone , root the cylinder the bowl into the leaf shape of the stem at an angle evolved through centuries of use; such speci mens match in their functional purity that other great civil ized achievement— an English briar For n pipe . those less puristically incli ed, pipes adorned with animal shapes combine uniquely the observed vivaciousness of animal life , the t of Egyptian digni y monolithic masses , with de of n in tails mi ute refinement; for example , the terplay of crossed wing tips and tail feathers on of the back of a crested duck, or the wet ripple muscles on the otter catching its prey . ’ For the -critic who can measure an artist s size as - only he matches his skill, Greek like , against the proportions of the human body, a pipe from Adena Mound erects a chanting warrior whose eight inches of height have been enl arged by the impresario of the show into a photo -mural z com of heroic si e , without losing a mite of its pact humanness . A Mexican influence has been for of advanced this piece , but it shows none the loss of power that provincial art is bound to show , so far from its center of civilization . All Indian fine arts came into being as side of l one os products some uti itarian instinct , if p 208 tulates n the practical validity of religious insti ct . Owing to this lack of cleavage between fine and dr m applied arts , one is agged i perceptibly in this exhibition from the consideration of the sub m to - i li e a limbo of moose ha r embroidery, porcu - ll pine qui mosaics , ribbon appliqué, that prove ’ the squaw a potential subscriber to the Ladies H ome C ompanion. Indian artists have an amphibian gift of mov ing at ease among abstract as well as realistic

. fide pursuits In its rare bona examples, realism or is used for purposes of farce, fable, history, but most often is a not undignified pandering of e to the taste the paleface . Obj cts classed by our standards as great examples of Indian art the bear woman suckling her child , the mask of n n - — a maiden, the danci g medici e man were pot boilers in the eyes of their makers . The deepest the u thrust of the Indian mind , lang age it chooses to exalt its clan pride, wield magic or the of power, address gods , is the language abstract art : thus the Zuni amuse their children with dolls that are acceptable sculptures by our a ds ul m r stand r , while the fearf i age of thei war god is hewn in such austere primitive style that we despise it as childish; the Eskimo humors his baby with teething-toys that we treasure as r ivo y statuettes , while his religious masks , carved to t perpetuate lof y visions , remain for us shape less .

21 0 obtained between objective conventions and the of n personal quota i dividual genius , mark the attitude of the Indian artist as one of classical integrity . It is on such a plane that this show hear r 0 may valid f uits , rather than in a , sh p window revival of feather-work and leather tooling . Though the choice of individual specimens is t impeccable, one would wish to admire wi h more confidence the murals from Aw atovi; the original h K fragment ex ibited, as sensitive as a Paul lee, does not jibe with the cocksureness of the restoration . The show is staged with ingratiating versatil it if the y, even inverted lighting increases Hal ’ low e en l t note of the col ection of masks , ra her than furthers an understanding of their beautiful carving . While most will justly delight in the t surprises strewn in their path, the serious s udent may grumble a bit as he is made to grope his

- way through dim lit detours . But serious students have already visited the Museum of Natural His tory and the Heye Museum of the American r x Indian , where many of the t easures e hibited r here managed, up to now, to escape popula

adulation .

21 4

For a better understanding and enjoyment of n prints , one must take exception to a certai con cept of fine prints that parallels in the graphic field the apocryphal golden legend concerning “ of the sacredness the Old Masters . Far from being that of building Chinese walls to protect of fine prints from the people, the task the ex pert should be to bring both together . Before one writing about such a show, should pledge oneself anew to a truth which so much special ized literature about prints has obscured : It is self-evident that the essence of the graphic arts t rt of n is his prope y of spawning, multiplyi g, and thus of pulling down the barriers of rarity and expensiveness that stand between the everyday n u man and art originals . Such a postulate i f ri ates in its simplicity a c ertain type of print- lover who shares with the hoarder of postage stamps a belief in the mysterious qualities inherent in

r . ra ity Fineness , an imponderable that remains fo essential rart enjoyment , is in no way impaired by multiplication; only the price the art object

ll r t . wi fetch, only its desi abili y for collectors Meanwhile its enjoyment spreads until it at last hoi olloi reaches p , a fate observed with mental reservations by those who hold art to be a proper pursuit only for an elite , and with joy by those others who deem art to be as useful and bene ficial as bread, not to be taxed or denied to the many . 21 5 Before the advent of photography and photo e in ngraving relatively modern times, all prints the t were technically fine prints , in sense hat a hand- made design had been cut or engraved d or rawn on wood or metal or stone . The topical vignette published with st0 p -press speed in a nineteenth-century magazine barely a week after ’ the — a dis event the siege of town , the queen s the of placements , arrival foreign ambassadors - - i was hand drawn and hand cut, ndistinguishable, so far as the irnpeccability of its autography is r of conce ned, from the woodcuts Holbein and

Diirer. The distinction could not then be made that is now drawn between newspaper and magazine illustrations on the one hand and fine prints on l introduc the other, as it is based who ly on the of tion _ photography somewhere in the process The ll of of reproduction . co ector fine prints had no other valid touchstone than quality to sepa rate the fine art sheep from the commercial art goats . And it would hardly have proved safe a m le to attempt judgment by a simple of thumb , “ ” r n t by t easuri g idle art, done with s rict sub ectiveness in t j the confines of a s udio, and reject n ing that other ki d of graphic art, commissioned to quench the curiosity of magazine subscribers ’ as to how many horses dragged the queen s he c . t arriage, or how Malakoff fell For among -flun tt or hack draftsmen sent to far g ba lefields , 21 6 grinding out cartoons week after week— and grinding their own lithographic stones also there happened to be some of the t0 pfiight art ists of r — thei epoch Daumier, Constantin Guys W Es in Europe, inslow Homer and Constantino

. the of i calante in America After passage t me , with the pressure of publication wiped away and deadlines long since erased, with the topics that were once the toast of the day forgotten, the residue of art in these topical prints vies for beauty with the subjective Biblical musings of

Rembrandt, or with the no less subjective pastime exercises of the aged and half blind Goya in n Bordeaux when, proppi g a litho stone on an on t easel , he smudged it, wi h the aid of a mag nif in as y g glass , bulls as live those other Spanish

“ bulls also smudged on stone in the caves of

Altamira . The one graphic field where photography was bound to supplant the hand- made product was that of reproductions meant to multiply the sem blance of famous or salable works . Unswayed un by emotion, the camera performs a job of n doubted authenticity; and yet, when genui e of artists deserted the field reproductive prints , we lost a chance at seeing the work of one master filtered through another trained eye . When the Kings of Spain commissioned Goya of a to engrave the masterpieces Vel squez, they acted like Museum curators bent on procuring

21 8

of art not thought as anymore . Its prints, left ’ of r a an to the small mercies child en s h nds, st i ed, r to n , and thrown away as rubbish, are fated to ’ turn into collector s items , like the medieval woodblocks and blockbooks that were also once hl much in demand and thoroug y consumed, both t nl spiri ually and physically . O y a ruling on the ’ fact that Herrim an s pen- and-ink originals were mul tiplied by a photo- engraving process coul d keep his oeuvre out of this show; for included in the definition of what constitutes a fine print is - - n that it should be hand cut and hand pri ted . our So let us raise an eyebrow at cartoons , coun ’ try s most live expression of the art of black-and white; let us attempt to interpose the flaming “ ” sword of Fine Art between Krazy Kat and immortality . Photography withered a whole generation of reproductive engravers and snapped the raison ’ d étre of graphic mediums that brought a dignity and autographic purity even to the meanest

- z of . maga ine the pre camera era But also , by an automatic shift of gravity that coul d be trans of n lated into an esthetic law compensatio , photography itself became in turn an imposing n new branch of the graphic arts . In its combi a of t tr tion factual veracity , s rict chemis y and aus e ter palette, photography is well suited to the idiosyncrasies of the American approach . Its few masters could hardly be omitted from this show . 21 9

t However , a cautious criterion allo ted their so works only antechamber space , to speak , for they lack the doubtful blessing of . being hand drawn .

Having shoved into exterior darkness , because they either are not drawn or else not cut by manifes hand, important and peculiarly modern tations of the graphic arts understood in their e wid r sense , this show features prints hand

- or - incon drawn , hand cut hand engraved, a not ’ r side able residue of today s U . S . graphic arts .

Even when so rigorously delimited, the field is thick with split - hair rulings that may puzzle the The c of intruding layman . good techni al health — a plate that is , its potentiality for reproducing a design ad infinitum— is frowned upon by many K of a connoisseur . ing the portfolios remains the its e drypoint, prized v lvet burr good only for a very few proofs . Etching comes next , that yields its good proofs only in short pulls . It has become proverbially synonymous with other coveted things , lollypops , mink coats , and such, that may lure unwary innocence into danger . The word even grates on the hardened ears of Hollyw ood censors . Otherwise how could one explain the following line— doubtless chastely edited— spoken “ by a film roué to a blond stenographer : Do come and see my Rembrandt lithographs'” T heoretically , all prints of museum standard

- i . should be hand pr nted It is a catchy term , 220

’ redolent of Ruskin s try at an artificial pumping n of health i to sick handicrafts . Of course, the printing of proofs from an original block does not r e a equire a compl x p raphernalia . Perhaps closest to true hand-printing are the Chinese rub has- and the bings from stone reliefs , in occident, the casual proofs made without benefit of a press , when the paper is laid over the block and pressed its fin erball into grooves with g or thumbnail . Thus would Mill et and Gau gin check the state i ut of a work, often a single deta l, before c ting T dl a - any further. hese undoubte y h nd made proofs are usually quite deficient as concerns l t inking and pressure, could not stand on qua i y t alone . Despite this hey are precious , inasmuch t the ik hirt or as hey are relics of artist, l e his s pipe . Most prints are made with the intromission ’ between the artist and the artist s proof of a printer and a press . As far as wood is concerned, ’ it is futile to distinguish between Gutenberg s

- archaic press , hand manned, but worked at top hi the speed in a most businesslike fas on , more complex plate press that pulled circa 1850 the of The London Illustrated News engravings , and ’ the small artists presses of today . Only naive souls sighing for the fiction of the good old times could detect a difference . All that is needed to insure a decent proof is correct inking and pressure .

222

' w r raging bet een conservatives and mode ns , I would check as a point in favor of modern prints t the fact that such fine and refined raits , most ’ of them collectors bait , are more often found a s a kind of fungus that thrives on conservative plates, of which modern works are relatively free . Even the simplest press may interpose a rusty turn of its screw or the wobbliness of its plates between an inexperienced printer ( who may very well be the artist himself ) and the beauty E n of a final proof . ven the most i tricate of Offset presses may be made to conform to the lightest indication of a skilled printer and yield the proof f . o supreme As in other fields endeavor, it is not the accessories used that guarantee fineness , but ’ and in the last analysis , a craftsman s hand the

the . brain that motors hand In that sense, and

- t . in hat sense only, all fine prints are hand made One should mention among the few fine printers f of our . o day, George C Miller New York City, Lawrence Barrett who works in Colorado

K . Springs , and Lynton R . istler of Los Angeles Their skilled enthusiasm has assisted at the birth of many a graphic artist . The United States witnesses a heartening re vival of the use of hand- drawn prints pulled in unlimited editions , which is where the definition of what the graphic arts should be acquires its or t full meaning . They are illustrations f rade ’ - i c . books , more often hildren s books In mid n ne 22 3,

’ t teen cen ury , when tired printers devils snapped the jaws and pulled the levers of the press that inked the five thousand copies of the weekly Charivari , their thoughts through the long

- twelve hour day were not on esthetic pursuits . ’ Yet it is their back labor that made Dau miers vr oeu e possible . Had it been submitted to the ai for restr nt of limited editions collectors only, had it been cut off from contact with his fall guy and constant admirer, the French bourgeois ’ i r Daum e s . at large, opus would have withered fati ue as Today, offset presses that run without g many as copies of one hand- drawn zinc doubtless launch some of the more vital prints f o our era . of In their democratic way reaching the people , the graphic arts play more than an esthetic role on the American scene . They blend well

“ with a tradition that rebels at the exquisite and the hr of term the rare . With gradual s inking the incognita which blanked the map of the United n States , the interest in pioneeri g and the open spaces that the works of Homer and Iackson typify thinly petered out into the duck prints

of . in t Benson The new wilds were the ci y , and the American tradition snared another generation of draftsmen trained in the tough school of n t newspaper graphic reporti g, who had the s reet for tu d a s dio, and for a rawing board an ash r can lid . At its deepest, thei work matches the 224

’ - mood, humanity packed, of Stieglitz great con “ ” The temporaneous photograph, Immigrants . hi - row di At its rowdiest, it is as gh pitched as the of - hi ness beef eater Hogarth, another great grap c reporter . John Sloan succeeded in capturing in a web of etched lines a whole metropolis and its motley inhabitants , a New York that is not to day’s New York and is now sunk as far as any ’ Atlantis; already Sloan s etchings have outlived his city . As in the days of Constantin Guys , Boardman Robinson jobbed as a war corre spondent whose graphic reportings from the field will outlast many a studio job . of - This art the ash can school, so close to ’ “ il ’ the people , lustrates Lincoln s saying, God must have loved the common man; he made so ” ll l n many of them . It could have spi ed easi y i to the social- consciousness that marks the art of the thirties without need of, or reference to , the very different brand of art that was being done ul in Paris at the time . It probably wo d have W done so were it not for the Armory Show . hile a majority of puritan laymen were shocked by Marcel Duchamps into believing in a European l n of cultural decadence , whi e a mi ority liberal laymen cheered modern art hobbling on its zig zag way as anarchistic , American artists under stood the lesson of Europe in its purest and highest sense . They felt it as a heroic and pain of ful reappraisal means , a conscious restating

226 t r see hei eyes could , it went naked . A general of and sigh relief went up at this admission, the its F r . o American Scene put in appearance me, ersonifies the tur Grant Wood p re n to Arcadia, f c or s . the candid sear h earth, blood and root A ' n visit to his chance meeti g in Cedar Rapids , a c workshop , where murals on rusti themes were — team painted, impressed me with the fact that in Iowa at that time, murals and land and people were as closely interwoven as were the f land and people and murals o Mexico . Even ’ m Grant s lithographs his mural affinities may r for u be felt, his patience , and a flai architect ral balance . At the same time that Corn became the leit motiv tr on in the coun y, city art focused the s Worker . Socially consciou artists now called themselves plastic workers , and attempts at art ists’ unions patterned after workers’ unions were n u made . Here , perhaps , an i spiration nurt red by thedepression at home borrowed its ideography of 19208 in part from the Mexico the , where engravers had shared in the renaissance with a loud cr0 p of illustrated posters and broadsides cheaply printed and retailing for a few pennies . of hi But in the States , the logical role the grap c arts as a ready medium of art for th e people never quite dovetailed with the making of an P z the art about the people . rints that canoni e worker were pulled somewhat p aradoxically on 227

ao china paper, in limited editions , and priced

cordin l . g y Nevertheless , the new faith, or the t remodeled faith, infused many a fine print wi h a breath and a breadth that a preoccupation t with s yle alone had never produced . Within the range of time that this show em compasses , many new techniques have been in tried in the graphic field , made possible by creasin l c g y omplex technological resources . Some are variations on classical themes— the u se of sandpaper and gasoline in the making of a of — lithograph, the sandblasting a woodcut and — others are materially new departures serigraphs , n t cello ri ts . P , etc If progress resided in varie y we Th should indeed rejoice . e graphic artist should on c not, however, rely unduly te hnical inventions his r to solve p oblems , any more than the painter

- on his brand new synthetic pigments . No short cut Can make art appreciably easier of attain e ment . Despite the many manual steps involv d, “ t art e cosa prin making, inasmuch as it is at all ,

mentale. 20 T . OLD MAS ERS FOR TOMORROW

“ ” It is told that Alice in Wonderland having found favor with 'ueen Victoria, Her Majesty graciously allowed Lewis Carroll to dedicate his to Th T Fi th next work her . is happened to be he f Book o Euclid Treated Al ebraicall So Far As f g y, It Re t to C mm ns ra n la es o e u ble Mag itudes. Some similar mischievousness rules the sequence of publication of the two books that Sydney Janis dedicates to contemporary painting . fi The Tau ht Themselves In the rst, y g , he pre sented with a keen outlook and refreshing respect the for the artists concerned, wonderland sight of men who succeeded in lifting themselves by their bootstraps and were caught in this levitat f ing act . Many o the pictures analyzed were of the - n t ttin i story telli g ype, monkeys upse g fru t

t ur . rays, cops in p suit and such Accused of favor n ing Sunday pai ters over professionals , Ianis was suspected by purists of being somewhat of a practical joker. His second book is so at variance with the first that it could mean an esthetic mea culpa for

231 those who do not know that Janis has long been non- a pioneer champion of representational art , who acquired difficult and mature Picassos when most other collectors were flirting with this ’ “ ” artist s Blue juvenilia . The riotous and the quaint are absent from r t a rr a Abst ac nd Su e list Art in America . Austerity s is mark its text from the first sentence , Science the Open sesame of tw entieth-century art to “ n the parting tableau , Man , manipulati g the lever of contemporary culture upon the fulcrum for of science, attains the vital balance twentieth century art . Would scientists care to uphold this or thesis choose to deny it, as did Sigmund Freud when he refused a proffered stake in the ? t expensive subconscious of Dali It matters li tle , n for the attitude exists as an aim , a spri g, a pas — t ll sion and in es hetic matters , wi often equals fact . h dr Today, when c il en bring home as a matter of course the abstract finger paintings that they s mear in nursery schools , when surrealism proves strobo sc0 ic a hit in advertising, and p photog raphy featured in magazines familiariz es us with

- the plastic patterns of time movement , it would be disingenuous to pretend shock or even surprise l at the contents of this book . An extraordinari y Well- informed and lucid text recites the f actual record without crowding it with irrelevancies . Janis taps worthwhile provincial sources scarcely 232

r touched by New York galleries , gives thei the chance to very young, while denying space K to deans among practitioners , George L . . n Morris and Albert Gallati among them . ’ To match in art today s globe-circling activi t ties , s ylistic relationships between continents are the n emphasized at expe se of national flavor .

After reading the Opening chapter, Sources in 20th u n Cent ry European Pai ting, that suggests an America dependent upon Europe for its art forms , one sighs for a complementary chapter on o k American sources . Eur pe freely ac nowledges the role of America in the formation of abstract and surrealist art . Gleize and Metzinger mention and ill ustrate in 1912 American Indian totem patterns as forerunners of cubism . Pioneer Ameri in can skyscrapers , pioneer American machines , form both the dynamics of futurism and Bauhaus n functionalism , while Mack Sennett ci ema come

refi ure . dies with their fantastic plots p g Dada If, “ as Janis says , it be true that to participate in to ’ day s culture it is only necessary that a country _ be infused with a modernization of its physical ” a equipment, one understands why an Americ n 1 plumbing fixture dated AD . 19 7 was exhibited ’ by Marcel Duchamp as an objet d art. Janis asserts rightly that non-objective painting is the legitimate exponent of its era, which is undeniably a noble enough place : for any type the of art . But price to be paid for such genuine

284

“ riders in three square inches of Illumined Pleas ures as an answer to the challenge of his para in gon, Meissonier, who could fit one picture a whole Napoleonic army down to the last brass Th u . e is button , gaiter and moustache s rreal m that Janis sponsors in this book is more abstract ' o ular version n in hue than is its p p , i asmuch as it inclines to the orthodox line of the surrealist party that favors automatism over patient ren l11 ul a z Da sm . dering, and anathem ti es for vernac ar T of non- his first corpus American objective art, t impressive both in quantity and quali y , needs no strengthening at the expense of realism . One regrets what j anis says of abstract painters turned realists artists who could not survive with out support, approval and companionship turned their backs on the difficult path of abstractionism Not all conversion to representation need be of venal and cowardly . Heroic was the attitude n him 1921 the cubist Rivera, leaving behi d in the economic security guaranteed by a Paris dealer for what seemed then esthetic exile and meagre rewards— Mexican walls and a laborer’s l suc week y pay . Hélion, justly recognized as a cessful t k t master of abs ract art , lin s his recent urn towards nature to what he experienced as a sol n a dier in this war . And Dali was yieldi g to nother spur than weakness when he changed from early “ abstractions to what he calls hand-done color photography . 235

I a gree with Janis that non- objective art de “ ” o f - serves the name twentieth century art , but “ feel that it would be safer to term it early tw en

- tieth century art . Esthetic quakes write com plex graphs in a hundred years , as in the last ’ century that Opens with the pomp of David s “ ” Coronation of Napoleon and outlasts Van Gogh .

Starting with Fauvism where Van Gogh left off, our own century has ample time left to breed D turn a avid .

: c d 1944. Charlot Paratrooper . Fres o etail . W

238 be incapable of feeling in retrospect the dynamics of dr today, the collective resolve that ives us towards one goal . A generation will be born for whom this war would be mainly a few pages of statistical logistic s in a text book— if it were not for art . Only art may attempt the feat that the Indian sculptor once performed : to harden topi cal emotion into permanenc e . c Man, the little engineer, plays with blo ks , sorts and piles them with the fierce c oncentra t l tion and Vital in ent of a chi d, and of course he

. 1D also colors them They are blocks to live , to crawl into , as the hermit crab protects its soft f E body behind the armor o a borrowed shell . ach c spe ies of creature has its housing taste, its r c flini in geomet i a ty. The snail takes its ease a

Spiral, the bee favors hexagonal shafts , man is p artial to cubes . Though his body be far more ’ c complex in shape than are Eu lid s solids , man feels it a good thing to be born , to live, and to die c of c within a neatly packaged ube spa e , its verti cals and horizontals standing for the intellectual logic al orderings that are his own . It is the fate of mural painting to be a corollary to buildings , these rigid geometric complexes . - n —c Murals are the skin thi , vari olored garment dessous t made to reveal architectonic , as clo hes al bulge at the chest and pleat at the hip. A mur should answer the spatial cubes of rooms with a corresponding quartering of illusive painted 239 space . If it is to be a mural , not just a painting on a wall , it needs to accept this subservient posi i t tion to arch tec ure, suck its strength from the as main body a remora from the shark . No pas sionate improvisation , no luscious brushstroke , of or can take the place plain mural fitness , ex n ’ plai the impact even today of Uccello s style . “ ” A mural that plays ball with an architecture accepts in its makeup ingredients that could be ’ called abstract— Vitruvius canon of proportions finds in it an equivalent; its horizontals match c floor levels , its verti als share the burden with or columns , its diagonals ascend descend with of t the stairs . The mural echoes the mesh ma he matical relationships that underlie even a medi u ocre architect re . But the painting on the wall needs also to be the funnel through which much besides art is

e . relay d to the onlooker For its intended public , t any man liable to enter a church, a minis ry , a ostoffice the — to p , art can be only side dish be m savoured i perceptibly as it were , while a major

or . theme , patriotic , social religious , is digested The muralist must cater to this very real need of laymen for a familiar aperture to bring into focus the revelation of esthetics . Styles that do not allow of story telling lack certain mural require r ments . The mu alist must indeed be humbly pre “ pared to deal with Washington Crossing the ” “ ”

n n . The Delaware, Li col Freeing the Slaves 240 backbone o f mathematics should remain em in of bedded the flesh an obvious subject matter, r computations relay emotions . A tists too proud to do this need not adopt a genre so publicly displayed . Critics would be wise to keep this popul ar

- . tur u his element in mind Ven i, in the follow p to Histor o Criticism n for y f , damns Mexican pai ters academicians because of their obvious interest in social themes . Modern art, says he, probes prob r for lems of fo m by painting apples, has done so the last eighty years and should continue to do n so . Cézanne knew better . Disti guishing genres , he painted fruit pieces , but remained haunted hr vocabu t ough life by mural themes , an epic lary of nude bodies . All through history form and content cohabit in peace . Duccio and Giotto , Raphael and Michel a ngelo, Tiepolo and Goya, Delacroix and Dau

all . The mier, tell stories contemporary muralist l need not excuse himself for being a story te ler . Murals are the personal apport of the Americas d r art. a r i an to mode n M rcel Lenoi , G no Severini others contributed frescoes to Europe in the 19205 early , but scarcely on the scale and at the pitch that marks their surge in Mexico , where murals smoked the artist out of his ivory tower n and educated him to team work . In fresco pai t n ing, pai ter and mason elbow each other on the i r same scaffold . As the mason m xes mo tar, trowels

242 so the often before the start of work, that he reaches the wall with little breath left, and less l wi l . Suggestions , objections, and pressures sub mit him to an ordeal by despair . Competitions ’ inflict what Villier de l Isle-Adam called the The ordeal by hope . artist does sketches , perforce faked, to make sense to outsiders . In order to r of reach the wall, he uns the gauntlet color

- i n schemes , reduced models , full scale deta ls wru g n — out of context . Fi ally he starts painting while the man with a bucket of whitewash waits be

n him n . hi d , poised to spri g forth into action Why not give the muralist the same confidence shown a plumber? Why use such archaic devices as that of the executioner with axe raised which insures the correct diagnosis of doctors call ed to the sickbed of some barbaric Chieftain? That I plead for fewer fetters from the outside does not mean that I believe art is at its best ul when most free . It is the artist who sho d stake his own limits . Long identified with sanctimonious tableaux ‘ of n be ladies draped in cheesecloth, plucki g, r stowing, blowing such Operatic paraphe nalia as w lyres , cro ns of laurel and gold trumpets , mural painting in the United States suffered in the last decade a life giving jolt . Patterned in part after the example of government-sponsored murals in Mexico and partly to round up this deal of a 243 brave new world , murals have rejoined the trends n - in easel painti g with seven league leaps . Its or new patrons , government agencies labor o ll rganizations , wi have none of the clammy stuffiness that catered to conservatives . One does of not question the soundness the change , but of perhaps that its extent . The liberation of mural painting is a revolution on the esthetic plane, apt to be messy as revolutions will be . The Victorian standards have been lynched with

. of gusto Surface finish, static dignity, nobility Neo theme , Classicism ( even though it be only

Classicism ) are strung from lampposts . The new s the of tandards , much alive and with kick a giraffe , are the same that reign over average m : odern art individuality at the core , distortion as to i the means , much pain taken make the th ng

a f . s c ppear e fortless Slice of life , lo al incidentals , r a e favored over outmoded allegories . Is such a style adequate for the murals that will vie with sculptures to commemorate this war? We r may t ust that a global war, fought in stand ard uniforms with standard weapons the world c of over, for aims that trans end the boundaries a state, a nation , even a continent, will breed its ow n to ample style , perhaps closer the older point

o f now so l . view, thorough y despised to n C c A return a ki d of lassi ism , even to the d of dr epiction ladies aped in cheesecloth , need not prove a tragedy . Many allegorical tableaux 244 painted in this century are esthetically worthless, t but heirs is nevertheless a proud lineage . The beauteous muses , draperies , wreaths , lyres , that make us smil e today were once hallowed by the Th r genius of Raphael and Poussin . e mode n formula of avoiding formul as is rich in passion but short of breath . And a brave return to tested recipes may breed works that match Raphael’ s “ ” ’ ” Acts of the Apostles and Lebrun s Battles in n r n long sustained i spi ation and i ventive dignity . The best guarantee that war memorials shall r the be worthy of thei dedication , does not lie in of al small irritants routine supervision, but in in lowing free play to the heart, bra , and con f of . o science the artist The intricacies the craft, the the exigencies of the genre , the seriousness of purpose, are censors he scarcely could escape .

246

t tended to the heological, he admitted that he n as did ot dare repeat . W it the shadow of the Inquisitors that stopped him from making copy ’ ’ out of Greco s confidences? In the painter s por — trait of the Grand Inquisitor now in the . Metro politan Museum— the name of TheotocoPuli is found scrawled on a sheet of paper thrown on ll the tile floor, open, but sti creased along four

. t fold lines It could be a letter, a denuncia ion the perhaps , Opened, read, and discarded, by somewhat awesome Cardinal . Some infer that the fancy of the artist was not accidental in putting thus publicly his name f of in under the oot the sitter, very much obeisance, but also very much under his pro tection so ; Greco , who in his youth had been l fami iar with Eastern rites , may have been closely watched when in Spain to insure Roman ortho doxy . i one Two more deta ls , the all night and the t other all light . In a letter wri ten from Rome and of El l concerning the Italian sojourn Greco , Giu io Clovio l on , no mean artist himse f, stated how , n a visit to the pai ter, he found him sitting awake in k all d absolute dar ness , draperies rawn over the high windows , so as not to let in even one filtered t of ray of the fine morning sun. The authentici y the letter is now contested, but whatever experts sa may y, the anecdote is too finely woven with the trends of the work and of the man not to 247

fil in an remain ed his dossier, even if only as apologue that shows his anticipation of the mys tical night with which he was to come into c on tact in Spain . The t is o her clue, one that deals with light, of t : undoubted authentici y Greco , with the tip of otted tu his brush, j down on one of his pic res , con cerning the heavenly court that surrounds an ‘ “ apparition of the Virgin: Angels are like candle at flame; they seem of great size a distance, but - u T are actually small when seen in close p. hese r words capture the dynamics of a t ue vision , swooping forwards from afar . Was El Greco accustomed to come nose to nose with angels , or was he only reporting at second hand? There is a matter-of-factness in the wording that inclines one to the first surmise; no other eye saw these angels but that of a master of optics; an eye still busy with clinical analysis at the time that heart and head may have conversed with heaven . A fact that few critics care to remember is that “ the man big enough to still be in the news after a few centuries or even a few decades from his t dea h, probably surpassed in height and depth the critic who attempts belatedly his psychologi a cal autopsy . As result, each generation takes n hold of a genius by a si gle hair, and proclaims t r hat it holds the whole man . Among mode n masters , more and more does Cézanne prove his sc ope as beyond that niche in art history pre 248

for h pared him by his early apologists , t at of a f o . i El n precursor cubism L kewise, Greco contai s — but far exceeds— what the modern critic ac clairns for of him , a prophetic encouragement the pioneers of expressionism . His famed distortions may give consolation to modem s who likewise distort; but the juxtaposition of text and pictures hi s in this book suggests how , to contemporaries , T these were more than subjective statements . o Spanish souls steeped in the vertical theology of m as his ti es , these distortions appeared dogmatic of exercises , pious variations on the theme resur rection; of what will happen to our bodies when violently thrown overboard from the what-w e

n m m . know, i to a world sho of space and ti e

- now all . Then as , not clerics were art minded in To decorate churches , there existed Spain a of safe brand art, closest equivalent for that ’ period of today s Barclay Street . These easel pictures were the watered legacy of the divine of Morales , panels with soft shadings reminiscent

- Leonardo , of a craft that hid the brush stroke as - t if it was shameful , and attained enamel smoo h the polish . Though it had not reached by far our degradation apparent in day, liturgical art was fast entering a routine path and the blood painted on flagellation pictures took amiable hues of rubies . We may sympathize indeed with the first curate to blunder and commission a picture from

250

f r family a fai . An uncle, a son, and boarding stu in under aint dents , all were busy brushing the p ’ in or in toto g, painting El Greco s . At least we know of one case in which the master saw one of his mural commissions only after its comple of tion, and then only because a squabble con r ce ning its price . When we state that Greco was a craftsman who sold his pictures as the cobbler sells his shoes , all we say is that his outlook on art was in keeping with the times . The more exquisite his r theory that his subconscious ruled b ush, and at that rather with frenzy than reason, is more flattering to contemporary taste but lacks in his torical perspective . It is the same with this fetich that we make t ul today of personali y, a preoccupation that wo d have proved as incomprehensible to Greco and his contemporaries as the theory of a rul ing sub conscious . It was then wisely taken for granted t so m hat a man is much part of his ti es , with so roots secure in the past, that, at most, he ’ achieves deviations rather than creations . Greco s elongated proportions , original as they may seem , were adapted from Cretan formulas that were in turn but a provincial branch of the Byzantine . These conventions ruled fresco painting in the

r . island where El Greco was bo n To the end, with the same tenacity with which he signed his name in Greek characters and boasted of 251

t being Cretan , El Greco cherished the raditional types of orthodox Eastern devotion; the gaunt, bearded , cadaverous elders that he had seen , and to on perhaps even helped paint, Cretan walls when he was but a lad in his teens . In Spain , e u h Athana thes fig res shed t eir eastern names , f siu s or C riacu s . o y , to masquerade as St Jerome

as . Latin fame , and even the pagan Laocoon

’ ’ r As to Greco s females , swaddled in d aperies fleshtones of a of undiluted local color, with

- green no more than mottled with faint terra rosa , their life seemingly conc entrated in the agitation

- - of their fan spread, needle thin fingers , they help to prolong into the over- ripe times of the Ba roque the archaisms of the Slavic icons that rep resented the three Marys at the Tomb . 252 ‘ This familiarity with Eastern rites and modes makes us believe that Greco was never much at hi s ease as a parishioner in Toledo or in Sevill e; that his swashbuckling manners , noted by con

DP . temporaries , hid the unease of the w as of o o He buried in the parish Sant D mingo , the same that had commissioned his first Spanish picture . Just before he died he willed to the n t parish money to buy tapers , long and thi , wi h haloed heads like the figures of Greek patriarchs

. his that had formed his style As he made this , n last wish k own , did he also remember how once the i he had regarded fact that, to his tra ned nin eye , now tired and strai g already towards the be sight of the resurrection, tapers and angels haved alike? Our present dilemmas with painting are all concerned with shop matters : abstract or con crete; surrealism or cubism; new romantic ism or primitivism, we speak of all as if it was our so freedom to choose . This is because we have half forgotten how the terms of art criticism are more than juggling balls; each drags in gigantic chunks of human knowledge and of human emo tion of which historical style is but the visible Too fringe . often does the critic , if he feels at all that there is in these terms more than sound, c refer through them only to means , the hoice of or palette , the line straight distorted, the spatial T or rendering deepened or squashed . hose are

254

If the publishers plan to enter the art field, r r where thei Catholic approach has al eady, with f this book, reopened old beauti ul vistas nearly forgotten, a little touch of the scholarly could

on 140 . only help . The plate page is miscaptioned

not . It is not a Greco , and even Spanish But how thankful we shoul d be for a reproduction of the crucifix in zenithal flight sketched from f o . in nature by John the Cross Here perhaps , r a complete denial of self, intent only on ecord

n . ing the vision, do we find at last true origi ality As René Huyghe points out in his clear and cau r tious analysis , the stylistic ing edients are as n miraculous as the occasion , bei g prophetic nl rather than retrospective . One may o y ques ’ “ tion Huyghe s Opinion that this drawing belongs less to art than to mysticism . Would it not be truer to state that, in art as in other pursuits , there is no substitute for sanctity? W d n oo e graving .

258 precise horse sense of a craftsman accustomed to a c rve hard materials , wood and stone, whose grain and density make short work of attempted nonsense . The plastic thought of Gill the carver that ponders the angle of the chisel and weighs the stroke of the mallet informs with bOth cau tion and confidence the articulate thoughts of

- . t Gill the writer His s yle, clothed in worker like ’ of simplicity, can also pack the wallop a worker s so fist . His thinking apparatus is earthy that it seems conditioned by touch and smell rather than logic , so salty that the pen moves impelled by the i c loins as well as the brain . G ll the stone utter digs into things of thought as a mole into the black soil , carving patient tunnels that open at the end on true blue vistas . Coming from the mind of a man accustomed to think and feel in images , this book can be summed up in a picture more easily than in an abstract train of thought . Reading it conjures a penny sheet with gaudy coloring, a Currier and Ives in robust style : wearing the leather apron proper to stonecarvers and the folded paper cap t th e that printers sport, a bearded pa riarch holds chisel of the sculptor and the burils of the wood

- engraver; surrounded by cases of sans serif, he stands silhouetted against the bulk of a screw press that assistants slowly feed with hand-made sheets; one sees through the door the women n baking bread , tendi g cattle , giving the breast to 2 59 their brood under the arches of a crumbling i monastery . It s a composite image that super imposes reminiscences of the patron saints of r — n many t ades Sai t Luke the icon maker, Saint

Eloy the smith, Crispin and Crispinian in leather aprons working at their bench, Saint Isidore , who watches over the farm chores , and a kind of for t r Tobias , who cares the dead by let ering thei n virtues o tombstones .

From the man that the book evokes , artisan

- rather than artist , shorn of theories , hot blooded and hirsute , an unknowing reader would expect works as good , as imperfect , as humorous and as sanguine as himself . Indeed it is hard to recon i hr t e of c le Gill the man , as seen t ough h eyes

Gill the writer, with the mannered and somewhat bloodless productions of Gill the artist; the author somewhat clarifies the paradox by detailing the influences that concurred in shaping his style . At the start of his career he Specialized ex clusively in carved lettering on monuments and a tombstones . A carved letter is most peculi r among sculptured beings because , in spite of i beveled uprights and incised ser fs , it has no real volume or existence in space; its members are rigidly flush with the frontal plane of the t slab . Thus Gill became familiar with his para dox: a sculpture in calligraphic terms that de u pend neither on volume nor on space. Nat re offers no subject matter as unsubstantial as man 260 created letters . Even a blade of grass pressed be tw een blotters suffers violence as it is thus ushered into two dimensions; though paper the helicoidal torsion of its live body alr t pos ulates space and volume . m of hi n Gill well realized the li itations s calli g . He dared carve garlands of leaves and flowers in the margins of his text; but when his design n i cluded embellishments in the round, such as ’ cheeky cherub s heads , the young letterer would ob as wisely give the j to a sculptor, it seemed to hi him then outside the range of s craft . He soon hardened his heart to such adolescent scruples , came eventually to carve not only heads but bodies , whole clusters of personages in action . In spite of the applause this more ambitious work fl received, one may question at least its in uence on many a younger artist . The flatness that letters possess by nature , that leaves and flowers may acquire ( still retaining a measure of their former t his enti y ) , does mortal violence to man; in bas reliefs the volume gives way to the slice , the human body with its elbows and knees painfully profiled appears crushed into the surface of the stone slab . To t be sure , Gill , the skilled let erer, often l t weaves his si houettes into calligraphic puri y , spins a line as precisely stream-lined as the pro

- files cut by a tooling machine; one may, how the of r ever, question propriety t ansmuting man ,

262

guts as well as other appurtenances about most f d c and c m o the pro u ts of the arts rafts move ent. ’ You can see the boys don t drink; you can see ’ n l they re not on speaki g terms with the devi .

all Gill put into his work he knew, all he loved, n r ik with most i tense concent ation . One would l e to say that the results of such life-long devotion were truly important . But are reforms as essen tially good as they are novel? Of the Impression “ ists Renoir used to say, They boast that they paint the shadows blue while others paint them ” c of tu m bla k . Of the portion the li rgical art ove ment that Gill leavened it may be similarly said They rejoice at having replaced in their churches

- - the neo Gothic style by the pseudo Byzantine. 24 T AR . T I TS CA HOLIC , 'UANDARIES

The world man has been put into to enjoy as his own has been inventoried in many unrelated — c ways astronomy, microscopy, di tionaries , etc . Each results in listings so unrelated to those obtained by another way that only God can fill the gaps between them , and thus Observe His one Creation as a unit . No considers one science invalid because its findings are independent of k some other science . In fact each branch of nowl 263 264 edge is expected to deal in its own way with the t universe, unduplicated by ano her. A thesaurus that lists words by meaning will have an entirely different arrangement from a n dictionary that lists them by spelli g, though e . Th r both follow a thoroughly logical plan a tist, to whose field is the visible only, that is say what “ ” r Poussin calls solids , will so t the things of the s universe by shapes , color , light and dark, sug gested textures . This results in a new encyclo pedia different again from both dictionary and

. W t thesaurus i hin his craft, the artist is not able to distinguish between good and evil , one should sa even y between beautiful and horrible , to use ’ layman s terminology . But though it lacks the of the benefit other traditions , physical has a w n n f o o e not o . logic all its , and devoid horizons We must consider that the Creative Act took of into consideration the shapes things and that, in the same way that man ( body included ) was o f made in the image God, all creatures reflect in their shapes some particular virtue of His not substantial thought . Thus it may be accident, as Delacroix remarks in his Journals , that the cracks to be observed in dried mud have a shap e and logic similar to the formation o f tree trunks for and branches . It must mean something, ex ou — ample , this insistence the sphere spherical t cells , spherical eye , spherical planets . Or his relation of a pine branch lovingly mimicking the

266

re fli Resurrection, the Assumption, to acqui ght ar l the need as a starter the squ e, sto id shape of

. n T tomb Giotto, steeped as he is in Sai t homas , paints a world at peace under the gui dance of God ul e , but it is not through so ful xpressions ’ He on people s faces that he achieves this mood . prefers to use the great architectural backgrounds the t i to the monastic scenes , solidi y of con cal u ma mountains poised as a proposition of the S m . Mainly through those inanimate things does he ’ communicate the equivalent of men s thoughts . ’ Man s body as Giotto portrays it is disguised into the semblance of trees and mounds under the heavy folds of cloaks whose texture is nearer n to bark and soil than to any k own cloth . It is not always possible to keep equally intact both illustrative and plastic proprieties; their relative importance shifts with time and fashion . When Greco tucls his personages into bodies which medical science pronounces in the last r stages of exhaustion, when his b ush distorts the if face of our Lady as it was made of ectoplasm, he n is si s against story telling, and this made h work a scandal for at least three centuries . Yet tt i if one pays a ention to his l ne and color, one ' gets the full impact of his mystic Most of the devotional images used today in t churches depict pious atti udes , eyes rolled into e cstasies , but the choice of shapes and colors often tells an entirely unrelated story of bad art 267

m n and of mercenary ai s , which is si ful, at least within the craft . Why should churchmen of today sponsor 'the such a photographic art? A representation of the saints that would be wholly satisfactory to the t tu senses , suggesting heir ac al presence , would be puzzling to the faith, because of this lack of n differentiation between origi al and copy . Few of the miraculous devotional images have stuck old close to realism . The black log Virgins of n world sanctuaries , those of Spai and Mexico h of idden under stiff pyramids brocade , the axe n - hew , blood drenched Santos of New Mexico are but the thinnest of veils between orans and

Recipients of the prayers . When Rubens painted our Lady fat and Greco not painted her thin , the Inquisition did pounce for on them ( for that reason at least ) , it was then well understood that this was not our Lady but a symbol of her; a German will paint her : Germanic, an Italian as Italian the Chinese paints her Chinese with specific approval of the

Holy See . There are besides this racial geography individual stylistic climates for which allowanc es ’ must also be made . If we may pry into our Lady s own n Opinion on the matter, it may be poi ted she out that herself, in her apparitions , modifies her appearance according to the recipient . is The world we paint not the world we know, but only its mirrored reflection within our eye . 268

It is perhaps a not negligible point for those w ho ’ are sticklers for nature s ways that this image in il fact is upside down . The lusiveness of such a vision dovetails strikingly with Saint Paul’s allu “ sion to things seen in a mirror and symbols . Only a crass materialist would check on the cor rectness of the mirrored 1mage and overlook this other assertion , that it must also stand as symbol . W ere art as real as the model itself, it would mean the o n a thickening of the walls around us , cl si g tight of this material prison; it would sink art into matter . Rather than reflecting barrenly back the object of its reflection , the work of art must open a passage for mortal things to the spiritual world . It is the very difference between the painted object and the natural Object that best expresses its spiritual import; here are things detached : from their everyday uses plants without growth ,

l . people without action , light without twi ight

Time ceases to exist . From our transient world if we move into the perennial . It is as Judgment had already been passed and all values were

T c . arrested into timelessness . his permanen y is in itself a spiritual asset, as if all the busy Marthas of m this world, all those creatures , ani ate and c inanimate , whose reason to be is to serve , ea h c in its apacity, were suddenly freed from this servitude and transformed into so many immo

- bile , contemplative , God loving Marys . It is then ’ a Catholic s duty to respect the artificiality of

270

t . If e hi reali y it be a lie, it r mains a very w te one . When God gave the world to man for his own f the use , the gi t was intended also for artist . The work of art must not be out too harshly t from the outer logic and beau y. A picture that reflects liberally God’s creation must reflect also some of His good . Asceticism is nonsense within of n n the craft sculpting and pai ti g, for both deal his with bodies , and their maker cannot shut up senses without weakening the usefulness of the ul t . i a the res t It may be, is even probable, th t higher reaches of spiritual life have no need for the plastic arts; but at our imperfect level sensuousness remains for the plastic artist the one proper approach; an animal gusto , not meta physics , is what makes the craft tick . The world is not only a dry nomenclature of n thi gs , fit for the statistician; when all and each is weighed, counted , and labeled , what better than paint can express the admirable residue? One cannot imagine the convincing portrayal of ’ h butterfl s . a y wing in words In t at sense, though the thought be paradoxical , Rubens is an emi n e nently religious pai ter . He endows the obj cts he paints with those supererogative attributes — which God intended for each sheen of silks , lusciousness of fruits , sensuousness of bodies . There is in his lack of inhibitiona truly Catholic

t . attitude , a tuned to his profession However engrossing are theoretical considera 271 tions, Catholic art is so tied up with practical problems that its artist cannot afford to rent an ivory tower or suffer a pathological inflation of -f r- e o . o his ow n g The art art artist proceeds on , brushes his pictures as he wants , let the chips fall where they may . But the Catholic artist is one of i of at end a k nd of tug war, the Catholic — or worshipper at the other , to be realistic , the ecclesiastic that handles the parish money . If these were the only participants in the sport , the artist would have no choice but to bow abjectly to the esthetic ideas of the non- artist; but it happens that this is a three- com ered prop

osition God . , with as the referee Before serving the Catholic flock or its pastor, the artist must give obeisance to God : he must not break the rules of sound esthetics under penalty of ceasing to be a good man . 2 T TH T 5 . 0 E EDI OR OF LITURGI CAL ARTS

Dear Friend: You write me that many readers disliked my frontispiece, and to please tell them why I did “ it ugly . It is an embarrassing question that or ask t should not be asked, would you a fa her why he made his children ugly? Whatever they ul are to the outside world, children m tiply in flesh and mind the idiosyncrasies of their beget coo ter and thus seem beautiful to him . I and bill over my maligned frontispiece with as much conviction as a father toad cooing and bill ing over his toadies . Indeed the whole outer world and the outer world’ s children seem somewhat deformed to me . out What you ask of me is to fly of my skin , as Georgia witches are wont to do , and from this outer vantage point give your readers an um biased analysis of what makes me and mine tick . of Some your friends , as quoted by you, find that in my Opus Mary is not “as beautiful as “ ” they dream her to be Beautiful is a term so debased today as to require further elucidation . 272

274

The beauty of our Lady was and is wholly “ devoid of what America bluntly terms sex ” appeal and thus is not for us sinners to appre ‘ hend . When our Lady appeared at Pontmain to i -in- small ch ldren and babes arms exclusively, it was certainly no ill -will of hers that denied her sight to the good curate and his well- meaning of sin parishioners , but rather the touch that ’ r - a soiled thei make up. Mary s appearance th t soothed and edified babes would have seemed “ to grownups that were not saints fearfu l as an ” army arrayed for battle . If an artist received the miracul ous gift of l be reproducing our Lady as she is , it wou d accompanied no doubt by a corresponding gift of prudence to st0 p him from ever flaunting his “ ” i th foolhardy accomplishment . In my Nativ ty e ’ sketchiness of Mary s features is the only decent

of . kind homage that I know how to, pay What line and color may portray without tres passing on forbidden ground are the trail s along ’ n him the which the pai ter s devotion carries , mental and spiritual climate of his prayer w ith The n n on the brush . more i dividual this deli eati ’ t n of one man s devotion, the s ranger to the ma y the i n perhaps , but also more ed fyi g for a group of people with like affinity.

In my case , my work is much concerned with i t hr Indian Mexico . At b r h and t oughout life and s in death , Aztecs hug the earth with an inten ity 2 75 of comprehension unmatched by that of people on who sit on chairs and not the ground, sleep in beds and not on mats . This peculiar chum ming with earth crept into this Nativity scene all three members of the holy family st0 0 p close to the ground to form a low-lying shape that people familiar with Indian mounds and Aztec pyramids may readily recognize . What could be a mere compositional device has also moral meaning . These attitudes rejoin beyond centuries and continents the Italian “Madonnas of Humil ” it y that squat on the bare earth , for example ’ Masaccio s in the National Gallery at Washing a ton . Perhaps because Madonna of Humility par excellence , this Italian Mary looks and acts like a Mexican Indian mother as she gravely fondles the Divine Papoose . n Besides racial considerations , style comes i to play; that is the ingredient that differentiates “ tu art from nature . In his wonderful pic re A Joust Between Carnival and Lent” Breughel touches other matters besides Church and n kitchen, presents unwitti gly a summary of the t history of style . The lanky ribe that pelts its foes with boiled leeks and salted herrings could stand for the masters that elongate the verticals — ll re Byzantines , Greco , Gi . The fat folk that pulse the attack with cannon balls made of capons and fatted geese are the cartoon equiva of — lent the masters of spherical bulk Giotto , 276

. t in Raphael , Rubens The only ype lack g is one of which Breughel had no concept, the photo graphic artist that despises all styles . Nowadays Barclay Street art steers joylessly its naturalistic course away from both thinness and fatness . It reminds one of the case of a mental patient that ' divided womanhood in two types : the broad ones , too animal to be wooed , the lean ones , too ethereal to be desired . Psychoanalysts res cued him from suicide . My frontispiece is in kinship with the low and ‘ ’ wide figures that Breughel s revellers stand for . The few people who are nowadays both con scious of style and c oncerned with liturgical arts “ ” E c l favor rather the lenten tradition , the ri Gil r l type of saints , unde fed and oblivious of the pu l f c c o gravity . Be ause this bony art hovers mu h n its higher than do realistic plaster sai ts , ex ponents are prone to claim that all saints in do lm Heaven watch their weight, and fu inate

c o f . interdi ts against other types art If true, us be left in outer darkness— not fat ones “would r only Charlot, but Giotto whose fo ms are _ as pregnant with grace as they seem pregnant with r child , and Raphael who rounds breasts bu sting with peasant milk, and Rubens whose painted mess of bosoms and books is a fearless tableau of the gifts of God . May these lines allay some o f the suspicion with which your thin friends View my work .

2 T CCIDEN 6 . REFLEC IONS OF AN O TAL PAINTER ON CHINESE INK T T K AT PAIN ING, AF ER LOO ING THE WORKS OF TSENG YU-HO

t Occidental art history has its my h, that of t the Old Masters . It pictures hem as bearded elders; the hand that holds the brush emerges from a cuff of old lace strewn over a sleeve of wine - colored velvet; the brush is dipped in mel low gold to better match the glow of an expen sive gilded frame . Often we see a king or em eror p in attendance, eager to retrieve the tools r t the Maste , weakened wi h age , may have let fall . Only in appearance is this folk tale innocu r the e n hi ous , as it fu nishes touchston agai st w ch the living artist and his work are subconsciously assayed, and unjustly found wanting . Few indeed are the art-lovers who like their dish the caught fresh, before gamey stench of his

r . tu to y, or of fable , has had time to set in Cen ries rt ar hence, when di , v nish, fakers , and restorers , l hi the wi l have obscured his ac evement, once alive artist may be raised in his turn to the status of myth . l ’ Oriental art, too , fosters simi ar midwives tales . There also, an assumed golden age is 280

tu w a n t hi safely cked y back i to the past, wi h t s d the a ded advantage over Occident, that fab ulously few authenticated works remain as the basis for a formulation of esthetic criteria; in i - extas rac th s field, art lovers may proceed to is p l tical y unhampered by facts . The European Old Master sports a beard; a beard figures also in the Oriental myth . For the th many, it amounts to a seal of au enticity that raises an ancient ink -wash to the rank of a r T a maste piece . his magic be rd should adorn the chin of the lone philosopher— properly the size of a chick- pea— who gapes at a make-believe or - waterfall , else gazes at a make believe moon . As to the yellow varnish that both hides and l makes an Occidenta Old Master, it has a dis Chinese substitute in accumulated grime,

il ink . integrating s k, and faded An English ama teur of the eighteenth century summed up an attitude that applies equally well to the appre ciation of the art of the East and of the West when he stated smugly that a masterpiece - n should be well brow ed all over, just like a lovely old violin. Practicing artists will forever remain unsatis ’

fied i t w distin uee. For with th s atti ude , ho ever g them , rather than manna from Heaven , the work

- of art is a man made object . The approach of the painter to another’ s paintings can be as matter-of-fact as that of a carpenter surveying

282

t of - na ure, the execution an ink picture must be

- nevertheless lightning quick . The plastic rhythm grows on paper at the same time that the brush z l flashes its curves and zig ags , musica ly, but

. no c on swifter even than music No craftiness , m scious thought even , has ti e to deflect the mo tion of wrist and fingers . Here , unlike what may c i happen in less exa ting techniques , the art st can fake neither knowledge nor greatness . One whole portion of man is cast aside in - n be free stroke brush painti g , this part midway tween body and soul that we call rational . All too rarely does the Occidental artist understand n this need to shush reason at the time of painti g .

of . He is loath to let go this , his safest faculty

In his work , reason battles at each step with ’ hi inspiration . The artist s rational self plots to de ’ from the spectator its master s weaknesses and n shortcomings . If the Occidental pai ter is at all “ ” t n the r at home in his pic ure , it is o ly as pe fect r host, hand stretched, shirt front starched, hai groomed . To know eventually the whole man, ll we must look at his sketchbooks , or better sti , his telephone booth doodlings.

- Not so with the Oriental ink painter . A mys or tical disposition , the winebibbing praised in to n or biographies as a trusted aid i spiration , for both, lock reason out in darkness , at least

n . the time necessary to picture maki g Otherwise , reason would engage in a pointless dialogue 283 n i with i spiration, distract her certainly, conv nce of two nl her perhaps helplessness as , of the , o y reason cares to follow an argument to its W inning

. l conclusion Once reason is rendered harm ess , the Chinese master has no choic e but to display on paper or silk his spiritual self as relentlessly as ow l a farmer nails an to a barn door . The act of painting becomes a total spiritual disrobing , both shameful and glorious , in the manner of a

- public self confession . From depths that words i subcon may never probe , the brush br ngs up n scious moods , innermost states , for which pi e, c act bamboo , plum tree and or hid as species of to be tuning forks , prove or disprove harmony tween the painter and the universe . It is this paradoxical selflessness in the assertion of self that explains how the lives of the hermit- painters t are replete with Franciscan anecdotes . What rue artist, alone with his vision before the blank area of - - be the picture to , has not already renounced the world . r dr However spi itual art may be in its final aft, it is not at the metaphysical plane that it starts . Its beginnings are located close to sensuous per n too ceptio s. Perhaps much has been made of the similarities between ink-painting and brush writing by literary critics who , in so doing, felt that they honored painting all the more . There are conceptual incompatibil ities between ideo graphs and pictorial subject matter . It is the

286 in a centaur . It is not with the inert brush that man paints , but with wrist , elbow, and shoulder .

In the Occident, the intellectual planning of a picture often comes into conflict with the mus f Th of cular function o picture making . e kind painter who uses a mahlstick is patient enough to tame muscles and nerves to the point of organic inertia . The stroke of the academic brush E — is proudly laid dead . ffaced as if they were obscene— are the clues to the live initial impact of as ik the brush it str es the canvas , and as well

“ o f its final flight away from the painted plane dis and back into space . The gymnastics that cipline the hand of the academician are doubt r l c f less admi ab e, be ause they are so di ficult; but this kind of training forfeits a whole world of beautiful lines never meant to obey the require ments of cold intellect . Taking after the com bined c l articulations of knu k es , wrist, and elbow , these freehand lines record circular motions laid within circular motions . They look free when compared with lines made with ruler or compass m only because the tool that makes them is i ; measurably more complex, but they too are laid along terms of logic and function . the ink- of In stroke Chinese painting , two extremes are thus fused : the complex animal machinery of the skeleton , with the tensions and extensions of its attached muscles , is on display t as nakedly as is the spiritual note . A mystic wi h 287

nl a sluggish body, or a body o y loosely teamed

its for t . with soul, is a deficient tool pain ing It is this rare near- miracle of the spiritual putting bone and sinew directly in motion that alone

- accounts for great ink painting . As of to subject matter, the squadron old pic tures that represent a sage gazing at the moon postulates at least a link between picture mak ‘ in natural si hts t g and g ; to be exact, be ween this mirrored image of nature that hangs reduced n n of our and reversed at the i ner li ing eyeball, - f and the man made image o paper and pigment . The theme of nature in Chinese painting is often stripped of its seriousness when it is presented by the kind of speaker who is at his best when lecturing to garden clubs . Perhaps certain blos soms displayed in full-color paintings hold in terest for the flow er-lover; and entomologists ma or y approve of the bugs that suck _ chew the n plants , fireflies or prayi g mantises; but the sub ect not - j matter is all important , even though stressed and bolstered by the addition of literary n colophons . Like the best Occidental pai tings , the best ink-paintings are themselves rather than

- slices of nature . In ink painting, beauty does not

of . depend on that the subject matter In fact, an ascetic disposition imbues nature in many a masterpiece with spectral undertones . The resi due of nature that filters through in these paint ings is as often a shorthand of decay as it is of 288

- r i spring . Ink t ees rema n beyond the ministra tions of well- meaning tree surgeons; ink -flow ers d ’ o florists . hardly ever rate ribbons Pine , grass , all the men and rocks, are ruthlessly equated to t common denominator of ink . To appreciate hese n how the pai ted sights , it is well to remember reality of stains and splashes rates as high as t r whatever it is hat they pu port to represent . T Yu -Ho Before meeting seng , what I knew of the relationship between Chinese painters a nd Nature was twofold and meager : ( a ) they loved it dearly; ( b ) they turned their back on it at the time of painting . Being myself a practicing artist, I readily believed both statements , but suspected that they were presented all too sim T Yu -H ply . hanks to the readiness of Tseng o in for rt opening me her notebooks and po folios , I now realize more clearly the sim ilarities that a a in attend the cr ft of picture m k g, the world over . Her first steps toward a picture are shown in of - she a series lead pencil drawings that are ,

e r . assur s me , done di ectly from the model Made in a medium with which the West is familiar, as yet only faintly marked by the timbre of l for formal style, these drawings are of va ue an art Occidental, to help isolate what is from the chinoiserie that , regardless of quality or intent, spells its own picturesque magic . Motives are t n mostly tree trunks , some hin , erect and buddi g; uses , as we do , space and solids , but juggles them after the principle of change that presup n of the poses , as does movement, a readi g pic ture along a stretch of time instead of in a n si gle moment . One of the slightest sketches is a striking t of project laid down along a thin s rip paper, f three inches wide and four eet long . In accord n with the cinematic pri ciple, it sums up the sights of a two -day boating party along the banks of a river . The artist makes use of a sys tem of dots and dashes so slight that it barely disturbs the whiteness of the paper; this pen cill ed shorthand of the projected shorthand of the brush already carries the meaning of the complex subject matter and its load of subjective values. of A third type sketch uses the brush only , is n is based on areas rather than o lines . There no or attempt at formal balance , rather the sketch is composed in vignette fashion, inscribed c loosely in an irregular oval shape . Such a sket h is that of the fishing barge seen through the n of hangi g foliage a river bank, and is a kind

f - - of o ink play . The wet looking surface the paper l is modu ated, rather than divided, by the sliding of values that ooze into each other as a testi monial to the speed that moved the brush . More than the previous ones , these works technically escape Occidental parallels as they spring from grounds as yet unstudied in our own brand of ttened of art criticism . Fa at will by the twist the wrist, line expands to area or thins again i into line . Darks fade imperceptibly nto blacks , 292

Out and outlines are blotted by washes . The one quality that a painter recognizes at once is la uerza del man o the r t f g , st eng h and assurance l f that attended the manipu ation o the brush . Next come album leaves in which pencil and ' brush notations fuse into all- around composi r tions . Elaborations along t aditional lines add to the well- observed tree trunk its ragged ink its foliage , and to the bare rock spattering of moss . Perhaps because these album leaves a re e wider than they are high, the themes are bas d

z an d. on the hori ontal, d pastoral in moo In of these tranquil notations the countryside, charm of tint and the inviting slope of low hills o t t r suggest a m rning s roll h ough mist, whose slow rising reveals translucent suggestions of

- solids , gathered from out of the ever present reality of space . - r In the large scale vertical scrolls , we rise f om r pastoral charm to epic grandeu . Over the earth are bound scene, beyond the trailing clouds that r eserves of paper whiteness , peaks loom that stretch the relationship of objects to verticality . A torsion imbued with elements akin to those of our baroque style wrings the shapes of nature

c - or like wet cloth . Grass tufts a quire a quasi ganic animation as each blade folds under in ’ i of k m micry spider legs , or rises li e scarab s r nk t r feelers . Tree t u s now pa tern thei restless n ness after animal trunks . The slopes of mountai s

294

Why should the Oriental artist feel that the tu his e past consti tes a shackle, when obj ctor works with a feeling of perfect freedom? Prop hi erly understood, the relations p of the individual k t of his to tradition is li e hat a babe to mother, one that can hardly be described as confining .

True , there are nuances that differentiate Orient c from Oc ident in this regard . Occidental styles obey the clock; chronology and hi story remain of their essence; they live short lives that can be counted in dec ades . A more elastic under of l standing time , peculiar to the Chinese , al ows its an artist to slow or to reverse course, and to become at will the contemporary of a master whose work he cherishes . Chinese styles run n rather against the grai of time , like parallel streaks that course along and bridge over the r i t centuries without dated bi th or cert fied dea h . Chinese styles are more in the nature of spiritual f affinities than after the generations o the flesh . To state this basic difference in the nature of style betw een East and West is to answer ass those who belittle Oriental tradition as p ée. It is true that the Occidental painter who at tempts to work in a style of the past courts to tr t hin failure . An addiction oubadour go hic - c dered the Pre Raphaelites . In Oc idental art , the t him original s yle of a master perforce dies with , radically so if he held the mirror to his age : ’ ’ Goya s goyesqu es and Lautrec s cancan can only 295 be revived today as fiesta costumes . Even the spirit of artists who stood aloof from their period — Michelangelo or Cezanne— fails to live in the works of imitators intent on mastering the letter l of on y their achievement . n Doubtless , period pieces exist in Chi ese genre in and the minor arts , but period hardly ever

- trudes in the nobler style of ink painting . As dr restricted as is the cast of archaic ama , its repertory of forms was purified of its everyday context— already long ago— by meditative minds impatient of ephemera . The range of subject matter extant in ink-painting is as limited and as timeless as are the severe geometries that

- z f . underlie a Cé anne still li e Nevertheless , plum t no ree , pine and bamboo are exact counterparts n of the cone , the sphere , and the cyli der praised a of i c by the m ster Aix, that are norgani and out scarcely mutable . Even though lifted of all r t calendar years to spi i ual significance , the heroic ink-flora of the Chinese painters still affords a continuum of metamorphosis in the pulse-beat of its seasonal cycle .

It is conceivable that , in a frightening future,

- of a man made landscape constructed all plastic , steel and cement, will cover the globe and render obsolete at last the basic choice of motives that

- govern Chinese ink painting . By then , however, man as we know him would have ceased also to exist. 27 . RENAISSANCE IN HAITI

As our speed of communication increases , it is as said that the world grows smaller, that, the f z many local di ferences are minimi ed, trends tend h to become global . T ese facts may be glad news the of l - for publishers mai order catalogues , but what holds true of success in plumbing and in kitchen accessories is not so certain to prove a l boon on other planes . A phi osopher once said that he could see no ground for objecting to a law that would dictate the shape and color and texture of hats— provided that the head under neath remained free to be itself . Art is perhaps made of a stuff closer to heads tu than to hats . Should modern architec re mush room its cubes over the whole planet? Shoul d oil n modern painting, permeating like an stai , spread unchecked from Paris to the farthest out posts? Whereas there is undoubted beauty in physical uniformity on a grand scale— in collec of tive gymnastic exhibitions , in drills regiments and Rockettes— one may doubt the virtue of s lar collective demonstrations in the realm of art making .

298 inherent in what constitutes correct behavior on the physical plane and on the spiritual . However, this breaking-up of the international school into smaller ones presupposes also the discarding of the imperial assumption that guides many a happy art critic , that a few rules of eye and thumb, easy to memorize, are a sufficient touch stone to separate forever the academic goats from the pictorial sheep . The attempt made by Grant Wood in Iowa to relate painting to local activities and the local landscape proposed in the United States a vital policy that came close to taking healthy root .

Eventually, the movement fell under the thrusts of an adverse criticism that failed to find in Grant the qualities typical of French and of German f expressionisms . Though e ficiently destructive in in practice , this was of course a quite irrelevant qufi y. on n Another local school grown this conti ent, r t i the Mexican, fo med in the twenties and s ress ng the mural accent, did take root and flourish, and is today a recognized national asset of Mexico . l Yet, how close it came to fai ure in these early days . because of similarly disoriented criticisms' When Orozco had just completed his frieze on revolutionary themes on the top floor of the of Escuela Preparatoria , I took a foreign visitor great culture to view the magnificent set of still fresh frescoes . As we walked along the corridors 299

of smelling damp plaster, my companion was quite silent . The tour over, he mused reprovingly, “ I wonder what they would have to say about that in Paris'

The latest local movement, just started in Haiti, constitutes still another attempt to slow the z f t mechani ation o the spiri ual . It is all the more r of imp essive in that, to the dream one art in one world, as beautifully deceiving as the countless repeated images of a single object placed be r tween facing mi rors , it bravely Opposes a much of of smaller image , the works a handful cul turally isolated men whose geographical portion is confined to only half a not very large island . i z Here as in prev ous attempts to decentrali e art , critical acumen will fail to focus properly unless it sheds the current postulate that only one kind of art may thrive in the world at one time . This unassuming and charming book is con vincing because it is written in a plain human vein and does not even attempt to separate art it W from s makers . ould that we had documents as human as this one on the beginnings of other — for art movements example , the following pas a sage , describing time when only the artists o f themselves were aware what was afoot, before “ t r outsiders had s umbled onto thei doings , A book-keeper in Cap -Haitien was spending his nights painting scenes from Haitian history for a Masonic temple . An overworked taxi driver 300

recisel modelin on was p y ‘ g some Chinese roses a - An cracked tooth mug. apprentice airplane mechanic wondered how he could improve‘ - if he had paint and brushes . A half starved voo ’ doo priest was agreeing to paint flowers and birds on a barroom door for a couple of bottles of i ceremonial w ne . A cobbler was sketching chickens and palm trees on discarded Esso calendars . Especially valuable in form and content are the minute biographies of individual artists . Rod man manages to describe their lives and their motivations without building up the picturesque for its own sake , neither glossing over nor under lining standards of thought and of daily living f Be so different from those o American artists . cause of this happy blend of keen observation f and restraint, the artists su fer neither a prema t ture apotheosis nor a loss of human digni y . This is perhaps only my ow n subjective re c a tion , but, in straining to avoid prejudices ,

Peters and Rodman , the two American apostles “ ” of this movement, may have gone over some too dl what wholehearte y to the other standard , so n of underestimating, in doi g, the quota

Haitian culture not based on jungle and voodoo . The o n world over, artists have been born all of two rungs the social ladder, as the worlds ,

ar . society and art , are sc cely interdependent In l Haiti, throwing overboard artists that fai to meet

302 If I may judge in this case by what I know of

Indian Mexico , Haitian life, in all its humility, may be lived o n a more permanent basis of mood of t f in The and taste han li e Paris . final test for the budding movement will be the viability of the relationship between Haitian art and the Haitian of people , a kind proof that is more slowly forth coming, but much more relevant, than the pass ing accolade bestowed by surrealists . Dieudonne Cédor: Crucifixion

306

F IRST P UB L ISH ED

Mexican eri a e A ev ew of Ho nin en 8 . H t g r i y g Huene Mexican erit , H e f ag e. T xt by Al onso Re u yes. I . Aug stin In 1 4 c . New Yo 9 6. , rk, The M azin A ag e of rt, Jan u a 1 4 ry 9 7 . The Ma azin Art an 9 . osé uadal u e o sa e o J G p P g f , J u a 1 4 da : Printmaker to ry 9 5 . the Mexican People 1 ortrai of Latin Ame Introducti on to the boo 0 . P t r k 10 a Portrait of Latin A mer ica as Seen by Her Print ma r Edi b e ke s. ted y Ann L on a h o ew o d y H ig t. F r r b Monroe Wheele y r.

astin s ouse 1946. H g H , 11 Mexican in s Introduction t the h w . Pr t o S o held at the Metropolitan Mu seum . Metropolitan Mu u se m Bulletin, No mber 1 4 ve 9 9 . m n The Ma azine Art 12 . osé le e e O ozco o No J C t r g f , mber 1 4 ve 9 7 .

Xa er The Ma azin A 13 . vi uer e o Az e o rt an G r r , g f , J c uar 1 4 te Artist y 9 7 . 4 fi The Ma az n 1 . Ru o Tam a i e o Art n yo g f , April 1 45 9 .

Lola u e 15 . C to The Tapestries Catal o gue of the show held in Mexico i C ty , Oc ober 1945 t . Cut-out Papers Catalogue of the Show held in Mexico i C ty, 1 947 . Etchings Forew ord to the album Titaras Mexicano u s, p b lished b the artis y t. M xi e co C 1947 . ity , 307

TITL E F IR ST P U BL ISH ED

The Lithographs of Forew ord to the album Alf edo Zalce Ima enes de Yucatan r g , Talleres de Grafica POp l ar Me c i 1 4 u xi o C 9 6. , ty , Rena ssance Rev si ed The Ma azine o Art Feb i i t g f , r 1 4 rua y , 9 6 . All-American A review of the show held at the Museu m of Mod m A h n e rt. T e atio N , b uar 1 41 e 8 9 . F r y , Am erican Prints: 1913 Catalogue of the retrospec 1947 tive show arranged by the American Institute of Graphic Arts at the Brooklyn Museum of

Art, 1947 . Old Mas ers for To A review of dne anis t Sy y J , morrow Abstract and Surrealist Art in Ameri a c , Reynal and Hitch occk, 1945 . Ken on Review rin y , Sp g 1 4 9 5 .

Mu als for Tomorrow Art ew ul 1 45 s 9 . r N , J y El rec M G o as y stic A review of Bruno de M hr . T e M ti I . , e ys cs, Sheed and W a d 1 4 9 9 . r , ’ Skeed and Ward s Own Trum et No 2 p , . 2, Feb ruar 1 y 950 . Eri c Gill A ev ew of E c ll r i ri Gi , Autobio ra h g p y , D Adai 1 41 9 . The C om r, monweal e ember 12 , S pt , 1 41 9 .

a hol c Art Its uan , ' Litur ical Arts Oc obe C t i g , t r daries 1 40 9 .

To the Edi o of Li Litur ical Arts o ember t r g , N v tur ical A s 1943 g rt . 308

FIRS T P UBL ISHED

fl n f an Oc 26. Re ectio s o cidental Painter on

in Af er Loo in g, t k g at the Works of Tseng Yu -Ho

27 . Renaissance in A

m an, aiti elle rini H , P g 1 4 dahy , 9 8 . h azin T e Mag e of Art, March 1 50 9 .