Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920 to 1950

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In 1924, as the Mexican government was clamping down on politically militant muralists, David Alfaro Siqueiros declared that if their mural commissions were canceled, artists would “exchange the walls of public buildings for the pages of [El Machete],” an illustrated newspaper launched by the Syndicate of Workers, Painters, and Writers. This beautifully illustrated catalog for an exhibition co-organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio shows that printmaking became a key medium for a broad array of artists who linked art to populist politics in revolutionary Mexico. Drawing on the collections of the aforementioned museums, the catalog showcases artists like Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera, as well as lesser-known figures like Emilio Amero and others not known for their work in printmaking like Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo). The volume is weaker in contextualizing artists less interested in politics, who instead worked in a variety of print techniques to make art that was shaped more by artistic and aesthetic experimentation.In the first chapter, Lyle W. Williams, curator of prints and drawings at the McNay, provides a historical overview from the introduction of the first press in the New World in Mexico City in 1539 through the 1940s and the waning of antifascist printmaking collectives like the Taller de Gráfica Popular. Following Williams’s introductory essay, Innis Howe Shoemaker, senior curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the PMA, tells the story of the Weyhe Gallery in New York, an important early promoter of Orozco, Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo. Shoemaker offers a fascinating history of the interest in Mexican art among New York dealers such as Weyhe’s director Carl Zigrosser. In New York, Mexican artists mastered a variety of techniques, and figures like Zigrosser promoted their work to American collectors. In 1940 Zigrosser became the print curator at the PMA. His personal collection of Mexican prints became the basis of the PMA collection. The third lead essay, by James Wechsler, offers a thorough overview of the relationship between printmaking and radical politics, emphasizing the artists of the LEAR (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) and the Taller de Gráfica Popular.The volume also includes shorter chapters by these authors and by John Ittmann, who co-curated the show for the PMA, on particular artists and themes like “Mexicanidad,” “Foreign Artists in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s,” the Open Air Schools, and Surrealist currents. Again, the featured artists are drawn from those represented in the museums’ collections. Thus important artists are overlooked, such as Jean Charlot, who led the revival of the woodcut in the 1920s, and others. Certainly the bibliography on José Guadalupe Posada is large, but the discussion of him and his peers is overly brief. Other early pioneers are also shortchanged, such as the modernista Julio Ruelas (1870 – 1907), a turn-of-the-century illustrator and engraver. This reinforces the idea that graphics in Mexico were necessarily politicized. A closer, more rigorous look at Ruelas’s complicated images would have provided a more comprehensive picture of modern printmaking in Mexico. To his credit, Williams mentions Ruelas, but he describes Ruelas as a “modernist” (p. 7), when in fact he was the Mexican paragon of modernismo, Rubén Darío’s literary movement, which in visual terms combined symbolist, decadent, and art nouveau tendencies. Modernismo is an important chapter in Mexican art history and thus warrants more careful attention. As for Rufino Tamayo, he receives a discrete chapter, but it is the PMA collection rather than his broader contribution to printmaking that drives the essay, which focuses on Tamayo’s earliest series of woodcuts. Rendered in a naive style, they depict paradigmatic Mexican peasants; however, a recent catalogue raisonné of Tamayo’s prints shows that his real contribution to the graphic arts came later. An expert’s perspective from within the field of Mexican art history would have sharpened both the essays and the curatorial vision. Nevertheless, the volume has substantial merits and is a welcome contribution for a nonexpert audience or for teaching.The PMA’s interest in Mexican art dates to the 1930s. In 1932, the museum received Diego Rivera’s retrospective from MoMA. In 1934 it hosted a chronological exhibition, Mexican Art, and in 1943 it organized an important survey of contemporary Mexican painting called Mexican Art Today (p. viii). In 2006, the museum co-organized a major exhibition of Latin American colonial art. This year it hosts an exhibition on Frida Kahlo in honor of the 100th anniversary of her birth, as well as a smaller but important exhibition on Juan Soriano (1920 – 2006), an important midcentury painter known little outside of Mexico. This volume underscores the museum’s commitment to the art of Mexico.