New Direction in Mexico

The manifesto that appeared in Mexico City in 1961 seemed like the usual bombast from angry young painters out to attract as much attention as they could. In big blue capital letters, it blasted just about everything sacred to the Mexican art world. Damned as academismo were slavish and parochial imitations of Diego Rivera's once-revolutionary social realism. Damned as dehumanized decoration were equally slavish imitations of the abstract styles imported from other lands. "We strive," said the manifesto writers, "for an art that communicates in the clearest and most direct way possible our commitment to man."

Today the manifesto is no longer regarded as bombast: it cemented together a powerful group of young painters who are attracting an increasing amount of attention, not only at home but also abroad.* Though they were separately painting their agonized pictures before 1961, it was not until U.S. Art Critic Selden Rodman published his acerbic little book called The Insiders that they realized they had a philosophy in common. As a diatribe against abstraction. Rodman's book got a trouncing from many U.S. critics; as a summons to a "new humanism," it found an enthusiastic response in Mexico. The young Mexicans even call themselves interioristas, though their movement is now known as "The New Presence."

Copies of Copies of Copies. If the group has a Mexican ancestor, it is Jose Clemente Orozco, but its father is Jose Luis Cuevas, 29, who has been taking shots at the Mexican art establishment for years. In 1954 he accused the Bellas Artes of selecting for its annual shows nothing but "copies of copies of copies of the so-called Mexican school." In 1956, while on a visit to Venezuela, he was asked why he so cruelly kept attacking the aging (and currently jailed) Communist firebrand David Siqueiros, and he bluntly replied: "For the same reason that the students of Caracas attacked Dictator Perez Jimenez." Siqueiros, he said, was a "comic dictator with the intolerant habits of a totalitarian politico." He insisted that while Rivera had turned out a few masterworks in his time, he had eventually sunk to producing "assembly-line paintings to fill the bags of American tourists."

As Cuevas' notoriety grew, so did the appreciation of his art. In time, his compelling black and white figures, penned in hot haste as if they were apparitions that might disappear, began to fetch prices higher than the drawings of even Mexico's famed Rufino Tamayo. Of the 100 copies of his newly published Recollections of Childhood containing twelve original lithographs (Kanthos Press: $500), about half have already been sold.

Blind Alleys. Always the rebel, Cuevas rather grandly refuses to associate himself with any group, even the interioristas. But his mark and leadership are there nonetheless. "Mexican art was at a dead end. Now we are free," he said, and the other interioristas enthusiastically agree. Canadian-born Arnold Belkin. 32, one of the co-authors of the manifesto, says that Rivera, chiefly significant as a social-protest painter, had the byproduct effect of leading Mexican art "up a blind alley --two generations of picturesque Indians making tortillas or setting out candles for the Night of the Dead." When abstraction invaded the country, it turned out to be another false trail. "Mexican gallery-goers began to accept 'action painting' as the expression of our times 20 years after the battle had been fought out in New York, Paris, and Rome."

The Insiders' work ranges from the violent canvases of Leonel Gongora, 30, to the near fantasies of Emilio Ortiz, 28, to the fleshy, bulbous creatures of Artemio Sepulveda, 27, to Francisco Corzas' fascination with hallucinations as "universal themes." Throughout the work, the palette is muted; Francisco Icaza, 32, argues that "reducing color makes form clearer." The results are uneven, occasionally repellent; but there is always a stark force about the Insiders that reaches out to the heart as well as the eye. Jose Mufioz, who at 34 is senior member of the group, explains his own anguished figures with a touch of poetry. "I am interested in finding the smile of a child, tenderness, the most human emotions. What I am painting now is those conditions which prevent these emotions. I am painting a cry of protest. It might cause people to feel a little more pity."

* They have recently been taken on by Manhattan's Cober Gallery.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.