South of the Border

Many things that most U. S. gallery-goers don't know about Mexican art are told this week in a book, MacKinley Helm's Modern Mexican Painters (Harper; $5).

The Western Hemisphere has produced two arts all its own: 1) U. S. jazz, 2) Mexican painting. These two arts are curiously alike. Neither is much influenced by European traditions; jazz grows from Negro folk tunes, Mexican painting from Aztec and Maya religious sculpture and the primitive religious paintings (retablos) that have hung for generations, as thick as shingles, in every mud-walled Mexican church. Like jazz, Mexican art is the product of exuberant talent rather than of training; like jazz, it has produced few first-rank geniuses, but the scintillating feats of line-&-color-crazed Mexicans often leave the learned doctors chapfallen and confounded.

Mexican painting has had its jitterbugs aplenty, but many U. S. gallerygoers have the impression that Mexican painting consists of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros -- who are only the Paul Whitemans and Benny Goodmans of Mexican art.

The era of Marxist revolutionary murals on which Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros rode to fame has pretty well petered out today, but the art of easel painting is running full blast. A flourishing group of some 40 able painters, including Abstractionists Carlos Orozco Romero and Carlos Merida, splashily realistic Jesus Guerrero Galvan and Federico Cantu, are beginning to be known in the U. S. Among the new ones touted by Critic Helm are Antonio Ruiz, who paints street scenes in a Covarrubias-like style, and 21-year-old Guillermo Meza, who took up painting be cause he didn't have enough money for mandolin lessons, and who is "undoubtedly going to be the successor of Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros."

Not all Mexican painters are good. But Mexicans paint as naturally as U. S. adolescents shag. Usually their painting says something. Says Critic Helm: "The vitality of the new democratic race of Mexicans has been urgent enough to awaken even Indian artists from their natural drowsiness. To the spectator from the North, accustomed to a European tradition which has assumed technical excellence as an essential means, much of the Mexican painting may seem, at first glance, not altogether proficient. There is precious little virtuosity in Mexico, there is even too little sacrificial taking of pains. But more than twoscore living Mexican artists have got something that practice, competence and technical proficiency can never in themselves produce. They have the supreme gift of translating experienced emotion into works of art which give off emotion. And that, I take it, is what those of us are after who go to look at pictures."

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