Mexican Volcano

Visitors to Mexico City's National Bellas Artes gallery last week saw a mountain of modern Mexican painting. Except for the work of one artist, the mountain was close to being an extinct volcano. But inextinguishable firebrand David Alfaro Siqueiros had summoned up enough live steam and hot lava to make plenty of activity.

The show was sponsored by Mexico's culture-conscious President Manuel Avila Camacho, who last year decreed an annual national prize for arts and sciences. (1945's prize went to an author, rotund little Dr. Alfonso Reyes, for his Criticism in the Athenian Age.) This year's 20,000 pesos ($4,140) will be awarded to an artist, plus 5,000 pesos each for the best example of painting, engraving, sculpture and architecture on exhibition.

Avila Camacho had thrown the gates wide: Bellas Artes' marble and stained glass magnificence bulged with some 500 entries; more than 400 of them were paintings. Long halls were devoted to unknowns from all parts of Mexico. Their work ranged from flat, bright-colored primitives and the overfinicky naturalism of Sunday painters to imitations of imitations of the slick stuff produced in Mexico City.

Wizened Old Master Orozco contributed a twisted mass of bayonets and struggling bodies entitled The Trench, which looked like a great many he had done before. (His best-known Trench was painted in 1923.) Fat, fast-talking Old Master Diego Rivera, who can always be counted on for a surprise, was surprisingly absent. He had been appointed a juror, and resigned at the last minute because "too little attention is given to architecture. I believe architecture is the most important of all the plastic arts. And second, I think too much prominence is given to the older artists. . . ."

Message in Oils. Older Artist (47) Siqueiros' paintings would have seemed "prominent" wherever they hung. Their blood-rich colors, cast-iron forms and gravel textures made them stand out as far as the smearing fist in his Self Portrait (see cut). Siqueiros' second entry was relatively calm--a green and gold description of three muscular, writhing gourds--but it was not quite so innocuous as it looked. In Spanish, calabazas (gourds) is a vulgar insult when spoken without a smile. Explained Siqueiros: the three calabazas stand for the three Government schools in charge of the competition.

Also included were most of Mexico's many half-knowns: Goitia, Castellanos Tamayo, Meza, Montenegro, Cantu Galvan, Charlot, Merida, and the surrealist Frida Kahlo (Rivera's third wife). By & large they seemed suspiciously un-Mexican and disappointingly dull. Why didn't the "younger generation" of artists compare with Mexico's aging masters?

Siqueiros thought he had the answer: the new painters were not fighters. He himself had served his first jail sentence at 13 (for sparking a student strike). At 15 he became a lieutenant in the Battalon Mama, a children's army which did yeoman service for liberal Venustiano Carranza in his 1913 Constitutionalist uprising. In 1922 he wrote an art manifesto which his two fellow revolutionists of Mexico's Big Three in painting, Rivera and Orozco, both signed. Its thesis: painting is social propaganda and should have nothing to do with ivory tower esthetes or private collectors. Green-eyed, eagle-beaked Siqueiros stayed violent. He had spent most of his life in jail or exile, fought wars and painted walls from Guadalajara, Spain to Chilian, Chile.

"The Road of the Exquisite." Good times and tourist dollars had smothered the revolutionary fire in younger Mexicans. Today's artists were more interested in painting to please the multitude of nouveaux riches than in refighting battles already won or lost. "Now," mourned Siqueiros, "60% of our painters have left our school in favor of that of Paris. Our school is social, heroic, and monumental. They are going, more or less, on the road of the exquisite, of the snob."

As for last week's show, Siqueiros wanted no part of President Avila Camacho's prizes. Said independent Painter Siqueiros: "A competition is for racing horses or fast automobiles. Not for artists."

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