ART REVIEW : Mexico’s Modernists: What Happened After the Heroics

At a certain point, modern art just seemed to disappear from Mexico. Between the world wars the revolutionary muralist triumvirate Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros shaped not only the heroic populist art of their own country, but also the look of American painting made by artists as radically opposed as the Abstract Expressionists and conservative Regionalists. In Los Angeles, Siqueiros had a mural squelched but left his mark on everybody from Millard Sheets to Rico Lebrun.

But by the end of World War II it looked to most Americans as if the muralists’ powerful beginning had led Mexican art only to silence. A traveling exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center proves it persisted. Straightforwardly titled “Mexican Painting, 1950-1980,” it presents the work of about 40 artists to show what happened after the heroic days.

We learn that it was the muralists themselves and the state support behind them that fouled the wheels of progress.

As Enrique Krauze points out in his catalogue essay: “The ideological climate of the ‘30s, with its polarizing of fascism and communism, contributed to . . . the adoption in Mexico of a mild but no less intolerant version of Socialist Realism.”

In short, art in Mexico became politicized, bureaucratized and rigidified. Siqueiros declared: “There is no other route than ours.”

Krauze concludes: “The sin of muralism (was) the sin of Mexico itself: the self-engrossment that leads to repetition, petrification (sic) and solipsism.”

Artists who tried to crack this mold became know as “The Rupture Group.” Rufino Tamayo was admired for his independence. Jose Luis Cuevas coined the term the Cactus Curtain to describe Mexico’s self-imposed aesthetic isolation. Foreigners such as surrealist guru Andre Breton and Wolfgang Paalen tried to help Mexico reckon with the wider breadth of its genius.

A significant clue to the cosmopolitan aspirations of latter-day Mexican art is suggested by the fact that more than a quarter of the artists on view immigrated from other countries, including Canadian Arnold Belkin. Britain’s Leonora Carrington makes art that reflects the influence of her marriage to the German surrealist Max Ernst.

But the surreal turn in the work seems less imposed on Mexico than enhanced by it, in the same way a sense of woozy magic inserted itself into Malcolm Lowry’s novel, “Under the Volcano.” More than one kind of art grew out of the rupture with the muralist tradition--that was the idea. There is work here that clearly carries forth the influence of Orozco, such as Raul Anguiano’s “The Thorn.” There is abstract art and some of it very good. Joy Laville’s “Reclining Woman” looks like a Matisse relieved of the necessity of good manners.

But all of it has shared qualities. There is a tendency to lapse into one or another already established artistic tradition. Arnaldo Coen’s “Over There She Appears Only Now” uses a shaped canvas of the ‘70s but drifts back in time to thoughts of Paul Klee. It’s a habit that makes the show feel like a slightly troubled period piece.

And all of it tends to be mantled in hallucinatory exaggeration that usually winds up being called “Fantastic Realism.” It’s a phenomenon of some significance. The artists closest to this bone are Remedios Varo, Francisco Corzas, Juan O’Gorman and Cuevas. Their shared tendency to turn reality into a mirage of erotic, anxious or violent symbolism naturally brings to mind the magic realist writers of Latin America such as Borges, Llosa and Marquez.

But links of association don’t stop there. We recall the Fantastic Realists of Vienna and even the more spaced-out flights of the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Makes one wonder if there is some psychic link between the art of countries that tend to live out of time and on certain geographic margins.

Anyway, now we are in Mexico. Anyone who’s been farther south than Tijuana knows it as a place of extremes. Forbidding desert gives way to tropical oasis and looming volcanoes. Peasant cultures and cosmopolitan enclaves alternate with noble pre-Columbian ruins and grungy cantinas.

The sensibility dictated by such an environment in every way draws its brackets beyond those of North American culture. That is certainly why some of the resulting art seems overly dramatic when it shows up here. The crimson background of Fernando Garcia Ponce’s “Ocher Stain and ‘X’ on Red Field” looks operatic. Gilberto Aceves Navarro’s “The Beheading of Saint John” appears frantic. But when you get over the shock to the retina you see sound, well-made art.

Emotional expression begins with sweet forebearance and ends with cruel resentment. Life is as innocent as a pinata in the painting of Juan Soriano and Alice Rahon. Olga Costa’s “The Fruit Vendor” is as generous as a doting grandmother. At the other extreme we find Jorge Gonzalez Camarena’s searing “Our Grandparents.” Two scorched skulls lie side by side, one encased in the helmet of a conquistador, the other in the eagle headdress of a native warrior.

Yet all of this is done with such relative artistic conservatism that a hip graduate student from the States could dismiss it all with the cock of a deconstructivist eyebrow.

Always a mistake. Art seen without empathy is dalliance without love, an act of self-aggrandizement. If this art stays in the middle of the stylistic road, maybe it’s because its emotional extremes need a certain amount of tradition to hold it together.

You can look at art to find out how you feel. You can look at it to find out how the other guy feels. If the latter is more gratifying you can look through the stylization of Ricardo Martinez’s “The Warlock” and see the essence of a different, Castaneda-like vision. Rafael Coronel’s “The Winos” is the best traditional painting here. It uses the pearly-gray elegance of Goya-esque brushwork as a foil to dramatize the snaggletoothed stupidity of a central figure suggesting a cleric. No novelist ever damned his villain with greater deftness. It’s an experience worth joining.

Armand Hammer Museum and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. to Nov. 11. Closed Mondays. (213) 443-7000.