Tokio descubre México

Abstract

This is a case study that analyzes the cold-war era policies of the Mexican government with respect to art exhibitions. In Washington, DC, in 1953, an exhibition of ancient Japanese art opened and thus ended the artistic invisibility of Japan that stemmed from the Second World War. Following this sign of “official rehabilitation,” Mexico presented a compendium of much of the history of Mexican art in Japan in 1955. The exhibition, Mekishiko Bijutsu-ten, reproduced an exhibition archetype that had been formalized decades earlier, by building itself around three large nuclei: ancient, modern, and popular art. There were in fact three exhibitions—each coordinated by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA, Mexico’s national institute of fine arts)—with pavilions at the Venice Biennale of 1950 and at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art in 1952. Together, they demonstrate the power of the INBA over ideas about Mexican art. The adjustments in the selection of works sought to reveal aesthetic parallels with Japan and generate cultural empathy. At the time, Mexico was triumphantly promoting its art as a product of an artistic renaissance that had occurred after the 1910 Revolution, an avant-garde that was seen as a possibility for the future of Japan. The Mekishiko Bijutsu-ten, too, was received as a novel proposal to activate old artistic forms for contemporary aesthetic production. This practice contrasted with the Japanese view of the issue, which had generally experienced as disruptive attempts to modernize the past. Thus, the exhibition fostered the transfer of cultural strategies.