Emiliano Zapata; Portrait of Emiliano Zapata at left, half-length with sombrero, and at the right lightning avobe flags with political slogans and 'Anenecuilco' in the centre. c.1953, Woodcut. Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, Reproduced by permission of the Sociedad Mexicana de Autores de las Artes Plasticas (SOMAAP).

Isidoro Ocampo, Japanese Fascist: Facism, The Japanese Facist, 1939, © Trustees of the British Museum.

Angel Bracho, Victoria! Poster celebrating the end of World War II: in the centre a German helmet with the head of Hitler pierced by a bayonet, a broken swastika and other symbols of German military power, and in the background the flags of the Soviet Union, the USA and Great Britain. Angel Bracho. 1945. ©Trustees of the British Museum, Reproduced by permission of the Sociedad Mexicana de Autores de las Artes Plasticas (SOMAAP).

Diego Rivera, Seated female nude, 1930. Lithograph. © 2009, Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F. / DACS.

The British Museum
Great Russell Street
+44 (0)20 7323 8000
London
Room 90
Revolution on Paper:
Mexican Prints 1910-1960
October 22, 2009-April 5, 2010

Between 1910 and 1920 Mexico was convulsed by the first socialist revolution, from which emerged a strong left-wing government that laid great stress on art as a vehicle for promoting the values of the revolution. This led to a pioneering programme to cover the walls of public buildings with vast murals, and later to setting up print workshops to produce works for mass distribution and education. All the prints in the exhibition come from the British Museum’s collection which has been acquired thanks to the generosity of the Aldama Foundation, Dave and Reba Williams and The Art Fund.

Some of the finest of these prints were produced by the three great men of Mexican art of the period known as ‘los tres grandes’: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The best-known print is Rivera’s Emiliano Zapata and his horse which has achieved iconic status in twentieth century Mexican art. Other prints including Rivera’s portrait of Frida Kahlo, Siqueiros’ Dama Negra, Orozco’s The Masses, demonstrate the extraordinary breadth, imagination, and quality of the works shown. In addition to the Los Tres Grandes, many other artist were involved and rose to prominence, especially after the founding of the Taller del Gráfica Popular (TGP) in Mexico City in 1937. The range of material is fascinating: as well as single-sheet artists’ prints, there are large posters with designs in woodcut or lithography by these same artists, and illustrated books on many different themes. The exhibition will also include earlier works around the turn of the century by the popular printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, who was adopted by the revolutionaries as the archetypal printmaker who worked for the people, and whose macabre dances of skeletons have always fascinated Europeans.

Printmakers in Mexico often belonged to groups, societies and movements which were underpinned by their commitment to politics. The earliest movement was Stridentism, an avant garde group which was launched 1921 and was similar to the Italian Futurist movement because it rejected the past. The Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) was formed in 1937 by Luis Arenal, Leopoldo Méndez and Pablo O’Higgins as a graphic arts workshop which was influenced by communism. TGP members had access to printing equipment at the workshop and did not need to have artistic training. The collective produced prints for posters, flyers and portfolios which were printed on cheap paper. Their prints often supported the campaigns of trade and workers unions in Mexico. For example, Pablo O’Higgins and Alberto Beltrán collectively made a poster advertising the first Latin American Petrol Workers conference. The TGP was also particularly committed to the fight against international Fascism. Angel Bracho’s striking red and black poster, Victoria! (1945), which celebrates the allied victory over the Nazi’s in 1945, is a key example of the TGP’s anti-Fascist stance. Other printmakers addressed subjects such as corruption, capitalism and Mexican daily life in their prints.

In 1957, the TGP held a major exhibition at the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico City to celebrate its twentieth anniversary as a printmaking collective and its activity continues even today on a minor scale. Members of the TGP and other artists’ groups have published extensively in support of the visual arts. Other artists associated with the TGP went on to establish art schools, institutions or museums.

Jose Chavez Morado, MoradoPrensa: The laughter of the public – away with your nonsense, 1939. © DACS 2009.

Alfredo Zalce, The USSR is defending the freedom of the world? Let us help!, 1941. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Rufino Tamayo (Mexican (active in the United States), 1899–1991), Virgin of Guadalupe, 1926-1927, Woodcut, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Eleanor A. Sayre Prints, Drawings, and Rare Books Fund, © Estate of Rufino Tamayo, Photograph courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886-1957), Zapata, 1932, Lithograph, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of W. G. Russell Allen, © 2009 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society, New York, Photograph courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Angel Bracho (Mexican, born in 1911), Victoria!, 1945, Color woodcut, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Museum purchase with funds donated by Richard Wallace, Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886-1957), Self-Portrait, 1930, Lithograph, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of W. G. Russell Allen, © 2009 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society, New York, Photograph courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
617-267-9300
Boston
Clementine Haas
Michel Brown Gallery
Vida y Drama:
Modern Mexican Prints
May 30-November 2, 2009

Printmaking has flourished in Mexico for nearly five centuries, since the first printing press arrived in 1539. After the Revolution of 1910, creative printmaking workshops thrived in Mexico City and prints played an important role in the formation of modern Mexican visual style. Vida y Drama: Modern Mexican Prints features bold, evocative, and socially conscious Mexican prints created from the 1920s through the 1950s. Lithographs, linocuts, and woodcuts by some of Mexico’s finest artists — Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Leopoldo Méndez, and Alberto Beltrán — are among the 27 objects in the exhibition drawn from the Museum’s extensive collection of works on paper.

"Printmakers of this period generated some of the most interesting Mexican art of the 20th century, inspired by their history and the changing world around them," said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. "As this exhibition illustrates, these artists were essential to the development of modernism in Mexico."

The works in Vida y Drama are arranged to examine three related themes. The first section offers some of the earliest prints made by three great painters, Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) and the muralists Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949). During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tamayo, Rivera, and Orozco went to New York City, the center of the modern art world, where they created, exhibited, and sold fine art prints. These works drew international attention to Mexican modernism and excited new interest in printmaking among younger Mexican artists.

"Artists gravitated toward printmaking as a means to explore the pre-Hispanic past and indigenous visual traditions, and to experiment with American and European avant-garde styles," said Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, exhibition curator. "Their prints gave form to the ideals of social, racial, and economic equality that fueled the Mexican Revolution."

Tamayo’s Virgin of Guadalupe (1926-1927) is one of the first woodcuts he made, and the lines have a rough look and a sculptural quality that evoke folk art. The simplicity of shape expresses his awareness of pre-Columbian art and European Modernism. Rivera’s most famous print, Zapata, is one of five lithographs he created in New York in 1932. It depicts Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary leader and advocate for agrarian reform. The image relates to two of Rivera’s previous projects, his 1929-1930 frescos for the Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca and a portable fresco he painted in New York for the Museum of Modern Art in 1931. Two works by Orozco also illustrate subjects related to the Revolution of 1910 — the lithograph Hands (1926), an evocative and hopeful image of outstretched hands, and The Rear Guard (1929), a boldly abstracted depiction of soldaderas, the women who followed their men during the Revolution, to take care of them and, when necessary, fight alongside them.

The second section of Vida y Drama highlights prints published between 1939 and 1957 by the circle of artists associated with the Taller de Gráfica Popular (the People’s Graphic Workshop, or TGP, founded in 1937). Many TGP artists were of the generation that was inspired by Tamayo, Rivera, Orozco, and the other great muralist and printmaker, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). The TGP was Mexico City’s most prolific and experimental printmaking workshop. Its artists created a wide range of powerful images (including posters advertising their exhibitions) that comment on social and political changes occurring in post-Revolutionary Mexico and well as in Europe and America. Included in Vida y Drama are two important and closely related works created by TGP artist Alberto Beltrán (1923-2002) in 1957. His linocut poster Vida y Drama de Mexico – 20 Años de Vida del Taller de Gráfica Popular depicts an artist’s hands carving the image of a young man’s head into the surface of a printing block. The head seems to rise off the block, and this speaks to the TGP’s interest in representing the challenges faced by everyday people. The other work by Beltrán is an ink, watercolor, and graphite preliminary drawing for the Vida y Drama de Mexico poster. The figures drawn in yellow ink summarize the group’s objectives: to depict the struggles of the Mexican people (the "vida") and to expose corruption and injustice (the "drama") represented by a calavera, a skeleton figure, dressed in a tuxedo and offering a toast to the viewer. Another TGP-related poster is Taller de Gráfica Popular: Exposición 20 Litográfías (1939) by Francisco Dosamantes (1911-1986), a color lithograph featuring a stylized eye that appears to be watching one’s every move. Additionally, Angel Bracho’s (b. 1911) color woodcut ¡Victoria! (1945) congratulates the Allied and Red Armies for defeating fascism in Europe and ending World War II.

The third part of Vida y Drama explores different types of portraiture. These are more intimate images of actual people in which the artist uses visual style to convey the sitter’s mood and character. Rivera’s La Mujer (Frida Kahlo) (1930) is a lithographic montage of his wife, the renowned Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, seated on a bed wearing only shoes and a beaded necklace. Before canceling the stone, Rivera made the MFA’s unique proof. He printed the image on both sides of the paper, and then pressed another impression against one side. The result is a fascinating print that implies movement, like a photographic double exposure, and the figure appears to have both male and female characteristics. Three artists’ self-portraits also are featured in this section: an unflinching image of Rivera in middle age, created in 1930; a 1939 naturalistic head and shoulders view of the young artist Jésus Escobedo (1918-1978); and Escobedo’s Man’s Head (Self-Portrait), about 1940, which shows biomorphic distortions to his facial features.

Alberto Beltrán (Mexican, 1923–2002), Vida y Drama de Mexico, 1957, Black ink and opaque watercolor over graphite on architectural blueprint paper, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, George Peabody Gardner Fund, Photograph courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.