Mexican Show

Two years ago Manhattan's up & coming Museum of Modern Art decided to invade Paris, to show the Parisians what U. S. artists had accomplished. Backed by its president and chief angel, genial, glamorless Nelson Rockefeller, the Museum staged an exhibition of U. S. art at the Jeu de Paume Gallery near the Louvre, invited Paris to come and take a look. So successful was the venture that the Modern Museum decided to go on from there, show Paris the artistic achievements of other American countries. Last summer President Rockefeller went to Mexico City to make arrangements for a Modern Museum exhibition in Paris of Mexican art. Halfway through his negotiations, World War II scotched the scheme. Nelson Rockefeller decided to hold his Mexican exhibition in Manhattan instead.

For months the Mexican Government, encouraged by the curious eyes and pointing fingers of Museum of Modern Art experts, scoured Mexico's museums, churches and mountain towns. They hauled in enough paintings, statues and archeological knickknacks to fill the Museum of Modern Art three times over. Even after drastic weeding, the collection (comprising nearly 6.000 items, insured for more than a million dollars) packed three boxcars. Convoyed by 24 Mexican soldiers and police, the boxcars last month reached the Mexican border, where they were turned over to two Texas rangers, who convoyed them to Manhattan. To house this Mexican hoard the Museum of Modern Art had to clear out its permanent collections, store them in the basement.

Last week the show opened. Largest exhibition of Mexican art ever held anywhere (including Mexico itself), it was also the largest in the Museum's history, filled the Museum's entire three floors of exhibition space and overflowed outdoors into the spacious sculpture court behind.

Gallerygoers saw a complete record of 2,000 years of Mexican art, from the artistic mud pies of the archaic Huaxtecs and Tarascans (500 B.C. to 500 A.D.) (see cut p. 58, top) to the latest paintings of Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. From the Huaxtec mudwork (similar to that of today's Pueblo Indians) Mexico's artists graduated to the only finished stone-carving and temple-building of the Mayas and Toltecs. When, in 1521, the Aztec empire was destroyed by the Spanish Blitzkrieg, Mexico's artists turned from feathered serpents to waxworky saints, from pyramids to tile-walled cathedrals. After the revolution of 1910 had cramped the style of the Church and had given a groping start to socialism, they turned modernistic, swiped an idea here & there from Paris, and started covering the walls of public buildings with pictures of peons and capitalists.

Two common denominators linked Mexico's three periods (pre-Spanish, Spanish colonial, modern): 1) the folk art of the peons who, in 1910, were still making artistic mud pies, as they had 2,000 years ago; 2) a love of blood and entrails that showed in the sacrificial chopping blocks of the Aztecs and the gory Crucifixions of colonial times, the sluggings and bayoneting of Orozco's frescoes.

Famed Fresco-Painters Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, whose work is well known in the U. S., had little new to show. Strongest, technically most interesting contemporary items were a group of bronzed, sculptural-looking paintings done in Duco automobile paint by deep-dyed Revolutionist Siqueiros (see cut, below left), a couple of violent scenes of violence by rugged Peasant-Painter Orozco. Biggest disappointment was a series of smart, sug ary, sometimes pornographic paintings by Diego Rivera, onetime high priest of Mexican muralism.

What really held Manhattan gallery goers spellbound was the enormous collection of gaunt, contorted, monumental stone sculpture by long-forgotten Maya, Toltec and Olmec craftsmen, representing the first 1,500 of Mexico's 2,000 years of art. Even the Modern Museum's gigantic exhibition offered only a sample of this pre-Spanish Mexican art. But these samples showed that Mexico's ancient art at its highest point could compete with that of such ancient cultures as Egypt's and Persia's, and that modern Mexico could find many a high artistic standard to shoot at in her own great, still largely buried past.

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