Mexicans & Friends

Like Mexican oil (see p. 61), Mexican art is a commodity in which U. S. citizens take considerable interest. Those who want to get oil out of Mexico are having a tougher & tougher time. Those who want to see or buy Mexican art are having it easier & easier. In San Francisco, Detroit, Manhattan and Hanover, N. H., distinguished murals have been painted by Artists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. Into Mexico City, where there are more & better Mexican paintings, the Inter-American Highway running south from Laredo, Tex., has piped thousands of U. S. tourists since its opening last year. Last week important shows in three U. S. cities gave art followers a fresh triangulation on Mexican art.

Maya. Most Mexicans are of Indian descent; either pure-blooded or mixed (mestizo). As Indians, their artists have never felt adequately fathered by the Old Masters of Europe. Between 1910 and 1920, when Rivera and fellow Mexicans quit trying to paint like third-rate Spaniards, they claimed as a vital part of their tradition the Maya Indian culture which flourished before the Spanish conquest. But if Maya sculpture and design became art to modern Mexicans, they remained archeology to most of the rest of the world. Last week the first big U.S. exhibition of Maya relics as objects of art was assembled in Baltimore.

Borrowed by Director Roland J. McKinney of the Baltimore Museum of Art were 149 pieces representing virtually the entire range of Maya civilization from 1 A.D. to 1541 A.D. The Aztecs, whose beautiful city of Tencchtitl`an was razed by Hernando Cortes in 1521, were a late-flowering branch of this civilization. Accurate astronomy and mathematics, a written language, games with rubber balls were known to the Maya people. The truncated pyramids on which the Maya built their temples still stand in the jungles of Mexico and Yucatan. Like the jungle itself, their carvings were luxuriant with plumes and ornaments, massive, configured in snake-like coils and curves. Baltimore's show includes many of the best-preserved Maya figures of gods and warriors, huge-nosed and somnolent; often squashed into semi-abstract patterns.

Prodigal Son. In the winter of 1926, when the Carnegie Foundation sent an expedition to cooperate with the Mexican Government in exploration and restoration of Chichen-Itz`a, greatest Maya city in Yucatan, U. S. archeologists picked up in Mexico City an extraordinary character. Then 28, Artist Jean Chariot was in Mexico partly because his French family had had relatives there even before Maximilian tried to rule Mexico, partly because post-War Paris and Dada were not for him. A solemn-faced gamin, he went through 1917 and 1918 as a lieutenant in the artillery, won the welterweight championship of the French Army. In 1921 he landed in Mexico and went straight to work with the famed Revolutionary Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters & Sculptors which, with Rivera as its gun-toting maestro, was then remaking Mexican art. Of what he found in Mexico he wrote:

"Put a chic woman beside one of the virgins of the Parthenon, and that will be a sight to burst with laughter or weep with shame; any one of these Indians is a sister of that ancient. . . . The decoration is always simple, taken from familiar things of nature and craft; beauty of hard earth and birds, better than Solomon in all his glory; and put together with an abstract geometry such as only this people after the Greeks of Crete have possessed."

Hired to dig and sketch abstract geometry at Chichen-Itz`a, Chariot so impressed the Carnegie archeologists that he was retained for two years, entrusted with writing the expedition's report on Maya art. Meanwhile, Chariot's own work drifted away from the furiously propagandizing Rivera school. After eight years in Mexico he went north to Manhattan, has lived there since. Last week at the Charles L. Morgan Galleries, Manhattanites enjoyed an exhibition of the best recent paintings by this prodigal son of the Mexican Renaissance. Composed in refinements of the squat, circular Maya forms, sophisticated, inventive, winning, to many a critic, Chariot's pictures of Mexican laborers and tortilla makers (see cut) were a welcome contrast to the present work of his old friends.

Fourteen. U. S. citizens got their first comprehensive look at Mexican art in a traveling show sent by the American Federation of Arts seven years ago. Last week another comprehensive, more up-to-date traveling show on its first stop in Chicago gave Midwestern art followers an idea of where Mexican artists are going. New work by Orozco was not included because that powerful artist is busy on a mural in Guadalajara. Consensus among the discerning was that without him the flame of revolutionary art below the Rio Grande looked somewhat pale.

Arranged for Chicago's Arts Club by pert, attractive Mrs. Robert S. Pirie when she and Mr. Pirie, whose father is president of Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co., drove their trailer to Mexico City last year, the show numbered 54 paintings, 36 of them new, by 14 first-string Mexican artists.

From Diego Rivera came five new paintings which showed the recent change in the artist's style. Because most Government walls have already been painted and also because the Cardenas Government no longer thinks it needs Painter Rivera's ardent brush, he has concentrated on quiet easel paintings and water colors, more closely observed and felt than his oldtime posterish designs.

From David Alfaro Siqueiros, companion of Rivera in the days of the syndicate, now a lieutenant colonel with the Loyalist army in Spain, one portrait painting was shown. It contained little of the rocketing imagination with which this painter once lit the Mexican Renaissance.

Most substantial realism was in two paintings by 32-year-old Julio Castellanos, One, Dialogue, showed a doped, unbuttoned soldier sitting on the edge of a prostitute's bed.

In Afternoon Light, by 29-year-old Federico Cantu, Chicagoans could study a mixture of El Greco and Picasso monumentality as evidence of one of the influences which are at work to internationalize Mexican art.

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